Manifest: Sync

Last time, I decided that the Manifestations will make all their actions with a die roll based on their Tier and Bond ratings: XdY, where X is their Bond, ranging from 1 to 5, and Y is their Tier, ranging from a d4 to a d12. I also decided to place a limit on leveling, such that a Manifestation will only ever level up 5 times.

But the math on that is a little squiffy. If a Manifestation focuses on leveling their Bond over their Tier, they are, in effect, hamstringing themselves. Take a look at this Anydice program:

output 1@2d12 named "2d12"
output 1@5d6 named "5d6"

If you look at the “at least” tab, you can easily see how the 5d6 Manifestation has a higher chance of rolling better than a 3 or 4 than 2d12, but 2d12 has a far better chance of rolling 6 or better than 5d6 has of rolling a 6. Both Manifestations have about an equal chance of rolling a 5 or better, but for one that means a 5 or a 6, while the other can go up to 12. That’s hardly balanced.

And I do want some balance. Specifically, I want players to have interesting choices, which means having players who choose to have 5d6 Manifestations be as “effective” as those who choose 2d12s.

So, I wondered, what could be a small balancing factor for this? Why would you ever consider focusing on Bond rather than Tier?

The answer I came up with? Sync.

We have all, in some form or another, struggled with our emotions. At times they can feel like something not quite of ourselves. Something that is a part of you, but not you. Manifestations must, therefore, have their own wills, goals, and motivations, as esoteric and inscrutible as they may be. Bond may not be friendship, but how well do you and your Manifestation work together? How well do you know each other, and if you are working in tandem, how well does your will support and augment the actions of your Manifestation?

Why no, it is nothing like Drift from Pacific Rim. I don’t know where you even got that idea. I mean just look at all the other possible sources I could have gotten that idea from!

In all seriousness, the idea of two disparate entities sharing the same body and “thinking alike” to increase their effectiveness is hardly new, and rather than redesign the die-roll mechanic, it gives a small measurable boost to raising your Bond.

Okay, so what is Sync? It needs to be a boost rather than a main mechanic, so that a higher Bond trades off a higher die roll for a special effect. It makes me think of Trespasser’s Solid Hit mechanic: half the time, something special happens. A higher Bond could increase the frequency of “Critical Hits.”

The system itself needs to scale up with Bond, and require as little extra cognaitive load as possible. What if I linked both Sync and Bond together?

The armor/toughness mechanics of Valiant Quest are quite intriguing to me. Armor removes damage dice that are equal-or-less than the armor’s rating. If you have armor 2, then any damage dice rolled against you are removed if they show a 2 or a 1. I like the idea of armor specifically affecting the dice, rather than the roll or the sum.

If I stole that idea, it might look like this: Sync is a special extra attached to every ability. When you roll to see how powerful your ability is, you count up the dice that show a number equal to or less than your Bond. The number of these dice is equal to your Sync value for this attack.

For example, an attack might deal roll damage and push sync. A Manifestation who has Bond of 2 and a Tier of d12 might roll a 12 and a 2. This means the Manifestation would deal 12 damage and push 1 space. On the other hand a Tier d6 and Bond 5 Manifestation could roll a 6, 4, 3, 1, and 1, thereby doing six damage and pushing 4.

Now, I still need to make sure that high Bond and high Tier are comperable choices. One of the important things to keep in mind as well is the “DPS Cost” of Sync. Consider how, in some games like Final Fantasy or early-level Pokémon, there is a real opportunity cost in using buff or condition abilities. Depending on the situation, you have to ask yourself “is putting a condition on my opponant a more efficient use of a turn than just hitting them with my stick?” Sometimes it is, but oftentimes it isn’t, which makes conditions less likely to be utilized.

So, in making my Sync extras, I need to be mindful that it should always be worthwhile to put a condition or special effect on a foe, which means they should be comperable to dealing that much damage.

Put another way, to find out if more Sync is balanced with dealing more damage, we can create a fake ability that deals Power roll + Sync damage. What this should do is check to see if having a lower max die is offset by having a higher chance of Sync.

Thankfully, we have Anydice.com to do the math for us!

function: syncroll ROLL:s BOND:n {
 MAX: 1@ROLL
 loop N over {1..#ROLL}{
  if N@ROLL<=BOND {
   MAX:MAX+1
  }
 }
 result: MAX
}

loop TIER over {4,6,8,10,12}{
 loop BOND over {1..5}{
  if BOND+(TIER/2)-1 = 7 {
   output [syncroll BONDdTIER BOND] named "[BOND]d[TIER]"
  }
 }
}

Now that’s an interesting spread. Immediately we can see that the chances of a 5d6 rolling anything under an 8 is going to be pretty rare. That makes sense; with such a high Bond, the only time you’re not getting Sync is if you roll a 6. That means the worst roll you can make with a 5d6 is either 5 1s (which gets you a 6) or 5 6s (also a 6). Even four 1s and a 2 gets you a 7.

If we take a look at the “at least” tab, we can see some more interesting facts: 5d6 is now far more likely to roll a 7 or better than any other spread, but there’s a huge drop off once we reach 10. Comparing the other spreads and we see a fairly expected trend: the lower the Bond, the more likely you are to roll a lower number, but after around 9 or so, the trend shifts; the higher your Tier, the more likely you are to roll a better number.

This suggests that Sync does something of what it was trying to do: balance out the effects of Tier and Bond so there was no obvious decision between one or the other. So long as whatever Sync does balances out to about 1 point of damage per level, the decision a player has to make is an interesting one: Do I want more reliable lower levels of damage and a higher chance of a special effect, or a more swingy Manifestation with less of a limit on damage?

Comparing these graphs to the standard XdY graphs, and you can see how Sync makes a huge difference to 5d6, but almost no difference at all to 2d12. This does exactly what I wanted Sync to do.

What’s interesting about this mechanic is that it can slot into the other die-roll option; Xd10+Y looks like this:

function: syncroll ROLL:s BOND:n {
 MAX: 1@ROLL
 loop N over {1..#ROLL}{
  if N@ROLL<=BOND {
   MAX:MAX+1
  }
 }
 result: MAX
}

loop TIER over {0..4}{
 loop BOND over {1..5}{
  if BOND+TIER = 6 {
   output [syncroll BONDd10 BOND]+TIER named "[BOND]d[TIER]"
  }
 }
}

As you can see, the Xd10+Y strongly favors a higher Bond than Tier, with the flip happening between 13 and 14. A d12 makes it a little better, but still pretty lopsided. However, compared with the basic curves for Xd10+Y, and you can see exactly the same thing as with XdY: a large difference with 5d10+1, a small difference with 2d10+4.

One significant difference with Xd10+Y, however, is how close the spread is. 5d10+1 has a minimum of 6 (five Sync plus a Tier of 1) and a maximum of 15. (one 10 plus four Sync plus Tier of 1). 2d10+4, at the other end, has a minumum of…6 and a max of 15. The number spread is exactly the same, but the important thing to remember is that for 5d10+1 (or 5d6, with the other roll system) the Sync is not going to be extra damage, but a special bonus. A debuff, perhaps, or extra movement.

This places Manifestations on an interesting spectrum: on the one end are the Brutes; heavy damage-dealers who sometimes do a lot of damage, other times do little. On the other end we have the Tricksters; medium damage dealers who focus more on special effects than damage.

It should also be noted that Sync doesn’t easily slot into the 1DX+Y roll that I’ve set aside for now. Perhaps there is a way to fit it in, (perhaps a flat bonus if the single X die rolls lower than Y?) but at the moment I’m fine with putting the 1dX+Y roll away, and working exclusively with the Dynamic and Static rolls until both are proven sub-par.

Lastly, this XdY roll needs a name. It can’t just be “attack roll.” It will relate to how powerful or effective an ability is, so for now let’s call it a Power roll.

Next time, let’s take a look at what the special effects of an ability could be.