P(Making Your Roll)

I'm off on assignment to Sacramento, a city on the West Coast of the United States, about 80 miles inland. If you're not from the United States, you probably have never heard of it, but if you've probably heard of California. Sacramento is the seat of government for the state of California. This lesson in US Geography has been brought to you because I have less time than usual to come up with good and productive things to write on this blog.

One thing I do want to talk about is the probability curve of A Time of War checks. There are really three kinds of checks; Skill, Attribute, and Double Attribute, but for the moment I just want to talk about Skill Checks. Let's start with the basic probability curve -- the chance of passing an unmodified skill check with no modifiers. As it turns out, a bonus of +4 for many skills is enough to guarantee success (no accounting for the Fumble Rule -- natural twos are always failures), and +6 in anything guarantees success. For context going forward, here's that laid out as a graph:

As you can see, your chances start pretty high and go up pretty fast as you pile on modifiers. The mitigating factor here, of course, is that A Time of War is a Margin-of-Success driven system -- you are generally rewarded for rolling well above what you need, and penalized based on how much you fail by. The interesting arc for us is the range between Success by 6 and Failure by 6, as below Failure by 6, you start getting into serious life-and-death consequences for the party even from relatively safe actions.

With Simple-Basic skills, failing by more than 5 is flat-out impossible without modifiers. Observe:

Complex-Advanced is marginally more interesting:

Again, we can see the familiar 2D6 probability curve, but here there's the tiniest chance of a Disastrous Failure if you only have a +0 in the skill. This suggests that under almost all circumstances, if your character has a fairly modest level of skill (+3) in whatever action they're taking, your chances of having major problems are quite low. In this sense, A Time of War can be thought of as a game with an assumption of success -- failures are things that can we weaved into additional challenges. More on that later this week.