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Old 05-29-2018, 03:06 PM   #1
Dalin
 
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Saint Paul, MN
Default Dice odds without dice

Situation: Road trip with the kids who ask if we can play DFRPG in the car. They remember their characters' key stats pretty well. I'm pretty good at making up scenarios on the fly. We have no dice and no digital tech.

What's the most elegant solution for determining success/failure without dice? I was thinking that if I knew the probabilities of success on three dice (e.g., from the table on the back cover of Adventurers), I could select a random number from 1 to 100. Then split the probability of success on both sides of the secret target and have the kids guess a number. So, for example, with skill 10, they have a 50% chance of success. If I picked 50 as the target, they would have to guess a number between 25 and 75 to succeed. If criticals mattered, I could say 49-50 is a critical success and 1 and 100 would be critical failures. Similarly, I could measure the degree of success or failure easily enough in percentage terms.

The scale would have to wrap around for this to work. So if I chose 90 as the secret target, with 50% odds, they would need to choose from 65-100 or 1-15 to succeed. 16-64 would be a failure, with 40/41 being a critical failure.

Does this make mathematical sense? Any wrinkles I'm missing? One concern was how could I pick target numbers "randomly." That's hard, obviously, but maybe I could use the tenths digit on the odometer combined, perhaps, with license plate numbers or passing signs to help me stay reasonably unpredictable.
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