Sunatet said:

Oh that's brilliant man! Would it be possible to set an input field where you could set the number of challenges a chaos star gives as well as the reroll?

Gallows said:

I'm not sure if that's possible, maybe, but the amount of work I would need to put on that...

Lets say, that symbol on every face is integral part of the core engine as well, as dice cancelling and graying engine.

To add a possibility of replacement would require hell of a work, and redesign of many core features.

I think I'll pass on that, I took me long enough, to get it work like its working now.

Sorry Gallows, You have to live with it how it is.

But if You know someone with programming skills (html, js, css), You can just save it to your disk (using browser built in "File->Save Page As" option), give it to Your friend and he can change everything You want in it.

Oh I'll try that. Perhaps I can look into it myself and see if I can find the place where the rule for chaos die is set and permanently change it to whatever I like. No worries... you have already done a lot for us by making this tool in the first place!

Can you give me a nudge in the direction. Where can I find the dice side definitions?

Gallows said:

Definitions:

js/dice.js

Engine:

js/main.js

Adding die on Chaos Star is on line 257 of the above file.

Quick off-topic question, Sunatet. Could you disable the "Roll" button while the app is actively processing a set of rolls? When I'm doing a series of long rolls, like 10x100 to reach a nice round 1000 roll, I have occasionally found myself hitting the "Roll" button when the rolling pauses (but isn't actually stopped). This interrupts the current roll set and starts a new roll set at that point. It'd be nice if it didn't do that. If I want to stop the current roll set, I'll Stop the roll then do another one.

On topic, I did a few quick test rolls with the additional die on the Chaos Star. Without counting the Star itself as a Bane or Challenge, it didn't appear to make a very significant difference in the difficulty.

For example:

1000 rolls for each

No additional die: 751 successes, 101 Challenge symbols, 401 Banes, 128 Stars, 207 Passed w/Banes

Additional die: 737 successes, 113 Challenge symbols, 407 Banes, 147 Stars, 203 Passed w/Banes

A few more sets of rolls should make a better sample. It is slightly more challenging overall. However, it doesn't fix the issue that Sunatet is seeing with armors, Soak vs Defense.

Honestly, I think the easiest thing to do might be to have armors provide just soak. Either leave out Defense, or give a defense bonus to better armors as a boost. So, for example:

Leather 2 Soak.

Brigandine 2 Soak, +1 Defense.

This will make Brigandine slightly better armor than Leather. Or, inversely, Leather is 2 Soak -1 Defense might work. Just keep in mind that Defense does not equal Soak, and, in general, is inferior to soak.

Ahh well Tried to change the roll outcome on a star, but it seems it's more complex than my minds can wrap itself around

But I got the same result as dwang. Rerolls on the star doesn't do much for success rate. I did try to calculate using the chaos star as two challenges and a reroll and that does a difference. That's why I asked about the chaos star setting. But looking at the code it seems like one would have to change almost everything to set the chaos star to [star sword sword] and a reroll.

dvang said:

Done, now clicking Roll while rolling, will stop the roll, clicking again will run it, where it stopped.

Also increased maximum roll number to 1000, and added possibility to switch off NezzNotation logging (it takes a big toll on a browser if you roll a 1000 rolls simultainously, and log all the rolls), this will not stop adding to statistics on the right of log window.

Remember to clear the cache and refresh the page.

On topic

My issue is not Soak vs Defence.

My problem is in how much I pay for the armor compared to protection it offers.

You pay 20s for Brigndine that offers you less protection than Leather which costs only 5s.

You pay 6g for Ulthuan Scale that offers less protection than Scale that costs HALF of the price and has much better availability.

That is my issue. Absolutely no issue with Defense and Soak values itself.

And to say the truth there are 2 solutions:

1. Change the Defense and Soak to offer protection appropriate to the price I pay

2. The easiest one to say the truth, and I should start with it - change the armor prices to fix the protection vs price issue .

Gallows said:

Hehheh, now You know why I didn't want to change that (I feel lost in my own code sometimes ).

And on the results, I can confirm that, adding another <P> on Chaos Star didn't change much.

Sunatet said:

Yep. If it was as simple as changing the dice face in the dice.js file, then it wouldn't be an issue but as I understand your code without knowing anything about coding, it seems like it's in calculating the outcome that you would need to input lines for stars in many lines containing the hammer to calculate the result.

Perhaps making a new die with one face with two swords and adding that plus another challenge die on a star would be easier?

Re: Chaos Star additional die

I think counting the Star as a single challenge symbol plus adding an additional die would be enough to tip the balance and increase the difficulty. After all, in both instances I actually got more stars than challenge symbols. Counting a star as a challenge symbol will double the number of challenge symbols rolled. That's pretty significant.

Re: Armor

Well, you could adjust the prices ... but then you risk making the armor prices not fit the fluff/reason. Leather should be more common and cheaper than Brigandine. Cloth should be more common and cheaper than (most) robes. (The game considers 'robes' to be a more elegant wizard-robe, than a coarse home-spun quality robe). I think the prices are actually pretty reasonable comparatively, and that it is the armor protection offered that is the issue and really what should be adjusted (despite being the more difficult option).

One option, then, is to toss out some of our preconceptions on what the various armors seem like they should provide, and go with a fairly simple and linear scale. Similar to your Defense/Difficulty scale.

Defense, Soak, Defense, Soak, etc.

Cloth = 1 Defense.

Robes - 1 Soak

Leather = 1 Soak + 1 Defense

Brigandine = 2 soak

Chain shirt = 2 soak + 1 defense

etc.

Since Soak is slightly better than Defense, you'll see that the armors progress in effectiveness.

Another option, is to see how multiple Defense works. Instead of adjusting by 1 Defense, try 2 Defense. Does +2 Defense come closer to evening out with +1 soak?

Let's look at Leather/Brigandine... <B>(RR)[Y], Def1 = , Def3 = <P>
Leather @ 1 Defense, 2 soak, chance .8743 (so, 1 less Defense than before, to compensate for increased soak)
Brigandine @ 3 Defense, 1 soak, chance .7011

Leather (3) 2.6229 (4) 3.4972 (5) 4.3715 (6) 5.2458 (7) 6.1201 (8) 6.9944 (9) 7.8687
Brigandine- (4) 2.8044 (5) 3.5055 (6) 4.2066 (7) 4.9077 (8) 5.6088 (9) 6.3099 (10) 7.011

Leather is only better for the first few low-damage hits, and then is eclipsed by the brigandine.

Thus ...

1 Defense, 1 soak
3 Defense, 0 soak
1 Defense, 2 soak
3 Defense, 1 soak
1 Defense, 3 soak
3 Defense, 2 soak
1 Defense, 4 soak
3 Defense, 3 soak
etc.

seems like that progression should work, although I'd do some further testing with numbers to confirm. Especially comparing high-skill hits. I can't open the .ods files at work, since Excel 2003 apparently can't open them (but my 2007 Excel at home will). Run some tests with Leather at 1 Defense (or optionally, Leather @ 2 defense and Brigandine at 4 Defense... as long as there is 2 Defense difference) You might also be able to stick some "2 defense, 2 soak ... 2 defense, 3 soak ... etc" in the progression somewhere.

This is my point of vue but I still dont like the "passive" defence value of armors...
WHat is the explanation for those values?

Yeah, I agree, that adding more defence and changing a soak slightly can help with the issue here.

Few post before I put a link to a file, where next to the test on original Armor Values I put some new values proposal (the tables on the right).

It is in this file: www.gmtools.excelocms.com/download/defence_orig.ods

Looks promising, but I need to test it more for higher damage, and Wepon Skill training.

Seems better than original values, but still some of them are not correct, so it is possible, that defence values will have to be risen to 3 as You proposed (in my file, max defence value of 2 seems to be not enough to compensate the soak values in some cases).

Oh, and OpenOffice is your friend (and its free)

@Gallows

Easier maybe, less time consuming... not necessarily (it still requires a lot of changes in many lines of code).

dvang I think the reason you saw more stars than challenge symbols is because in the result counter challenges/successes are cancelled out so only those in a roll where they are dominant is counted. There is 12.5% chance for a chaos star but over 50% chance for a challenge so it would be freak luck if you had more stars on 100 or more rolls

But counting it as one or two challenges by itself will do a lot to tip the balance.

geekoo said:

Right now, we are trying to "fix" the original values, and learn the systems math, that's the reason for passive defence on armors in the above.

Protection that armors offer in their current state is not correct compared to the price you pay for the armor (mainly you pay more for less protection in few cases).

If we "fix" the values, and learn the math and defence-soak dependencies, then we can modify it to fit our needs later (but I'm not sure if it will be possible to dish the defence on armors, or put it to negative without serious consequences, it seems to be at the core of the system).

I, personally, am not in favor of changing the Defense system. I think the default <P> is reasonable, and think anything else will be more complicated than WFRP really wants/needs. I don't currently have an issue with the higher success rate. However, I am trying to help Sunatet get a viable alternative system worked out. Besides, it's kind of fun to play around with the numbers.

@ Gallows: Oh, yeah! The canceling makes perfect sense! Still, 120-140 more challenge symbols means about a 12-14% increase of challenge symbols (from 1000 rolls), which is still quite a bit of added difficulty. I didn't record the number of uncancelled success symbols rolled to work out how those would cancel. It seems like a good enough increase in difficulty, though.

Here's a thought completely off the wall and out of the blue. What about some armors reducing the effectiveness of YOUR OWN attacks? Say, some armors add a to the difficulty of your own attacks. It would be hard to calculate how this affects potential, but it could be an additional way to offset some of the disparity we're seeing. So, if we keep the values for Leather and Brigandine. However, we add the offensive penalty to the leather. While the leather might technically defend better, it impairs your own offense. Food for thought. Just a brainstorm idea that might or might not have merit.

I think I managed to change the challenge die star to be 'star sword sword' simply by changing it in the dice.js

The issue was that when I clicked a dice on the download from sunatets site it would jump to his webpage instead of running locally. I just changed it in the dice.js and now the star give two challenges as well. Cancelling works too and the star also shows up as a 'star sword sword' symbol. It works well and two challenges on the chaos star doesn't seem too much in terms of success rate.

Thanks to sunatet for the dice roller and to vendolis for pointing me in the right direction and giving me a download that runs 100% locally.

This is great, now I can test out all kinds of things with the dice

Gallows said:

I definitly would like to have such a local dice roller without internet.

When I save the whole html and run it locally, it's ok but dices icons don't work... That's too bad. What can I do to make it work ?

@Gallows

Glad You made it

@Willmanx

There is a function called "addImageToDice( imgName )" in the "main.js" file.

Tris function adds a image to the die. You need to make sure, that src="path to file" part of the image in this function points You to the right location.

The problem You experience is due to the fact, that when you save the page it breaks the catalog tree and puts all files (images, css, js) into one folder.

Change the src="" to the folder where your files are (you can take the correct folder from .htm file you run - all images in it have the correct path).

Sunatet said:

I've been looking for that. Is it just one place you need to change the image path or for every button? Can't seem to find it. Do you have your dice roller as a zip archive somewhere? That would be wonderful.

Gallows said:

This one place should be everything you need.

In case of any problems with image visibility, search for ".png" string in the code (all dice symbols are png images).

Sunatet said:

I've changed it to the path of the images but no luck. I don't know if it's because I save it the wrong way. When I save it to the desktup I get a html file called dice roller and them a corresponding folder where all the files are in that folder.

I saved it a different way now and put all files into folders. This worked to make the star = 'star sword sword'

But now chaos star multiply no longer works

I guess it's because the chaos star multiply looks for the result 'star' but my modifications give the result 'star sword sword'

I changed two places in the main.js to reflect this, but still no luck.

Simple thought about level of difficulty.
Do you think when creating a pool of dices if you had say 2 black dices you could replace them with one purple in an opposed roll?

geekoo said:

I would say yes, the difference is small enough.

Example:

base pool: 3 <B>, 1 <R>

1 <P> - 0.7438

2 - 0.7764

2 <P> - 0.5523

4 - 0.5954

3 <P> - 0.3912

6 - 0.4298