Sycarion Diversions

I like Chess variants a great deal. In fact, my wife bought me an Omega Chess set for Christmas. While there a couple months ago, I happened upon an invention by Graeme C Neatham. It is basically a variation of chess on a hexagonal board. No surprise, considering the link. The difference comes in splitting hexes into triads. Each triad has a different color.

Some time ago, I mentioned a hexagonal variation of Tactique. Seeing this board gave me all sorts of ideas. This also gave me ideas for using this type of hex paper for RPGs instead of traditional hex paper. For both, I hope to explore different ideas.

Here are the PDFs of a black and white version and the colorized version. What is different from Greame’s design is that my hexes are not rotated 90 degress and the colors are different. I will also provide a hex shaped pdf soon. I realize that a hex shape is more conducive to board games.

Black and White Tri-Hexes | Color Tri-Hexes

A friend sent me a link talking about a one page RPG. I’m not surprised by them as 1km1kt has a bunch of them.

However, the prospect of the rest of the players determining your stats is intriguing. Scott and I are going to try it out with two of his friends soon. (Yes, we paid the $2.) Check out the original post about Minimus here.

Here’s the PDF. Free to download, requested $2 if you use it.

I’ll let you know how it goes. Our campaign is similar to Golden Age Comics circa 1937. We plan on being mostly gadgeteers at this point, but who knows what five things I’ll come up with. The first one is:

Henry (my character) was born in 1837 and fought in the Battle of Antietam for the Union.

Turns out that I won’t be making that post after all.

Yannick, the creator of yould liked my process enough to add another option to basic yould command.

To test the quality of any yould engine, type the following:
yould -t foo.yould -q

You will get a percentage of real words generated by the engine listed in the command. Anything under 10% will say that more training is needed. Between 10 and 20 % will say sufficient training. Over 20 will say well trained.

This option is in the 3.9 beta. It should be released soon.

How good are the engines that are created with Yould? Here a good way to find out:

First, create a complete word list used in an engine
yould -t cicero.yould -s > wordlist.txt

Second, generate 100 words with the engine using –real-words flag
yould -t cicero.yould -r -n100 > co100.txt

Third, sort the 100 words in alphabetical order
sort co100.txt > sco100.txt

Fourth, run a comparison that prints out only the words in sco100.txt that are not in wordlist.txt
comm -23 sco100.txt wordlist.txt > compare.txt

Fifth, count the number of lines in compare.txt
wc -l compare.txt

You can script this as well, just needed to make some notes before doing some explanation later. This works on Windows if you use unixutils from sourceforge. Very handy toolset to have.

It’s a New Year, and I couldn’t pass up this good three-column theme called Dillecto. Dilectio Theme is created by: Design Disease brought to you by Smashing Magazine.

The main thing is that it allows a chance to have more sidebar activity. Cool, eh?

I like creating new languages, especially to flavor RPGs or a fantasy setting. To that end, I have been creating a relex of Latin as the language of magic. It sounds like Latin without being the Dog Latin used in popular books.

I wrote part of the README for yould’s next release. I’ll be posting some of the engines I’ve created and some helpful how-tos in the coming days.

I have all the boxscores from the 1985 season. I’m doing it as part of a quest to get more information than currently available online about the USFL’s final season. The various sources come from local newspapers. I will create a section of Sycarion that is just for the completed boxscores.

Game 1 in Tampa Bay with 44,0095 in attendance broke down like this:

Team ———-Q1 — Q2 — Q3 — Q4 —- Total
Renegades —-0 —– 0 —– 0 —– 7 ——— 7
Bandits ——- 14 — 14 —– 7 —– 0 ——- 35

Neither team threw for more than 162 yards. It was a running game, if you can believe that.

More later at usfl.sycarion.com

I know, I know. Everything lately has been RPG stuff. Dice is in my blood, I guess. So now, back to a project I’ve been working on for the better part of 2007, the Pro Football Action project.

The software that I was using to create entire seasons had one small flaw that prevented me from using it:

I couldn’t make my own teams.

In the case of the USFL, I couldn’t get enough stats on players and teams without camping out at the library and reading a lot of microfilm.

So, I switched to a different program, Alex Mittenmeyer’s FBWin. It is a windows version of the old Avalon Hill game, Statis-Pro Football. It uses Access Databases to store stats, track a season and so much more.

However, editing a team wasn’t entirely straightforward. Many people wrote to Alex, including me. I’m happy to say that I have the editor and will post it here for others to download.

Football for Windows Editor

You can contact Alex at the Statis-Pro Football yahoo group.

The last post about Sicherman Dice was basically just a definition. Now for the application.

In Action! and other games, success is measured by rolling higher than Skill Score + Ability Score + Dice Roll. The official rules use 3 regular dice (3d6). An alternate rule uses a 20 sided dice (1d20). After doing some calculations, it is also possible to use Sicherman Dice. As a shorthand, I will refer to rolling two Sicherman dice as 2dS. 2dS means rolling the Sicherman dice and using one as a ten digit and the other as a ones digit. Thus if you rolled an 8 on one die and 2 on the other, the result would be 28 or 82.

How to Read 2dS rolls

At first, I thought of having the die with the larger numbers be a tens digit and the smaller one as the ones digit. Then I realized that most people would make the largest roll the tens digits no matter what. After checking the odds, it doesn’t affect odds to succeed very much. So, the way to read a 2dS roll is to make the largest two-digit number possible.

For example, if I roll a 3 and 4 respectively, the result is 43. If I roll a 6 and 1, the result is 61.

Odds: Four Test Cases

Before talking about odds, I have to say that it is difficult to post a table that looks the same as the matrix in the Action! rules. As a result, I’m going to take four characters and discuss them specifically as a cross-section of all possibilities. I’ll give a skill score and an attribute score to each one. Then I’ll discuss the odds of each character achieving success.

The first character is the Realistic level character. The realistic character has a skill score of 3 and an attribute score of 3. This means, of course, that the Realistic character will need dice roll + 6 to determine success.

The second character is the Cinematic level character. The Cinematic character has a skill score of 6 and an attribute score of 6. This means that he or she will need dice roll + 12 to determine success.

The third character is the Extreme level character. The Extreme character has a skill score of 8 and an attribute score of 8. This means that success is determined by dice roll + 16.

The fourth character is the Paragon character. This character is the pinnacle of human achievement with a skill score of 10 and an attribute score of 10. Success is dice roll + 20 for success.

Odds: Target Numbers

After playing with the numbers, I think I’ve come up with the best possible set of target numbers. For reference, here are the difficulties and target numbers from Action!

Difficulty Levels & Target Numbers

Description —– TN
Average/Easy….12
Tricky……………15
Challenging……18
Difficult………….21
Demanding…….24
Extreme………..27
Legendary……..30

Now under the new 2dS system, the numbers look like this:

Description —– TN
Average/Easy….24
Tricky……………36
Challenging……48
Difficult………….60
Demanding…….72
Extreme………..84
Legendary……..96

To give some reference to these numbers, I look at them as percentile ability. A person in the 96 percentile of their task should be able to pull off some legendary things if they are lucky.

Odds: The Numbers

In the Action! System, the matrix shows a table with needed rolls of 3d6 to succeed. Since I am looking at odds, and not actual rolls needed, I need to first provide odds based on the Action! System for success. (This is for 3d6)

The Realistic person has to roll a six or better to perform an Average/Easy task. The odds of rolling a six or better are 95.37%. To perform a Tricky task, a roll of nine or better is needed. Odds of that are 74.07%. For the rest, I’ll just list the roll needed and the odds for rolling that number or better. Challenging - 12 or better - 37.50%. Difficult - 15 or better - 9.26%. Demanding - 18 or better - 0.46%. Extreme and Legendary are technically possible by rule, but the character must roll an 18. The chances of rolling an 18 are 1 in 216 or 0.46%.

The Cinematic person can automatically perform an Average/Easy task. Odds are 100%. To perform a Tricky task, a roll of three or better is needed. Odds of that are 100%. For the rest: Challenging - 6 or better - 95.37%. Difficult - 9 or better - 74.07%. Demanding - 12 or better - 37.50%. Extreme - 15 or better - 9.26% and Legendary - 18 or better - 0.46%

The Extreme person can automatically perform Average/Easy, Tricky, and Challenging tasks. Odds are 100% for all three. For the rest: Difficult - 5 or better - 98.14%. Demanding - 8 or better - 83.79%. Extreme - 11 or better - 50.00% and Legendary - 14 or better - 16.20%

Finally, our Paragaon can automatically perform Average/Easy, Tricky, Challenging, and Difficult tasks. Odds are 100% for all four. For the rest: Demanding - 4 or better - 99.53%. Extreme - 7 or better - 90.74% and Legendary - 10 or better - 62.50%

It seems that once you hit the Paragon, very little is beyond your capability. This bodes ill for superhuman characters, but that’s a subject of a different post. Without delay, here are the odds for the same four characters under the 2dS system. I’ll warn you, the odds are lower.

The Realistic person has to roll a 18 or better to perform an Average/Easy task. The odds of rolling a six or better are 97.22%. To perform a Tricky task, a roll of 30 or better is needed. Odds of that are 91.66%. For the rest, I’ll just list the roll needed and the odds for rolling that number or better. Challenging - 42 or better - 66.66%. Difficult - 54 or better - 36.11%. Demanding - 66 or better - 16.66%. Extreme - 78 or better - 16.66% Legendary tasks are technically possible by rule, but the character must roll an 84, the highest roll possible on Sicherman dice. The chances of rolling an 84 are 2.77%.

The Cinematic person can automatically perform an Average/Easy task. Odds are 100%. To perform a Tricky task, a roll of 24 or better is needed. Odds of that are 91.66%. For the rest: Challenging - 36 or better - 72.22%. Difficult - 48 or better - 50.00%. Demanding - 60 or better - 33.33%. Extreme - 72 or better - 16.66% and Legendary tasks - 84 - 2.77%

The Extreme person can automatically perform an Average/Easy task. Odds are 100%. To perform a Tricky task, a roll of 20 or better is needed. Odds of that are 97.22%. For the rest: Challenging - 32 or better - 83.33%. Difficult - 44 or better - 52.77%. Demanding - 56 or better - 33.33%. Extreme - 68 or better - 16.66% and Legendary tasks - 80 or better - 16.66%

Finally, our Paragaon can automatically perform an Average/Easy task. Odds are 100%. To perform a Tricky task, a roll of 16 or better is needed. Odds of that are 97.22%. For the rest: Challenging - 28 or better - 91.66%. Difficult - 40 or better - 72.22%. For the rest: Demanding - 52 or better - 47.22%. Extreme - 64 or better - 19.44% and Legendary - 76 or better - 16.66%

What a Difference

It seems like more able characters are penalized, but only because the scale changed. It’s true that almost everyone has a 1 in 6 chance of performing an Extreme task. The Realistic and Cinematic person have much better chances, while the other two have much worse chances. What this does is allow superhuman characters chances to do things beyond the standard difficulty levels and have some challenge. Otherwise, you have to target numbers in triple digits for a challenge while everyone has at least a 2.77% chance to perform superhuman feats.

One other note - bonuses and penalties are now factors of five. What used to be a +1 bonus is now a +5 bonus. A -3 penalty is -15 points, now.

Conclusion

This was more of an exercise than anything. Still, I think that a mechanic based on Sicherman Dice is viable. As far as Action!, I believe it would require more rules changes. It would also require a sliding scale of what is “Legendary” depending on the level of the game. What might be Legendary in a Realistic game, might only be Demanding in an Extreme game. It’s something to think about.

The main issue of using Sicherman Dice as percentile dice is that it is impossible to roll a number between 64 and 81. That’s a huge gap that wreaks havoc with probabilities for success. Even if I made an easy task a TN of 12 and Legendary a TN of 84, the differences are not that large. For the record, there are 21 possible rolls for 2dS as I describe them here. The rolls are: 11, 21, 31, 32, 33, 41, 42, 43, 44, 51, 52, 53, 54, 61, 62, 63, 64, 81, 82, 83, 84.

Still in search of different mechanics for fun. Let me know what you think of the effect of Sicherman Dice.

If you’ve never heard of them, Sicherman Dice are a pair of dice which have the same odds for throwing every number as a normal pair of 6-sided dice. The numbers on the faces are different, but the odds of rolling a 3 or 18 are exactly the same as standard dice. It’s weird at first, but if you do the math, it makes sense.

What I have been pondering lately deals with a different usage of dice. A long time ago, two six-sided dice were used for tables in role playing games. However, instead of using the total, they were read as two numbers put together. In other words, one dice was a tens digit, the other a ones digit. This would provide 36 different rolls (11 through 66) and you had a one in 36 chance in rolling any one of them.

For the Sicherman Dice above - if they are used in this way, the range is different. You only get 24 different numbers. (11 through 84) because you can roll and number ending in 2 or 3 twice.

More detail tomorrow, just writing it down so I won’t forget right now.

Information on Sicherman dice from:
Weisstein, Eric W. “Sicherman Dice.” From MathWorld–A Wolfram Web Resource. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SichermanDice.html