Manifest: Stat-Investment Rework

Last time, I went through what I learned from the first playtest of Manifest v0.1, and made a quick-and-dirty skeleton for moving forward. This time, I’d like to…well, start moving forward.

First and foremost, I’d like to take a harder look at the basic Stat-Investment Power Roll, and see if I can’t find ways to smooth it out, both ludo-narratively and statistically.

So, let’s go to Anydice!

Anydice

We can see a full-mess breakdown of the system using the following:

loop X over {1..10}{
 loop Y over {2..5}{
  output [count {Y..6} in Xd6] named "[X]d6 v [Y]"
 }
}

(Note that we are really only looking at the POWER side of abilities here, but the math for SYNC works out the same, since they’re just inverted. You can test this by swapping the powerroll function to “[count {1..BOND} in DICEd6]” if you want.)

Hard to tell anything from that alone, but we can test the effects of BOND or the number of dice invested by setting either X or Y to a single number. If you set X to 5, for example, you can see how steadily raising and lowering BOND effects an ability’s POWER. If you set Y to 3, you can see how investing more dice does the same.

We can also explore the differences with different die sizes:

loop X over {1..10}{
 loop Y over {2..5}{
  loop Z over {4,6,8,10,12}{
   output [count {Y..Z} in XdZ] named "[X]d[Z] v [Y]"
  }
 }
}

And that’s something we should consider. I chose d6 out of familiarity and commonality, but is a d6 the best option?

Well, what does changing the die size actually do?

Currently, as shown above, changing the number of dice invested affects the spread of possible results. If you invest 3 dice, your POWER is going to range from 1 to 3. Changing your Bond affects the probability of each result, meaning a lower Bond results in a greater chance of higher POWER.

Changing the die size really only changes the number spread and impact for changing X and Y. If we’re rolling d4s, changing your Bond results in a 25% shift. If we’re rolling d10s, it’s only a 10% shift.

But that’s getting further in the weeds than we need to get: we can just look at the Bond spread. If we’re rolling d4s, there are only two kinds of Manifestations: Bond 2s and Bond 3s. d10s give us eight: Bond 2s to Bond 9s, assuming we don’t want to allow Bond 1s or Bond 10s.¹

So the question really is, how many Manifestation types do we want?

Two (d4s) is obviously too few, while eight (d10s) is too many. If we get too many, that would make the choices less interesting, as what really is the difference between a Bond 4 and a Bond 5? Sure, there is a difference, but would it be noticeable in casual play?

So really the question is: d6 or d8? Four (d6s) seems too few, while six (d8s) might be too diffuse. What does the math say?

Checking Anydice, the graphs all have very similar shapes, which means this ultimately is a choice of minor consequence. Both d6s and d8s can give us the same shape of results, they’ll just require some different numbers to balance them out.

That also means, thankfully, that this is something that is easy to change and will require little reworking moving forward, so we can stick with d6s and keep d8s in the back of our minds for the moment.

Simplification

My players felt that six Manifestations was too much. They only ever used one or two per turn, and while some of that could be due to the learning process, coupled with unfamiliarity with the system, it does suggest that if players can field six Manifestations at once, they should be eased into it.

One way to help support multiple Manifestations is find places to simplify. The more we can boil the system down to “one rule” with some minor exceptions, the better. With that said, we can simplify the Manifestations quite a bit.

The structure of the system has several variables: An agent has X dice for a turn, can invest up to Y in an action, roll them, and count those showing Z or lower/higher for the ability. I’m considering adding other mechanics that use more numbers, so I have to ask myself the question: do I need to keep Bond? Everything that Bond does at the moment could easily be folded into the emotional stats, reducing Manifestations to a Type, a Tier, and a list of abilities.

The one rule becomes “Invest as many dice as you want, roll them, and find your POWER and SYNC based on your emotional stat that’s the same as your Manifestation’s Type. That’s quick, easy, and requires low cognitive effort.

So we can get rid of bond² and put everything it did into the emotional stats. That’s one less thing our players need to concern themselves with.

The Die-Pool

During combat, there are a few strategic choices a character will make: Where to move Manifestations, what abilities to use, and how many dice to invest from their die-pool. The first two are situational and will require some mechanical support, but the third needs special attention. How big is the average die pool? How many dice can an Agent invest in a single ability? I used 10 as a limit in the Anydice program above; is that a good top, or should we consider more? Fewer? And what’s the spread between new Agents and old practiced veterans? Are the new-folk investing 1 or 2 dice while the experts are investing 20?

Each die is a certain +1 to either POWER or SYNC. We can equate that to two dice equaling +1 to both, with a bell curve from 0 to N. What limits do we want on this?

Obviously Agents need to invest at least 1 die to activate the ability. That’s a base +1 to either POWER or SYNC. If this is the minimum, then I want to make sure the minimum is used: abilities have to be useful with only one die invested, or else why bother investing one die? Dice also amount to a limit on the number of actions someone can make in a turn. If the spread goes up to 20, then without hard limits on actions, a player could take 20 actions in a single turn.

Another important part of the puzzle: during the game, the players relied on heavy-hits, investing as many dice as possible into a single ability rather than dividing their attention and dice. This isn’t how I want the dice to exclusively fall, so how do we encourage more options?

The quick solution is “force it.” Put a hard limit on both the number of dice that can be invested in an ability and the number of abilities that can be used a turn. So long as the max number of dice is lower than the number of dice in the die-pool every turn, players will naturally invest dice into more abilities.

This also suggests an ideal range of fewer dice in the die-pool. The fewer dice there are, the more likely a player will invest a single die in an ability. If they have three dice, that’s three abilities.

But there’s a small problem with that: If an ability is useful through spending one die, does spending two dice become unnecessary? If I support single-die abilities, it could be very easy to either get a situation where players only ever invest one die per ability. This is the same problem I have now, just in reverse. I want the number of dice invested in an ability to be a decision.

Finding the balanced die-pool economy is going to be important, and this plays into another die-pool question: where does the pool come from? Do players get a certain amount of dice per turn, or a flat number at the start of the mission? Can they make their pool larger through actions?

A lot of this can be answered, but we should start with the basics. What size pool are we looking for? Let’s consider three basic spreads: 1-5 dice, 1-10 dice, and 1-20 dice.

1 to 5 dice

The smaller the pool is, the more important each individual die is. Since each action takes at least 1 die, we can easily look at this spread as a team of five Manifestations each getting one action with a single +1. A single Manifestation, on the other hand, could get a boost of +5 distributed to POWER and SYNC, making their action potentially far more powerful.

If we consider the “two actions” limitation of the other systems a fair standard, five dice means one Manifestation gets 3 while another gets 2, and five actions with 1 die apiece isn’t a huge difference from two.

This also means LP has to be low: +1 damage versus a 4 LP enemy makes more of an impact than versus a 50 LP target.

1 to 10 dice

At this level, one die might still be important, but certainly less-so. If a player has three Manifestations, they can invest 3 or 4 dice in each one. This also means there could be ten actions of 1 die apiece, five with 2, two with 5, or one big one with ten.

Assuming perfect probability, this also means that five actions with 2 dice apiece could each get +1 to their POWER and SYNC, while one big action with ten invested dice could get +5 for each. That’s not a bad spread, and makes each ability perhaps more reliable in their use. An ability that deals POWER damage and then pushes SYNC will be more likely to do both if there are more dice used.

1 to 20 dice

I don’t think I want to go this far. The value of 1 individual die is pretty useless now, but if you can reliably invest 10 dice in an ability, (assuming you’re only doing two per turn) then it’s going to be quite rare that an ability doesn’t get both POWER and SYNC

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I’m torn between the 5 and 10 limit, frankly. I want individual dice to be important, but I also don’t want the players to ever get caught in a cycle of always rolling one POWER when they really wanted SYNC, or visa versa.

I could keep going, but this post has gotten too long already. Got to save some stuff to work on for next time!