Rules to condense multiple similar rolls?

[Wurok]

Are there any rules to condense the success or failure of multiple rolls?
For example, say players are traveling for 30 days through wilderness, is there a way to make a single concise Survival roll instead of 30 Survival rolls, one for each day?

I was thinking of using the standard probability table, and trying to add some variation with rolls, but haven't got anything that makes sense.

[weby]

Normally such rolls are not made at all, or at mostly monthly rolls or similar.

Only meaningful rolls should be done. See when to roll on B343.

[Wurok]

They are nor trivial rolls, however. Without food or water, the PCs could suffer some reasonable harm. Just saying "you take your time and cross the jungle, foraging when you need to" is not really something minor. There is a considerable danger to the travel.

I'm not talking about foraging walking from city to city in some pseudo-medieval world, I'm talking about crossing a jungle, a desert, a savanna, etc.

[Taneli]

My gut instinct would be to have them make enough rolls to get the combined margin of success to 30+ in you example case, and in case of a failure they would waste more time (and require more MoS to make up for it), and in the case of a critical failure they would face a mishap of some sort and then we would focus on that situation.

Or, you could just have them make one Survival roll and go with that, assuming that the jungle was "just for colour" and the meat of the adventure was the thing on the other side of the jungle. Heck, in a sufficiently high-powered / cinematic / skilled setting / party I could just state that "30 days of jungle later..." and maybe have them roll vs. Survival once in case I wanted to have a chance to introduce a minor complication, or call the attention to the awesome skills of the Survival experts in the party.

All that said, if anyone has any good ideas on the topic, I'd be interested in hearing you out too!

[DanHoward]

If they are just travelling through then a single Survival roll would probably suffice. If the campaign revolves around survival in the jungle/desert/etc then I probably wouldn't allow a generic Survival roll at all. I'd want it to be roleplayed out with a plan and specific tasks that need to be done each day.

[Bruno]

By the time you're looking at 30+ rolls, why not look up the character's effective skill on the Probability of Success table, B171? They succeed at that many rolls (round to the nearest whole number, or round towards even, whichever you prefer).

Example, assuming 'round to nearest':
A Survival expert (skill 12) with +2 quality bonus has an effective skill of 14, and succeeds 90.7% of the time. For 30 rolls, that's 90.7% * 30 = 27 successful rolls (and 3 failures).
A Survival n00b (skill 9) with improvised equipment (-2) has an effective skill of 7 and succeeds 16.2% of the time. For 30 rolls, that's 5 successful rolls (and 25 failures).

Characters with Luck are a little more complicated but using http://anydice.com/ I believe it's the following table:

Effective
Skill		 %
3		  1.38
4		  5.45
5		 13.26
6		 25.29
7		 41.16
8		 59.36
9		 75.59
10		 87.50
11		 94.73
12		 98.26
13		 99.57
14		 99.92
15		 99.99
16+		100.00

(Anydice program link: http://anydice.com/program/bf0c - you can find chance of success for GURPS by using the At Most tab)

[Phantasm]

For a quick travel montage, I may just go "okay, what's everyone's margin of success if you rolled a 10 on your Survival skills?" and just run with it. Sometimes, you don't even want to roll. But then, doing a "Take 10" variant is a house rule, not official.

Another similar issue I've discovered, though, is someone who has to roll Precognitive Parry every turn in combat, sometimes multiple times per turn, and then a Parry Missile Weapons Parry roll. (This is on top of the increasing penalties for parrying every time he has to roll a Parry.) In this case, I just say "roll Precog Parry" at the start of the player's turn and let him use that roll - good or bad - for all incoming attacks.

[Rasputin]

I had the same question a few years ago, and came up with this.

[Wurok]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

I had the same question a few years ago, and came up with this.

Thank you. This is the sort of thing I was looking for. Do you have any experience with actually using it in-game?

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Wurok

Thank you. This is the sort of thing I was looking for. Do you have any experience with actually using it in-game?

Strangely, only a little, though it generally works. One of my players likes rolling all ten Survival checks. (I don't get it either but, since he plays the barbarian, maybe he likes all the successes.) To keep things even, I set up a macro in Dicenomicon to handle ten rolls and use that for everyone else.