07 August 2013

GameTalk - Combat Resolution

Buckets of dice?  Or CRTs?  Which one would you use when?


By: Brant

2 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Brian said...

As always, It Depends and I've used both.

CRTs of different types allow for attempts to model the effects of different variables - e.g. an odds column shift for one type of thing, a die roll modifier for another type of thing. Makes them more versatile than buckets of dice (where you can just add or subtract dice, or give a blanket DRM for everything you roll) but I tend not to use differenetial CRTs because they don't scale well.

Buckets of dice have their place too, for simplicity and speed if nothing else, though players have to acknowledge that combat results are going to be more random than with a set CRT and fewer die rolls. (at least that's the intuitive conclusion; looking at the statistics some would argue that it's all the same in the end, averaged out over hundreds of games - except that you generally don't play a game hundreds of times).