Why so many dice tricks?

[TheCountAlucard]

Because dice tricks are fun. That's why.

Alternatively, because the absence of dice tricks is less fun.

[Holden]

My biggest complaint with dice tricks is that it's yet another system that seems geared heavily towards face-to-face tabletop role-play, when an increasing number of games, possibly even the majority of games these days (or at least a significant minority), are run through chat programs or over forums. Dice tricks are typically a lot easier to deal with if you're physically rolling dice, versus depending on rollers and making multiple roller rolls.

I found during playtesting that Roll20's dice roller makes all the various dice-shenanigans of EX3 extremely easy to parse, actually much easier than rolling physical dice on a table. The same would be true of any roller that displays results in a sequential array (f'r example, 1 1 2 4 4 5 7 7 7 9 10). I can pick out my successes, my 1s, my 6s, and any straight-sequence from that almost instantly.

[Holden]

I'll speed this discussion along as long as I'm here, by addressing the next inevitable stage of its evolution: Why not combine all these mathematical bits and bobs into a universal Excellency or series of Excellencies?

Because Abilities are not constructed equally. Let's take Double 9s, for example. They show up a fair bit! Have you noticed where they don't show up in an easily, repeatedly deployable form, though?

Any of the four Solar attack Abilities.

Statistically, double 9s are very similar to TN reduction to 6. That's a very dangerous thing to do to the game's accuracy curve when you're dealing with dice pools as big as the ones Solars can toss around. All of the combat Abilities are very careful about just exactly which kinds of tricks they'll let you throw onto a roll all at once, because we want Solars to be strong, but not actually unstoppable, when it is fighty time. Especially considering the raw power you can synergize into those big, highly-accurate rolls through damage-enhancing combos.

Let's step away from those Abilities for a bit and look at Awareness and Stealth, instead. Now, aside from boosting Join Battle, all Awareness really does is notice things. And all Stealth really does is let you hide. And the two Abilities usually get deployed to fight one another. The worst thing that can happen when you get beaten in a contest between those two Abilities is that either someone makes a surprise attack (which is nothing to sneeze at, but a far cry from the all-destroying catastrophe it was in 2e), or someone gets noticed and fails at stealthing. Those are fairly modest failure states as compared to getting hit or killed. Likewise, they're fairly modest success states compared to crashing or killing opponents. So Solars get to go batshit bonkers crazy with modifiers in both of those Abilities, for character concepts who really want to push "blind swordsman who can track you by your heartbeat" or "shadow killer who can infiltrate anywhere and kill anyone" concepts to the best-in-the-world level.

Larceny and Investigation are another opposed-pair that illustrates this principle pretty well.

Or look at Craft-- Craft has MASSIVE potential rewards, so the upper ends of its play-spectrum introduce the game's most brutal difficulty curve. At the same time, Craft is always inward-directed-- it's never competitive with another character, you are only ever challenging your own ambitions. So Craft gets every single trick in the book, because if it absolutely smashes the game's normal math curve into splinters, well, it's not competitive. There's only the universe to benchmark against. If we gave Melee every trick Craft gets, the combat engine would melt. Melee doesn't need all that stuff; Craft does.

[Kyman201]

Double 8s and such breakdown

Huh, manual thanks, Holden. That was actually really interesting.

[Sanctaphrax]

That makes lots of sense as far as it goes, but surely you could've accomplished much the same thing by letting Craft users roll 100 dice or get dozens of auto-successes (if you must handle Craft that way...) and then not giving that opportunity to Melee users.

Then again, if some people find it exciting then I guess that's reason enough to have it. The complexity cost isn't terribly significant.

[hippokrene]

Dice tricks are nothing like gambling or casinos.

Gambling is about keeping people invested while they are continuously losing. Casinos are all about interior design and experience management; it’s more like the appeal of restaurants than double 9s.

[Meianno Yuurei]

That makes lots of sense as far as it goes, but surely you could've accomplished much the same thing by letting Craft users roll 100 dice or get dozens of auto-successes (if you must handle Craft that way...) and then not giving that opportunity to Melee users.

Then again, if some people find it exciting then I guess that's reason enough to have it. The complexity cost isn't terribly significant.

It's predicated on a few particular aspects: traditionally (1e, most of 2e), direct target number manipulation was the forte of the sidereals; smaller pools, but bend fate to succeed more easily. That gives a sense of theme, but also limits everyone else - if only sidereals can succeed on numbers lower than seven, then no one else has that tool available. Reroll x numbers, double y numbers, is a new piece of mechanical technology that does several things better than "hell, +10 dice or whatever"; it reduces the wonky nature of rolling +10 dice (+0 to +20 successes), and it makes Solar excellence more than "they have the biggest phallic stacks of dice". In combination with the oppositional technology of "every 1 you roll benefits me or harms you", it further illustrates solar excellence; those charms are frequently useless against a solar because she has no flaw to exploit (her 1s were all rerolled).

Having a bunch of ways to manipulate the dice, and illustrated explanations of which charm tech is out of non-solar hands, allows for a better graduated demonstration of solar excellence than "roll 1dBucket dice", one that is a bit more engaging, has more hooks for the system to work with, and best of all, does not mandate that non-solar charms /suck/ to make solars cool - instead, non solar charms are awesome, just not quite as awesome as solar charms. I doubt non-solars will have double 7s in much of anything at all, for example.

[Bulshock]

It's predicated on a few particular aspects: traditionally (1e, most of 2e), direct target number manipulation was the forte of the sidereals; smaller pools, but bend fate to succeed more easily. That gives a sense of theme, but also limits everyone else - if only sidereals can succeed on numbers lower than seven, then no one else has that tool available. Reroll x numbers, double y numbers, is a new piece of mechanical technology that does several things better than "hell, +10 dice or whatever"; it reduces the wonky nature of rolling +10 dice (+0 to +20 successes), and it makes Solar excellence more than "they have the biggest phallic stacks of dice". In combination with the oppositional technology of "every 1 you roll benefits me or harms you", it further illustrates solar excellence; those charms are frequently useless against a solar because she has no flaw to exploit (her 1s were all rerolled).

Having a bunch of ways to manipulate the dice, and illustrated explanations of which charm tech is out of non-solar hands, allows for a better graduated demonstration of solar excellence than "roll 1dBucket dice", one that is a bit more engaging, has more hooks for the system to work with, and best of all, does not mandate that non-solar charms /suck/ to make solars cool - instead, non solar charms are awesome, just not quite as awesome as solar charms. I doubt non-solars will have double 7s in much of anything at all, for example.

It also made me interested in playing Solars again, something I haven't been interested in till now since 1E first came out (and before other splats in 1E came out). I wanted to like Solars in other editions, but raw dice and so many charms that felt like it was the charm rather then the character doing something just made me go 'meh' about their abilities and the feel of them. To put this in perspective since the Backer PDF dropped I've written up 4 Solars. Since the first alternate splat dropped in 1E I'd written up 3 Solars until now that weren't outright NPC's with 'whatever' tossed on them.

[DrLoveMonkey]

That might be why it falls flat with me. I'm a statistician, and I'm not really capable of seeing these things in aesthetic terms. I don't really get the appeal of casinos either.

Somewhat in agreement with Hippokrene here. It's less the fun of casinos and more the fun of boggle or yahtzee or other such things. As soon as those dice drop you instantly see you got 4 successes, 1,1,2,6,7,9,10. But wait, you re-roll 1s, so you re-roll those and get a 2 and an 8, another success! Hang on though, that 8 gives me a straight from 7-10! Score! Rising Sun Slash!

It's fun to do, not too mentally intensive or slow, but fun. Admittedly I do see the math behind it, but that kind of gets shoved to the background when I'm hunting my big pool of dice looking for a straight or more sixes to re-roll. Or it least it has in the one test combat I ran as a Solar.

[Joker]

I'll speed this discussion along as long as I'm here, by addressing the next inevitable stage of its evolution: Why not combine all these mathematical bits and bobs into a universal Excellency or series of Excellencies?

Thanks for the explanation, I can see why you included the many dicetricks.
But I want to talk more about this because it is the ony area of E3 so far that looks like it could be a serious* problem for our group and might actually stop our game, because everyone finds the charmsets nearly impossible to get though thanks to what is to us a bloat of boring dicetrick charms. And we are a group that loved the charmsets in prior editions and love the idea of more charms. Every single one of us had fun with the giant equipment lists in games like EP, the number of charms is not a problem! But dicetricks are so boring to read. In direct negative repercussions it has already changed my character away from being Socialize Supernal, because having to waste charmslots on all the dicetricks just to get to the 8+ prerequisite interesting charms is really not worth it to me (and why does Socialize even get that many dicetricks? Guile and Resolve really don't seem to get high enough that you would need them). Getting something like Invisible Stature Spirit was right out because filling a slot with something that I consider as boring as Perfect Shadow Stillness is an option for me when I could be taking one of the interesting charms.

So I am probably a bit more extreme than most, because this is the one thing might actually stop my Exalted game from happening and it made what should have been the most fun part of Exalted chargen (chosing charms) into a frustrating slog, which no prior Edition managed for me.
Long story shot, 'we couldn't do it Excellency like because they are different for most ability' isn't enough for me because you could have done that in put in a minor amount of extra text to explain how each ability changes them and what abilities don't have access to this specific Excellency.
Something like:
9-Again
[general Stuff]
Modified: Add Mute (Abilities X, Y, Z), Limited to specilities (Abilities A, B, C), Cost 3m (Abilties H, I, J), etc.
Barred: Ablities E, F, G

Or at least make the dicetricks their own charmtrees within each Ability, kind of like Craft has a 'Power' tree.
Anything to keep them away from the charms that actually do more insteresting stuff than change the way dice work.



*I know I posted a lot about the Bp/Xp thing, but I really consider that a minor annoyance at worst, not something even remotely serious as far as problems go.

[The Wizard of Oz]

From the sound of it, your problem isn't really the dice-tricks, it's the way you need them for prereqs for other charm. So, I think a better way to solve your issue would be to change the prerequisites.

[Joker]

From the sound of it, your problem isn't really the dice-tricks, it's the way you need them for prereqs for other charm. So, I think a better way to solve your issue would be to change the prerequisites.

It probably got overshadowed in my post, but having to work through many of dozens of individual, too wordy charms that could be summed up as "add dicetrick X" is absolutely a significant problem for our group. By my impression the more important problem for at least the ST and one other player in our game.

Edit: I think many of these charms could be improved if, instead of generic fluff text, they could do what the Keen (Sense) charms do and spend a few words on spelling out the implications of the way they increase your dice. Take Keen Hearing and Touch for example. It's basically just a small dicetrick charm, but it takes the time to point out 'hey, by the way, that means you can now easily hear Ants marching on the branches over your head, isn't that awesome' and is an actually really fun charm thanks to this.

[Totentanz]

Holden, I'm seeing a tide of misgivings about misgivings about the dice tricks.

Did you anticipate this amount of push-back and do you think people will warm up to the idea if they push through those misgivings and play with the system?

[Holden]

Holden, I'm seeing a tide of misgivings about misgivings about the dice tricks.

Did you anticipate this amount of push-back and do you think people will warm up to the idea if they push through those misgivings and play with the system?

I'm seeing a tide of people who are super-happy with how 3e plays and are aggressively recruiting people to play.

We made a new edition that is very, very different than what came before, which set particular design goals and met them. We knew we'd be shedding potential customers from the moment we started making decisions like "runs on FATE" or "does not run on FATE" or "is a super-light" or "is super-heavy." It has enough range to play for 10 years out of just the corebook. It hangs together and works far better than anything else of comparable complexity and scope that I've ever seen. It cannot be all things to all people and still be any good. I am fine with this.

Past that, I think the fact that once you hit the table, a lot of the apparent on-paper complexity melts away serves it well. One thing we've seen over and over and over and over again throughout the playtest feedback and the backer release was people going "I was pretty iffy about how this was going to work, but then we played it and everything clicked and it was a blast."

[Kyman201]

Did you anticipate this amount of push-back and do you think people will warm up to the idea if they push through those misgivings and play with the system?

Personally I feel that a LOT of misgivings will vanish when you play with the system. It's like I noted in my thread about the Martial Artist Merit. I had two players who made MA characters, and at Chargen they thought "Four dots for a merit? That seems expensive..." and then after seeing the styles in play their reactions were "NEVERMIND THAT'S FAIR!"

A lot of things that look dull on paper really come alive when you give them a good spin.