Question: On the matter of Empath and your Botch rules: if I need to roll Perception + Empathy, with that knack I do not roll my Empathy and instead can gain my Empathy as auto-successes. But if I have a Perception of 2, then wouldn't that serve to possibly increase the character's chance of botching?
Yep, it certainly would. Any time a roll subtracts dice in favor of successes, it automatically increases the change of botching - the fewer dice you roll, the more likely it is you may botch. And the Crowd Goes Wild over in Dexterity does the same thing.
It's a tradeoff; you're more likely to accidentally fail hardcore by botching, but if you succeed will succeed more wildly than anyone else your Legend could have because you have extra successes. You're trading security for better results, and while it does make you botch once in a while, the majority of the time you're still going to be getting more bang for your buck with the successes than the dice (especially since you can spend Legend to reroll a botch).
I'd also note that it's only really super-dangerous at low Hero levels or for those who have very little of the stat being paired with Empathy (usually Manipulation or Perception); as you grow in Legend and gain more dice to the Attribute in the roll, your chances of botching will decrease little by little, while your sexy automatic successes will always be there for you.
While I can understand the reasoning you've provided. There's one point that I would like to contest, and maybe spark a discussion about.
ReplyDeleteSay the above mentioned character has Perception 2, Epic Perception 1, Empathy 3, and the Empath Knack.
Without the Knack they would roll 5 dice and add 1 auto success. Which could net them anything from a botch, to a spectacular 11 successes.
Once they took the knack, their chances of botching increases, because they only roll 2 dice, but at most they will get 8 successes.
To me this suggests that these Knacks trade a more mediocre rate of success with a greater chance of botching, which seems to be a bit counterproductive.
Im afraid you probably need a course in general statistics. Not to denigrate your thought process at all. I think you hold some valid info.
DeleteBut the odds of getting 10 on all 5 dice is 1 in 100,000. We play a lot, and probably from all the characters and all the games across 3 years we've probably rolled perception empathy.....maybe 1000 times? We'd have to play for 300 years for your rolling situation to average happening once.
So lets not take the hyperbolic situations and instead talk about the possible real world applications.
Taking your above person(who I admit has dangerously low stats and probably shouldnt take empath) and lets look at more realistic rolls.
Without empath he averages 3/4 successes.
The chance of them botching is about 1 in 19 if they have the legend to reroll brings it down to 1 in 361.
Chance of getting 5 successes on 5 dice and so 6 total successes is 1 in 33.
With Empath he averages 5 successes.
Chance of botching is about 1 in 11, or 1 in 121 if legend to reroll.
His odds to get 2 successes on his two dice(and 6 successes in all) is 1 in 6.5 exponentially higher then the non empaths chances of getting a 6(which is a very high roll for such shitty stats.
But he does have a 3x higher probability of botching.
So x6 chance of getting an outstanding success
x3 chance of getting a botch
Seems like a decent exchange for me. But your mileage may vary.
Now lets do the same process with a hero who is actually made for perception. Often in our games the perception person would start with 5 perception, 5 empathy and 1 epic(they'd also probably applied academics thus adding academics dice to empathy but we'll leave that out for this).
Without empath:
Average successes 6
Chance of botching 1 in 51
With reroll 1 in 2601
Chance of all successes(11 successes) 1 in 750
With empath:
Average successes 8/9
Chance of botching 1 in 19
With reroll 1 in 361
Chance of 11 successes 1 in 44
Here we see that with more dice the chance of botching comes down the same chance of botching we had with the non empath guy earlier. Im willing to botch 1 in every 361 rolls. That seems normal to me. But having upwards of 16 times as good a chance of getting the 11 successes I might need seems worth it.
Anne explained that it is a risk vs reward situation. It definitely is. Hopefully you understand why your suppositions before were incorrect. Any botching you are doing is in exchange for a superior chance for success.