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Old 05-27-2015, 12:35 AM   #1
Celti
 
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Default [Pyramid #3/66] Safe Thresholds for Ritual Symbols

A player in one of my games wants to use Ritual Symbols for his RPM caster. I'm allowing it, it's reasonably balanced from what I can see (we'll find out!).

However, one of the things that Ritual Symbols changes is that you suffer a -1 penalty to energy gathering rolls on every fifth attempt, instead of every third. This blows the Safe Threshold table all to hell and I can't figure out how to reverse engineer the formulas. The energy for effective skills 13, 14, 16, and 17 roughly matches up to three dead-average (10.5) energy-gathering rolls (or five for 17, as befits it for the -1 penalty not reducing chance of failure). None of the other numbers match up, however.

Given that my programming skills outweigh my maths here and the game starts tomorrow evening, I'm just going to write a calculator that does all the rolling automagically and ignore the quick-and-dirty charms rules for now, but the perfectionist in me demands an answer.

Any ideas?

Last edited by Celti; 05-27-2015 at 12:43 AM.
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Old 05-27-2015, 12:55 AM   #2
Langy
 
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Default Re: [Pyramid #3/66] Safe Thresholds for Ritual Symbols

Why write what already exists?
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Old 05-27-2015, 12:56 AM   #3
Christopher R. Rice
 
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Default Re: [Pyramid #3/66] Safe Thresholds for Ritual Symbols

PK's got one too.

Edit: PLEASE email me this if you get it worked out into a table form. I'd really like to put it on my blog. I didn't have the necessary math skills to figure it out when I was writing A:RPM.
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Old 05-27-2015, 01:47 AM   #4
Celti
 
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Default Re: [Pyramid #3/66] Safe Thresholds for Ritual Symbols

Yes, I'm aware calculators for vanilla RPM exist — but neither of those support Ritual Symbols, let along the other house rules I use.
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Old 05-27-2015, 01:49 AM   #5
Christopher R. Rice
 
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Default Re: [Pyramid #3/66] Safe Thresholds for Ritual Symbols

Quote:
Originally Posted by Celti View Post
Yes, I'm aware calculators for vanilla RPM exist — but neither of those support Ritual Symbols, let along the other house rules I use.
Langy's link lets you specify the penalty interval.
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Old 05-27-2015, 06:18 AM   #6
Kalzazz
 
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Default Re: [Pyramid #3/66] Safe Thresholds for Ritual Symbols

I to would be interested in seeing Quick and Dirty Symbols!

Given that casting an RPM spell is a Perform Until with a few Ifs for friends it is easy to knock together a quick script to automate

But that isn't near as cool as Quick and Dirty
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Old 06-01-2015, 12:55 PM   #7
Varyon
 
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Default Re: [Pyramid #3/66] Safe Thresholds for Ritual Symbols

At the high end (skill 19+), Safe Threshold is exactly what you'd get if you rolled a 12 over the course of 10 accumulation rolls, so you'll want to stick with that - although with only suffering a -1 per 5 attempts, the point where this becomes the rule is right around skill 17. Things are going to be a lot more complicated at lower skill, but for skill 17+ our assumption works out to right around +1 to skill, so having this be the case for lower skills shouldn't break anything. Just use the Safe Threshold table as-is, applying a +1 to effective skill level for using Ritual Symbols.
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