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In lugnet.fun.gaming, Mike Rayhawk writes:
> Ha ha I wish! We were playing a game about a month ago with the Shogun's
> Imperial Army vs. the Mountain Bandits and the imperials were similarly
> organized, we kept wishing that we had such a rule. We tried a number of
> different ways to handle group rolls at various points during the game, but
> none of them really worked out very well.
If you're interested, I could use a little trick demonstrated in a game a
friend from college wrote which made a trivial way to utilize a normal
distribution curve to generate results from mass dice rolling. Of course you
still come up against the issue indicated below:
> I feel the same way. About the only thing we tried that made any sense was,
> if you have a bunch of the same kind of troop attacking with the same kind of
> weapon, make all their Attack Rolls at the same time (for instance, if you
> have 12 guys who need to roll a 3 on 1d6 to hit, roll 12d6 and count how many
> dice come up 3 or higher). When you've counted how many of them hit, the
> defender chooses which of your troops get the good rolls and which ones get
> the bad rolls.
This of course gives an advantage to the defender. What might be more fair is
to let each player allocate half of the hits. This gives the players equal
incentive to usethe shortcut. In the "defender allocates all the hits" method,
I'd let the attacker chose to exclude any critical rolls, and in the 50-50
split, I'd allow either player to force specific rolls to be individually
made. What this effectively means is that if there is a line of attackers
matched to a line of defenders, but there are one or two defenders in very
critical positions, these will be individually rolled for (in a "defender
choses", these guys obviously won't be hit unless the attacker scores almost
all hits, and in the 50-50 split, they would almost always be hit - neither
result is good).
Of course, another good one to apply is the "law of averages". If the attacker
is attacking at a huge advantage such that the expected result (% chance to
hit * number of attacks) is significantly greater than the number of defenders
(assuming a "one hit kills" system), then just assume all the defenders are
killed (I got so annoyed at one D&D player who wanted me to roll a to hit for
every bullet from a machine gun, the expected damage was something like 100
times his hit points, I wanted to just roll a d100 and if I got a 00, he
lived).
Frank
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In lugnet.fun.gaming, Frank Filz writes:
> This of course gives an advantage to the defender.
Of course, but it's the attacker's choice whether to use the group roll or
not. For any attacks that were especially important, he would still choose to
make the rolls individually. He would only choose to use the group roll where
it didn't particularly matter to him which of the targets got hit.
> What might be more fair is
> to let each player allocate half of the hits. This gives the players equal
> incentive to usethe shortcut. In the "defender allocates all the hits" method,
> I'd let the attacker chose to exclude any critical rolls, and in the 50-50
> split, I'd allow either player to force specific rolls to be individually
> made.
This would be more fair but starts to get a little too complicated.
> What this effectively means is that if there is a line of attackers
> matched to a line of defenders, but there are one or two defenders in very
> critical positions, these will be individually rolled for (in a "defender
> choses", these guys obviously won't be hit unless the attacker scores almost
> all hits, and in the 50-50 split, they would almost always be hit - neither
> result is good).
Exactly. The important rolls are all handled first and individually, and then
the rest can be done as a group.
> Of course, another good one to apply is the "law of averages". If the attacker
> is attacking at a huge advantage such that the expected result (% chance to
> hit * number of attacks) is significantly greater than the number of defenders
> (assuming a "one hit kills" system), then just assume all the defenders are
> killed.
That would really have to be a voluntary decision from the defender. We did
that a lot of times during that same game, because we were really lazy that
day and never wanted to calculate damage. Especially when the tower fell over
and crushed all the imperial cavalry, the defending player just conceded that
they were dead because it would have been silly to calculate the damage
(something like mass of tower times stories dropped vs. trooper armor).
> (I got so annoyed at one D&D player who wanted me to roll a to hit for
> every bullet from a machine gun, the expected damage was something like 100
> times his hit points, I wanted to just roll a d100 and if I got a 00, he
> lived).
D&D has machine guns now?
- Mike Rayhawk.
--------------------------------------------------
Check out the Official BrikWars Home Page at
http://www.teleport.com/~rayhawks/brikwars.htm
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In lugnet.fun.gaming, Mike Rayhawk writes:
> > (I got so annoyed at one D&D player who wanted me to roll a to hit for
> > every bullet from a machine gun, the expected damage was something like 100
> > times his hit points, I wanted to just roll a d100 and if I got a 00, he
> > lived).
>
> D&D has machine guns now?
Well, not really (but they did publish stats for them in The Dragon once, ever
read "Monty Haul and the German High Command"?), but hey, that was freshmen
year in college, and I was still a power gamer (that was also almost 20 years
ago...)
Frank
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In lugnet.fun.gaming, Frank Filz writes:
> Well, not really (but they did publish stats for them in The Dragon once, ever
> read "Monty Haul and the German High Command"?), but hey, that was freshmen
> year in college, and I was still a power gamer (that was also almost 20 years
> ago...)
You dated yourself by calling it "The Dragon". Heh. They dropped the "The"
quite some time ago.
eric
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