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Greetings! Just joined the list, and I'm going to get straight into trouble by raising some questions about the mechanics.
Now, don't get me wrong - I like the HeroWars mechanics. (I liked RuneQuest, too, but I prefer HeroWars). I think that the mechanics should work fine for a lot of genres, and especially well for Glorantha (since it solves the old problem of how to represent Heroes and normal folk properly - always a problem with BRP, IMHO, especially if you consider all the variant HeroQuest rules that cropped up).
Anyway, being of a naturally mathematical/statistical bent, I noticed that there wasn't apparently much advantage in going from a target number of 20 to 1w. A simple ability test has a 5% chance of a critical in either case, a 90% chance of success in either case, and a 5% chance of failure in either case. This is a consequence of the special rules for target numbers 1 and 20 (the former can't critical, the latter can't fumble).
Nothing to lose sleep over, though, right? You still get +1AP in an extended contest, and it's not like you're actually WORSE off...
... except that in some cases you are. Let's say you're faced with a resistance number of (say) 5w2, and it's a simple contest. Now, let's agree at the outset that you shouldn't be very likely to win, but at the very least the guy with the higher skill (1w) should win more often/lose less often than the guy with the lower skill (20).
Well, in fact this turns out not to be the case. Here's the possible results:
SKILL: 20 1w Narrator Decides 4.75% 0.00% Complete Victory 0.00% 0.00% Major Victory 0.00% 0.00% Minor Victory 0.25% 0.25% Marginal Victory 4.50% 3.50% Tie 0.00% 0.00% Marginal Defeat 0.00% 4.50% Minor Defeat 85.75% 64.50% Major Defeat 4.75% 26.00% Complete Defeat 0.00% 1.25%
As can be seen, the lower target number not only has a better chance of success, but also if they are defeated it is much less likely to be a major defeat (and it CANNOT be a complete defeat). This is partly because the target number of 20 cannot fumble - which means it cannot ever suffer a Complete Defeat in a simple contest - and partly because the 1w cannot critical (after the mastery has been cancelled).
Essentially, whenever you've got a skill of 1w(x), you'd be better off with a skill of 20 if you ever face a resistance with more masteries than (x). You are slightly better off if you're facing an equal number of masteries: compare against a resistance of 5w:
SKILL: 20 1w Narrator Decides 1.25% 0.00% Complete Victory 0.00% 0.00% Major Victory 0.25% 0.25% Minor Victory 8.00% 8.00% Marginal Victory 36.75% 37.75% Tie 3.50% 3.50% Marginal Defeat 23.00% 22.75% Minor Defeat 26.00% 21.75% Major Defeat 1.25% 5.50% Complete Defeat 0.00% 0.50%
Here, you have a 50.25% chance of being defeated with a skill of 20 (as opposed to 50.50% with 1w), but you also have a 45% chance of victory (as opposed to a 46% chance with 1w). So your chance of victory is marginally higher with 1w, but so is your chance of defeat (and note again that if you ARE defeated, the degree of defeat is still likely to be higher with the 1w skill compared to the 20 skill!)
This seems to be an inevitable consequence of having the special
rules for the extreme values. About the only way to avoid it is to
not allow target numbers of 20 or 1 - which introduces its own
problems.
- --
GAZZA
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