Manifest: The Die Pool and Investing

Last time I went over some issues regarding the die-pool, namely its size and where it came from. I looked at a few sizes and found myself torn between an average die-pool size of 5 or 10.

Thankfully, an easy solution has presented itself — doubly easy because it will be simple to change if I need to.

Die-Pools are built by totaling an Agent’s emotional stats and dividing by two. Human average is 2 apiece, and I’m currently playing with Agents having a 10 to 14 stat-point limit, so that naturally puts the die-pool in the 5 to 7 range. If I decide to switch to 10, then I drop the dividing-by-two bit. No fuss!

Oh, also I came up with a better name for Sync. Now, ability rolls will be divided into POWER and CONTROL.

Okay, so if we know the die-pool for each Agent is going to be around 5-7, we can look at a new Anydice program:

loop X over {1..7}{
 loop Y over {2..5}{
  output [count {1..Y} in Xd6] named "[X]d6 v [Y]"
 }
}

This looks pretty good to me. Playing around with constant X and Y variables, we can see that raising the number of dice not only raises the maximum limit on POWER, but also makes rolling higher POWER more likely. Likewise, raising the stat makes getting a higher POWER much more reliable.¹.

But we still have a small problem. Taking a look at the “at least” tab shows us that there is never a time adding another die doesn’t help. It’s linear improvement, which doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of spending all of one’s dice in one place.

Some of this could be solved with careful ability crafting and mission design, but I’d like to see if I can support it mechanically. After all, if it’s possible to just have one super Manifestation and dump all your dice into its eye-laser attack, why would you waste time with other strategies? How can I mechanically encourage spending dice on multiple abilities?

In the last post, I considered having a hard limit on the number of dice you could invest in an ability. During the playtest, the rule that prevented players from investing stat dice from one of their stats meant players had left-over dice to use. Preventing the use of all your dice forces players to consider other uses for that resources.

That’s limiting, however, rather than supporting, so another option is diminishing returns. If I can somehow craft the system to provide fewer benefits for each die invested, then there’s incentive to invest a few dice in many useful abilities without preventing edge-cases where more dice is still preferable.

That, however, could involve a lot of complex math. Diminishing returns aren’t linear, and so that means a more complex POWER system involving charts or multiplication. That increases cognitive load, which lengthens combat and encourages simpler and fewer Manifestations.

Is there an easy rule that provides diminishing returns? Well, if we don’t want to get mathematical, we can simply set a limit whereby more invested dice give lesser benefits. Especially since I’m aiming for smaller numbers of dice investment, this feels more reasonable.

Let’s pick a random flat limit to start with: 3 dice. If you invest more than 3 dice in an Ability, you get diminishing returns. This could be handled with each of the first three dice giving a +2 to POWER or CONTROL and every die after giving a +1. That pushes the numbers higher, though, with three dice giving you +6, so we could go the other direction and require spending 2 dice to invest 1 after your third.

While this could work, depending on the die-limit I chose, this would fit better in a system that used a larger die-pool. It also limits the value of the dice in question, as they now provide half the value of the other dice. Not a terrible thing, but the mindset I’m trying to instill in my players is not weakening the power of the dice, but the investment.

Rolling At Advantage is the most basic “roll more than you use” mechanic in RPGs. Legend of the Five Rings uses a “roll several keep a few” die-roll mechanic; what if we borrowed that idea? What if you could invest as many dice as you want in a Manifestation, but you could only count up to your Tier or Emotional Stat? That means a Tier 4 Manifestation could have 6 dice invested, and then the Agent chooses which 4 dice to count. What does that do to the Ability Roll?

Well, investing more dice means you’ll have more ability to decide what happens. You have more control over this one ability, but at the cost of fewer dice elsewhere. It means if you have 8 dice to invest, you could decide between spending four dice apiece on two Tier 4 Manifestations and taking whatever you roll, or spending all 8 dice on one of them and being more confident you’ll get the CONTROL or POWER numbers you want, but really getting the benefit of only 4 dice.

Do we use Tier or the Stat? Well, Stats range from 2 to 5, while Tier ranges from 1 to 5. That’s close enough, but the ludo-narrative is different: With Tier, Manifestations’ abilities get stronger as they level up, meaning a Tier 1 Manifestation could get a +1, while a Tier 5 could get a +5. With stats, the higher stat you have, the more powerful all your Manifestations of that type can be.

Tier has a lot to recommend it, but the biggest problem is that Tier 1 Manifestations can never get more than a +1 to either POWER or CONTROL. While careful construction of abilities might make this moot, at the moment it feels safer to go with stats as the limiting factor of dice investment.

As for the Anydice program:

function: powerroll ROLL:s STAT:n {
 set "position order" to "lowest first"
 loop A over {1..STAT} {
  if A@ROLL>STAT {result: A-1}
 }
 result: [lowest of #ROLL and STAT]
}

loop X over {1..7}{
 loop Y over {2..5}{
  output [powerroll Xd6 Y] named "[X]d6 v [Y]"
 }
}

I like this, but it does still involve randomness. If you really want a high CONTROL and invest more dice to get it, you might still only roll POWER. That reliance on output-randomness can be frustrating.

What if you can only invest up to the limit, but can then spend more uninvested dice to increase CONTROL or POWER by 1? This way, you can reliably get what you need at the cost of other Manifestation’s utility…but that turns a possible +1 to either POWER or CONTROL into a certain +1. It makes dice more powerful after investing beyond the limit, which is what I wanted to avoid.

What if any die invested after the limit adds a flat -1 to either POWER or CONTROL? That way you get a better chance of one at the certain cost of the other…but that’s still a bit susceptible to problems at the extreme edges of the bell-curve

One possible solution is spent dice don’t increase CONTROL or POWER, but shifts them instead. If you get 2 CONTROL and 1 POWER, you could spend a die to shift it to 1 CONTROL and 2 POWER. Spend another to get 0 CONTROL and 3 POWER. That is more in line with the idea of reducing options in favor of control. Another solution is requiring two dice to bestow a certain +1 to either CONTROL or POWER, reducing the possible value of each die by half.

Some good ideas here, and I think they’ll take some playtesting to see which ones work best and are the most engaging.

Next time, I want to take a closer look at LP. Exactly how much LP do I want Manifestations to have?