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Genesys Dice Stats

So, after the post on @prokopetz's blog about statistics and dice rolling and the difficulty of modeling rolls for Fantasy Flight Star Wars/Genesys, I wrote up some Swift code to do just that. It's ugly code right now, and I plan to clean it up a bit and post it somewhere.

Part of the issue is that there's a huge number of distinct results from any given roll. As an example - a stock roll where a character with an attribute of 3 and a skill of 2 rolls against an average difficulty task has 171 distinct results that can come up.

But, I've been working on grouping these results meaningfully, like this:

Pool: proficiency, proficiency, ability, difficulty, difficulty 51640 (70.041%) : Total Successes 14322 (19.425%) : Total Successes with Advantage 21564 (29.248%) : Total Successes with Threat 8928 (12.109%) : Total Success + Triumph 0 (0.000%) : Total Success + Despair 14478 (19.637%) : Total Failures with Advantage 2376 (3.223%) : Total Failures with Threat 2974 (4.034%) : Total Failures + Triumph 0 (0.000%) : Total Failures + Despair 2961 (4.016%) : Total Fully Cancelled 73728: Total Results, 171 Distinct Results

Some interesting things come up from this. First off, there's 50% more success-with-threat than success-with-advantage. This actually makes sense - most sides that give successes don't also give advantages, and the difficulty dice that aren't giving you failures are instead giving you threats. (Similarly, failure-with-advantage is six times more likely than failure-with-threat, and 2/3 of failures have advantage.)

About 75% of the rolls with a triumph are successful. This is slightly higher than the base success chance of 70%. Again, this makes sense - you know there's at least one success that was rolled.

4% of the rolls completely cancel or are entirely blank.

The problem from here is that it's hard to produce, like, a chart of results. Even if you just focus on total success rate, you still have six dice types to take into account, and six-dimensional charting is not my forte. Although there is the advantage (FSVO) that there generally aren't more than about 5 dice of any one type in the pool.

The next step is probably to see if the code runs on Linux, and clean it up for posting somewhere. After that, I may create some spreadsheets of results.

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So, because it's the kind of neurospicy that I am, I wrote up a quick program to do some Genesys dice calculations.

There's one main problem with output from this sort of thing:

The combination of large dice pool sizes and up to four output symbols per roll (triumph, despair, either successes or failures, and either advantages or threats) means that you have a lot of results in any given pool and no obvious way to display them.

For example: a typical character with an ability of 2 and a skill of 3 rolling against an average task - that's a pool of five dice (two proficiency, one ability, and two difficulty) with 171 distinct results. (And that's after cancelling successes/failures and advantage/threats.) The single most likely result (one success) comes up about 6.5% of the time. The result pool contains at least one net success 70% of the time.

It gets worse when you add in boost/setback dice, or challenge dice. That 171 results doesn't include a single despair, for example, since there's no challenge dice. Changing one difficulty die to a challenge brings the number of results up to 273.

I hope to clean up the code (making it so you can change the dice pool without recompiling, for example) and post it somewhere but I suspect the hyperfocus will wear off before I get to that point.

While we're talking about AnyDice, do you know if there's a way to accurately test the probability of multiple outcomes on unconventional dice? The below link is an abriged test of an implementation of FFG's Genesys dice I found on a forum thread; the tester was trying to work out if the implementation was even correct, and testing for 2 Advantages AND two Successes on one ability dice (which is impossible, but AnyDice gives 1.56%). The ability dice is a d8; only one side has 2A and only one side has 2S, and they're different sides. The intuition is that because the advantage sides and the successes sides are defined in different orders, the same index for success and advantage should be used which will never see a 2 on both arrays. AnyDice just outputs the intersection of the two 1-in-8s, 1/64 = 0.015625. Do you know of any way to get the intuitive output, or is this just a reflection of AnyDice being a probability calculator and not a dice roller? https://anydice.com/program/3aeb3

Yeah, no, that's completely wrong. What you've got there is is a script to generate the results of rolling two dice, one of which has only success symbols and no advantage symbols, and the other of which has only advantage symbols and no success symbols. That's where your unexpected intersection is coming from.

The problem here is that, because each die can have multiple kinds of symbols on it, potentially including multiple kinds of symbols on a single face, and we care about the total number of each kind of symbol, our odds become a sum of vectors rather than a sum of scalars. I'm not aware of any widely available dice probability calculator that can elegantly handle dice which produce vector results.

We can cheat a bit in this particular case, though, because the fact that we don't need to deal with negative numbers means we can convert a vector result to a scalar result by assigning each symbol a power of ten.

For the sake of argument, let's assign each "success" a value of 10, and each "advantage" a value of one. This, a face with one "success" symbol becomes a 10; a face with two "success" symbols, a 20; a face with one "success" and one "advantage", an 11; and so forth.

In the table of results, we then examine the digits individually, with the "tens" place being read as the number of success symbols, and the "ones" place being read as the number of advantage symbols.

Expressed in this way in AnyDice terms, a Genesys skill die becomes:

output 1d{0, 10, 10, 20, 1, 1, 11, 2}

In the resulting table, you'll see that your anomalous intersection has vanished; there's a 12.5% chance of "2" (that is, two advantages with zero successes), and a 12.5% chance of "20" (two successes with zero advantages), but no "22" (two successes with two advantages).

Note, however, that this only works correctly with up to four dice; with five or more, there will be some outcomes where the number of advantage symbols exceeds nine and "overflows" into the successes column, polluting your results.

Clear as mud?

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Me: desperately trying to avoid a migraine over the next few days by getting as much sleep as possible.

My ADHD at 11:45pm when I’ve got shit to do first thing in the morning because it’s fucking Christmas: pst, hey.

Me: …

ADHD: You know that plot hole you’ve been stuck on for over a year?

Me: …

ADHD: wouldn’t it be wild if you suddenly figured out how to fix it AND had the motivation to work on it.

Me: …

Me: God fucking dammit.

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Listen All Systems Red is so so funny from Gurathins perspective imagine you grew up with Space Socialism and was hired to go help some pal with science but you weren't allowed to go unless you rented AmaTeslas Torment Nexus Alexa Dot and then when you get there you find out a whole continent of people got annihilated by their Tourment Nexus rentals so you take a moment to check yours quickly and find out it already had disengaged its Don't Kill People box, the only thing you've ever been told prevented them from mass homiciding their clients, something that LITERALLY just happened to people you knew a day ago, and when you say to your fellow socialist doctors HEY I think our Tourment Nexus is fucked up and it's files said it killed dozens of people barely a year ago and we should probably get the hell away from it the same doctors are like look at what you're saying. You're hurting the Tourment Nexus' feelings. The Tourment Nexus is just a little construct who likes Netflix Gurathin stop antagonizing it on the plane ride.

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HE DID IT FOLKS, HE DID THE THING

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Was talking with one of my very lesbian friends about body dysmorphia and how you can look at a fucking gorgeous woman who has a lot of the same qualities as yourself and not realize that the complement also applies to yourself. I asked her if she'd been watching Dancing With The Stars this season and she said no.

So i showed her a picture of Ilona Maher from this week's episode.

Her response:

"Thigh. Thigh. Thigh. Thigh. Thigh."

So anyway, the takeaway here is that one person's 'too masculine' is another person's 'thigh.'

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The Farmer’s Daughter by Victor Adame

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When you finally find out about your ADHD.

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The System Shock remake doesn't have you visibly use the toilets, but they do auto-flush after you leave them. (Which, given the type of game that it is, is likely to make you jump and wonder if something just snuck up behind you.)

Also, you can recycle the toilet paper and turn the resulting scrap in for cash.

It was inevitable that "can I pet the dog?" would evolve from a basic litmus test for a video game's willingness to permit the player to engage in non-productive interaction with the game's world to a cynical marketing device, but I think the basic idea is sound. We just need to refocus on types of non-productive interaction that are inherently unphotogenic or otherwise difficult to turn into marketable video clips, like "if the game's level layouts include bathrooms, can you use them?". I propose calling this the "Can You Shit" metric.

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if the muppet show was still airing chappell roan would guest star and thered be a running bit of miss piggy thinking shes trying to steal kermit but shes actually trying to flirt with miss piggy the whole time

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We can narrow it down quite a bit - 1977 Blue-book D&D Basic and AD&D Monster Manual don't appear to use dX, but the 1978 AD&D Player's Handbook does. (Page 16 is the first example I found.)

Here's a tabletop RPG history question, and also an etymology question if your nerdery bends that way.

d66 tables – as in "roll a six-sided die twice, reading the first roll as the 'tens' place and the second roll as the 'ones' place, yielding a number in the range from 11 to 66" – have been around at least as early as 1977, when the Starships book for classic Traveller used them to randomly generate trade goods for players to buy. However, the term "d66" wasn't yet being used to describe them – the book's text simply describes in detail how to roll on them each time such a table appears.

Conversely, we know the term "d66" was being used to describe this type of random lookup table no later than 2004, because several popular Japanese indie RPGs which came out in that year use it. However, none of these games seem to have originated it – the way they're using it suggests they're dropping a piece of jargon that was already well established at the time.

So the question is: what's the earliest tabletop RPG that specifically uses the term "d66" or "d66 table" to describe this type of random lookup roll? i.e., not "d6/d6" or "d6,d6" or any alternative verbiage, but "d66" specifically? It has to have been published in or before 2004, and (probably) not earlier than 1977. No speculation about which games might have used it, please; if you're going to suggest a candidate, be prepared to cite a specific title and page number.

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I can get another 1993 - TNE core rulebook. Note that it's referred to as 2D6 in the text but D66 in the tables, which could indicate that it's a transitional period.

I did a full-text search through my Traveller directory and didn't find anything earlier than this, but not all the PDFs in there are fully OCRed. I manually looked through the GDP/MegaTraveller World Builder's Handbook from 1989, which explicitly calls this 1D+1D, so that narrows our range even more.

Here's a tabletop RPG history question, and also an etymology question if your nerdery bends that way.

d66 tables – as in "roll a six-sided die twice, reading the first roll as the 'tens' place and the second roll as the 'ones' place, yielding a number in the range from 11 to 66" – have been around at least as early as 1977, when the Starships book for classic Traveller used them to randomly generate trade goods for players to buy. However, the term "d66" wasn't yet being used to describe them – the book's text simply describes in detail how to roll on them each time such a table appears.

Conversely, we know the term "d66" was being used to describe this type of random lookup table no later than 2004, because several popular Japanese indie RPGs which came out in that year use it. However, none of these games seem to have originated it – the way they're using it suggests they're dropping a piece of jargon that was already well established at the time.

So the question is: what's the earliest tabletop RPG that specifically uses the term "d66" or "d66 table" to describe this type of random lookup roll? i.e., not "d6/d6" or "d6,d6" or any alternative verbiage, but "d66" specifically? It has to have been published in or before 2004, and (probably) not earlier than 1977. No speculation about which games might have used it, please; if you're going to suggest a candidate, be prepared to cite a specific title and page number.

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1E Dungeon Master's Guide has the same 10% chance. I believe that's the original source of that rule - the first rulebook the girdle of femininity/masculinity shows up in is Greyhawk, the first supplement for white-box D&D, and that one just "changes the sex of the wearer".

I didn't see any magical girdles in blue-book Basic, so the 10% chance has apparently been there since 1979.

Old-school D&D's penchant for magic items which appear to have some beneficial property and automatically defeat every conceivable test that would demonstrate otherwise, but the first time you use them in a life-or-death situation they can somehow tell that it's for real this time and suddenly reveal themselves to be horribly cursed has rightly been criticised as player-hostile bullshit, but the oft-unacknowledged corollary is that many of them are also, in context, extremely funny.

There's a flying broom that gets mad when you try to ride it and attempts to beat you to death with its handle. This is separate from, and unrelated to, the flying carpet that gets mad when you try to ride it and attempts to wrap you up and squeeze you to death.

There's a spear which performs normally in sparring matches, but in mortal combat it curves around to make you stab yourself in the back like some sort of fucking Looney Tunes gag.

There's a magic ring which appears to have the powers of a randomly chosen different magic ring, but in reality the only power it has is to employ mental illusions to trick its wearer into thinking it has powers. You are being gaslit by jewellery.

None of these require you to go to obscure sourcebooks, nor are they apparently particularly rare – they're just hanging out on the standard treasure tables in the Dungeon Master's Guide, ready to pop up in any random hoard.

You can even create them by accident by biffing your roll when crafting your own magic items (the roll in question of course being made secretly by the GM, so you can never know whether this has happened until it's too late), which implies several fascinating things about the nature of magic.

There's a hat that makes you stupid and it's plotting against you.

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I'll be honest - that wasn't the episode I was expecting you to go with from the first post.

I was expecting "A Taste of Armageddon", which is on a very similar theme. (The Vietnam War was going on - go figure.) AToA is about how, when war is clean and bloodless, it's easy to let it continue because you don't see the real horror of it.

The Enterprise is visiting a planet that appears to be completely peaceful. However, while visiting, they find that they've been in a centuries-long war with another planet...all handled by computers. The computers decide how a given attack will proceed, and who the casualties are. And then the people "killed" in the attack all go to the disintegration chamber, because if they don't, the real war will resume. All the horrible weapons they've designed will be used, infrastructure will be devastated, cities will be destroyed. Instead of neat, clean disintegration chambers, people will be torn apart by bombs, buried alive under rubble, starved when infrastructure fails and food can't be delivered.

And then they claim that the Enterprise has been "killed" in their war game, and the entire crew has 24 hours to beam down and report to disintegration chambers.

Kirk is having none of this, and destroys the war-game computers. The leader of this planet is horrified - without the computers, the real war will resume. But, as it turns out, the leader of the other planet feels the same way. Nobody wants the brutal reality of high-tech warfare. As the Enterprise leaves, the two planets are negotiating peace.

Lately I've seen a lot of people using "Star Trek ending" as a shorthand way of saying "cheesy 60s ending where all the characters get together and laugh at some shitty one-liner until the freezeframe in order to wrap things up with a neat breezy bow" and, well. They're not wrong... but that's only half the episodes.

The other half of the episodes end you staring at the TV in haunted existential silence because the story's thesis was "Don't delude yourself that waging war with technology is any less brutal than committing murder with your bare hands. You are a mortal and an animal like any other and if you think you have a justified reason to kill you had better be prepared to face your enemy, and recognize him as an intelligent equal, and smash in his skull with a rock."

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5 years ago, I was in Rehab.

10 years ago, I was watching my Potential and Opportunities dissolve and evaporate in an ocean of cheap gin and expensive whiskey.

But 5 years ago, I was in Rehab.

One of the exercises they had us perform was to imagine ourselves happy, 5 years in the future.

Many of us in that room had forgotten how to imagine nice things happening to them. A few snorted (well, I snorted), finding the notion that we’d even still be around in 5 years grimly humorous.

For about half of us, it was the last stop on the way down.

But I indulged the therapist. I was there, after all, because I did not want to die. So, I imagined myself, 5 years hence.

Happy.

It came to me all at once; an artistic remix on Norman Rockwell’s Freedom From Want, reframed with myself placing food at the table.

Sunday Dinner At My Place, I answered, when it came my turn to share my fantasy. I was asked what food I imagined eating.

It’s not the meal itself, I said, it’s the implications framed around it. Sunday Dinner At My Place means that I have a Place. It means that I have Family that will actually speak to me and friends who actually want to see me. It means money enough not just to feed myself but others too. It means having the time to spare to take the time preparing the meal.

A lot of nodding heads all around me. A struck chord. Many people with no Place, in that place. Nowhere that would lament their leaving.

5 years hence, as I lay down to sleep in my Home, with my Wife and my Son, surrounded by my Art and my Flowers, I reflect.

It was a long road. It was hard. We lost people. So many people. There were long days and long nights and hospital stays. Angry arguments with ghosts. I changed, in ways I never hoped for, or expected. Good ways, finally, for once. Slowly, against the backdrop of a world in chaos, I found my mind.

Sometimes, My Wife wondered aloud, what she did to deserve me. After some stumbling with my feelings, I eventually settled on an answer.

I’m a Rescue.

She gave me a Home.

And, so, I gave her a Family.

It seemed fair

This Sunday, my folks, which whom I have not had a shouting match in years, will come over for dinner. We will cook and eat together. My Friend became My Wife, and she took a piece of me and with it she made Our Son. There will be many hugs, and no violence. Good Things Happened.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you don’t know what the future holds.

don’t give up yet, ok?

It could get good, even.

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