Swinging from the sidelines

[phiwum]

The rules are pretty clear. If, say, two baddies are in HTH with one good guy, a yellowbelly hero on the sidelines can swing into the hex. Because everyone is prone, he's +4 DX to hit the baddie he's aiming at. If is DX is 11, this is a roughly 5% chance to miss. If it's ten, then roughly 10% chance to miss.

If he misses, he rolls the same odds against the second baddie.

If he misses the second baddie as well, he has the same odds to accidently hit his ally.

With DX 10, then, the odds of accidentally hitting your ally in this situation is roughly one in a thousand. (If there's only one baddie and one good guy, the odds increase to one in a hundred.)

Seems to me this is a bit nuts. I'd think there should be some significant risk of hurting one's ally when attacking into a brawl. A simple solution would be to lower the odds for each die roll, with the obvious choice being to take away the DX bonus for attacking a prone target.

Otherwise, the comment that "When you're surrounded by foes, sometimes the best thing you can do is jump on one of them!" is inapt. If you do that, the other foes just start mauling you from the safety of the sidelines.

Have these odds struck anyone else as unrealistic? A one-in-a-hundred chance for a person of average DX to accidentally strike his buddy in the brawl really is inconsequential.

[Shostak]

You could just use the rules for loosing missile weapons into an HTH pile. That definitely increases the odds of hitting a friend unintentionally.

[phiwum]

It certainly does. But I'm not sure if I wanted to go from a 1% chance of hitting your buddy to a 50% chance each time you hit.

I think we could go about this scientifically. That is, watch a bunch of movies and count the number of times an ally is accidentally hit in a brawl and divide by the number of punches thrown, estimate whether the guy hitting the ally is average (DX 10) or a hero (DX 13) and figure out what the odds should be.

Now, we'd have to choose our source material carefully. The Three Stooges would really swing the estimates hard.

More seriously, one way to make it a more significant threat is to change the order in which we roll. In RAW, you roll to hit each enemy before rolling to miss your friends. If we'd simply randomize the order, then when striking into a one-on-one brawl, a DX 10 character has a roughly 5.5% chance of striking his ally and a DX 11 or higher goes to a bit less than 4%, if my kitchen table calculation is correct.

The odds of hitting an ally using RAW but taking away the +4 DX bonus would be 25% for DX 10 and 14% for DX 11.

[Terquem]

three people on the ground, grappling each other, is not as chaotic as one might image. I have been a grade school recess volunteer parent, and reaching into this sort of melee and getting hold of the one you want to get hold of is pretty easy. I think the rules are good the way they are

[TippetsTX]

Originally Posted by Terquem

three people on the ground, grappling each other, is not as chaotic as one might image. I have been a grade school recess volunteer parent, and reaching into this sort of melee and getting hold of the one you want to get hold of is pretty easy. I think the rules are good the way they are

Although, aren't you effectively a giant in that scenario?
;)

[Terquem]

true

But the chaos element remains the same, three people in a grapple isn't really all that chaotic

[phiwum]

Originally Posted by Terquem

three people on the ground, grappling each other, is not as chaotic as one might image. I have been a grade school recess volunteer parent, and reaching into this sort of melee and getting hold of the one you want to get hold of is pretty easy. I think the rules are good the way they are

I'm not thinking that there's a huge chance to hit the wrong person, but enough of a chance that it should cause some consideration. Swinging a battleaxe isn't as precise as pulling kids apart. I can't think that there's literally a 1% chance for an average person to hit the wrong guy.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by phiwum

The rules are pretty clear. If, say, two baddies are in HTH with one good guy, a yellowbelly hero on the sidelines can swing into the hex. Because everyone is prone, he's +4 DX to hit the baddie he's aiming at. If is DX is 11, this is a roughly 5% chance to miss. If it's ten, then roughly 10% chance to miss.

If he misses, he rolls the same odds against the second baddie.

If he misses the second baddie as well, he has the same odds to accidently hit his ally.

With DX 10, then, the odds of accidentally hitting your ally in this situation is roughly one in a thousand. (If there's only one baddie and one good guy, the odds increase to one in a hundred.)

Seems to me this is a bit nuts. I'd think there should be some significant risk of hurting one's ally when attacking into a brawl. A simple solution would be to lower the odds for each die roll, with the obvious choice being to take away the DX bonus for attacking a prone target.

Otherwise, the comment that "When you're surrounded by foes, sometimes the best thing you can do is jump on one of them!" is inapt. If you do that, the other foes just start mauling you from the safety of the sidelines.

Have these odds struck anyone else as unrealistic? A one-in-a-hundred chance for a person of average DX to accidentally strike his buddy in the brawl really is inconsequential.

(Edit: Text in grey was a mistake.)
Wait. Your math is wrong.

The roll to hit the ally is a roll to-hit at the same DX +4. So the chance to hit the wrong person is not the chance to miss raised to the power of the number of figures in the hex. It's the chance to miss raised to the power of the number of ENEMY figures, and then multiplied by inverse, i.e. the chance to HIT, the ally.

So if there's one foe in HTH with your ally and your to-hit is 90%, the chance to hit your friend is 9%.

If there are two foes in HTH with your ally, then the chance to hit your ally is 0.9%.

The system could stand to be tweaked for the multi-figure case. An easy way that makes sense to me would be:

If the first foe is missed, randomly determine ONE other figure in the hex, and roll to hit that figure. On a miss, it's a miss. Crit failures only take effect on the first to-hit roll.

(Edit: I posted that before reading your final suggestion. Which, it turns out, is almost the same as my suggestion! I actually like your version better, leaving out the +4. I'd be tempted to reduce or leave out the +4 to hit the intended target, too... or to make it an option whether to take the +4/+0 as you suggest, or to try +0 but get to roll to MISS an unintended target +4. So you can choose between a great chance to hack someone, probably who you want, or doing it carefully, reducing the chance to hit the wrong person.)

[phiwum]

Originally Posted by Skarg

Wait. Your math is wrong.

The roll to hit the ally is a roll to-hit at the same DX +4. So the chance to hit the wrong person is not the chance to miss raised to the power of the number of figures in the hex. It's the chance to miss raised to the power of the number of ENEMY figures, and then multiplied by inverse, i.e. the chance to HIT, the ally.

So if there's one foe in HTH with your ally and your to-hit is 90%, the chance to hit your friend is 9%.

Okay, either I'm misreading you here or one of us is misreading the rules.

Let's stick with two figures in the hex, the baddie and the ally. I roll to hit the baddie, with a 0.9 chance of hitting. If I miss, then I roll to miss the ally, with a 0.9 chance of missing. Thus, I hit the ally only if I fail both rolls and hence have 0.1 * 0.1 = 0.01 probability of hitting the ally.

If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying I need to miss the first roll and "succeed" on the second roll, so have 0.1 * 0.9 = 0.09 probability of hitting the ally.

But that's not how I read roll to miss. ITL 117 directs us to ITL 116 which directs us to ITL 115 which describes a successful adjDX roll indicates missing an ally, not hitting one.

Am I missing not understanding something?

[Terquem]

I think in melee attacks directed into HtH

Roll to hit your target - if miss
Roll to hit the next available target until you hit someone or miss everyone

In Shooting (Ranged) attack into HtH
Roll to hit your target - if miss
Roll to MISS the next target

That is the way I am remembering it, but I should just look it up, after all its on this computer, duh