I'm looking to conceal the amount of damage a PC takes leaving the player with only the description of the wounds in hopes of getting a more realistic response to wounding rather than the "I'm Ok, I've still got two whole boxes until I'm dead." attitude I'm all too familiar with.

In order to do this I'm going to have to conceal the wound modifier from the player's rolls. If I tell him to roll skill x and attribute y minus two dice he's just going to ignore that whole bleeding thing 'cuz he's gonna know it's only a moderate wound....

So I was thinking that instead of reducing the PC's dice by the penalty that I should increase the opposing party's dice by the penalty to get the same effect without revealing the amount of the modifier.

Question: is this method mathematically close enough to the RAW results to be glossed over or will this significantly alter the test's results?


Thanx

Not an easy task, as the probabilities change with the number of dice available for a specific task. You need to recalculate this for each number of dice.

When they roll a set of dice, YOU roll the correct amount (with modifiers) and use your results instead. As a GM, I roll enough dice often the players would never know.

Pick out some choice words for describing wounds taken and maybe for an overall condition: 1=scrap, scratch, nick ... 6=grevious gash, crushed limbs, etc.

if its ranged combat, unless the attack removed a whole limb, it would be somewhat hard to tell the exact kind of would a person suffers, no?

On an opposed roll, substracting one die from one party is statistically identical to adding one die to the other party, regardless of the relative dice pools.
You can even do the trick on success tests, by treating them as opposed with an opposing dicepool made up of only the negative dice pool modifiers.

The only difference it makes is that heavily wounded PCs will glitch less often, which can be seen as a good thing.

Uh, not even a little bit. If you subtract even a single die from a dice pool, you alter the probability of failure, glitching and critical glitching. If you increase a dice pool by even a single die, you *decrease* that same probability (generally speaking, we're aware of the issue with even vs odd dice pools).

So what Warentester said is accurate. You'd have to recalculate probabilities for each die roll.

What you are looking to do is apply the major downside of a pain editor to all your players. Have you discussed this with them?
As has been said keeping all the probabilities for success, glitches, etc. in line can only be accomplished by rolling the appropriate number of dice.
So you can secretly roll your players dice and piss them off by giving them a pain editor without any benefits either way in the end you'd just be playing with yourself.

I think you're approaching the problem in way too difficult a manner. For some impartiality and a general rule of thumb, when the player rolls his dice, just ignore the first two that end up nearest you. No rolling on your part, no math, only a need for unbiased calls. Besides, if you're prone to cheating anyway, this method certainly isn't going to change anything.


Edit: And if three end up exactly the same distance from you, count from the right or whatever. Just make sure you have a system in place and you'll easily avoid most of the headache you're setting yourself up for.

Maybe roll a number of dice equal to the penalty behind the screen, and match the rolled values to the nearest equivalent the player rolled?

For Example, say the player rolls 12 dice to soak, but has a -3 penalty from wounds.

Player Rolls:
2, 6, 1, 3, 6, 1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 1, 1


GM Rolls:
2, 4, 6

Modified Result:
1,3,6,1,2,3,2,1,1

That turns the players 2 successes into 1, and brings it awfully close to a glitch.

Use the method described above (roll dice equal to the penalty, subtracting hits from the player's total), and get your players to report the number of 1's rolled to you. Add any 6's you rolled to determine if they glitch. It's a little more work for the GM, but if you care about keeping the probabilities intact then it does the job. Added bonus; it forces players to think about whether they glitched. Most players forget, and it's hard to know, as the GM, if they're checking or not, unless you watch their dice closely.

Usually the rule is for bullet wounds is that if you dont bleed out in less than 5 minutes, youre going to be fine.

Changes in the probability of a single roll (or even just one part of an opposed roll) don't really matter.
I mentioned the difference in glitching probabilities, but neither the average net hits (which is the most important value) nor the chance of failure change.
Every single die is equivalent to a third of a hit, which is about the only interesting value, and it's an absolute shift.

Yes, there are some rare (and needlessly complicated) situations that differentiate zero hits on the active roll from zero net hits overall (wanting to touch, but not hurt your opponent in melee for example), which become annoying to sort out with this system, but apart from that, they are statistically equivalent.

There is a slight deviation at the extreme ranges, as the minimum and maximum values change (you can have 9 successes rolling 9 dice against one opposing die, but you can't just rolling 8 dice, for example), but the difference is really quite minor, as long as the dice pool doesn't fall to about 3 dice.
So, if you're not playing with people obsessed with maths, which care about extreme range deviations of likely way less than a percent (I didn't calculate them exactly, as I'm not that obsessed ) you can safely disregard that, I'd say.

It seems easier to just give karma rewards for good roleplaying of wounds, eh? Like Grinder suggests, describe the wounds and effects in a visceral manner, not just numbers. When they miss a shot because of wounds, describe: you raise your gun, trying to take aim though the cracked goggles and spitting rain, a sharp pain stabbing up your shoulder, blood making your fingers slick. The gun kicks hard, harder than you expect, and the bullet doesn't seem to have hit the troll. At least, he's not slowing. Make sure you have your NPCs are bleeding and crying, being dragged from the field, etc.

1) Get a PDA. Preferably one with video out.

2) Write a customizable dice rolling program that can roll bultiple sets of dice utilizing separate easily-updatable user profiles.

3) When the PC receives a wound penalty, update his profile accordingly, so that the program subtracts the appropriate number of dice. .

4) Hook the PDA up to a projector and pass it around when it is time to roll. Have it display the number of hits and whether or not there was a glitch, rather than the exact numbers rolled.

This way, everybody still rolls their own dice, and the probabilities remain the same.

5) Refer to your PDA as "Friend Computer" and accuse your players of being Communists.

6) Use the entropy from the decay of a radioactive isotope to make your random number generator truly random.

This sort of thing happens in any hit-point system.

However, I agree with K10. Use the carrot, and not the stick. Loudly give extra karma to those who play up wound penalties. Pointedly leave the ork out of it. When he asks why, tell him point-blank. He'll learn fast enough.

I don't think its fair to hide this information from a player to be honest.

Maybe stress to them in physical terms how FUBARed they are physically and if you feel appropriate, apply additional penalties.

A player should always be able to make his own assessment of this condition.



What he said.

Following Cain's post, I'm a believer of the carrot and the stick . Reward good roleplaying but feel free to stress the point. Unless my players are running around with damage compensators and the like, they always start stressing once they hit serious....

- J.

Dice swapping does actually make a big difference on a couple of case, especially magic. In sorcery hit's are capped at force if you adding dice greatly favors the defender as their hit's aren't capped. If you treat success tests as opposed with with a DP = penalty it would be almost impossable for a mage with any serious penalty to cast a spell on a drone regardless of how good they are. When conjuring the hit's a spirit roll to resist summoning determine the drain. If you start heaping dice on to both sides of the summoning test the tasks earned may be the same but the mage's head will explode from the drain. Also having to do with spirits. It's pretty easy to summon spirits with enough ItNW that they can simply can not be hurt by mooks with small arms, no matter how the dice fall. If you start inflating dice pools even if the hit ratios remain the same, inflating a DP means spirits aren't out right immunne to mooks, which is really big deal.

Nope. The mean and the variance are both interesting. Small pools have a significantly larger chance of exceptional results (either way). You are correct that the overall chance of success is (almost) a function of dp-size differences, but there is a significant difference between rolling 6 and 4 remaining dice.

I would suggest to lead by example. Guards that are shot at withdraw even if not hit, guards that are hit cry out in pain. Someone who suffered several boxes of physical damage is bleeding all over the place, not a good idea for runners. You can include that damage into the descriptions you provide for the runner. "Only a moderate wound" is "a small trail of blood across the hall".

Not really. Some people are just going to die, and some people are just going to be fine, but for a hell of lot of people getting to a surgeon in the first 30-120 minutes really matters.

Swapping dice has a significant effect on probability. Large dice pools tend to be more regular. While you always average 1 hit per 3 dice, larger pools are much less likely to get results much higher or lower then average, the addition of more dice tends to create a more pronounced bell curve of results, and thus adding or subtracting a die from a large pool(as is common for shadowrunners attacks), has a minor over all effect.

On the other hand, small pools tend to be more random, there are less dice, which tends to make the probability curve more linear, results that deviant from the average are more common, and thus the addition of one or more dice can cause surprising problems. Defense pools of most enemies tend to be small.

Take an example, you have an attacker with a dice pool of 13, and a defender with a dice pool of 3. On average the attacker will get a little more then 4 hits, which the defender can't even hope to beat. Plus, the pool has a very very high chance of getting at least 3 hits, which would be difficult for the defender to reach. If you remove one from the attackers pool(such as through a wound modifier) you are still averaging 4 hits, and your chance of getting 3 hits hasn't gone down a great deal, the defender is still just as screwed. But if instead you give the defender an extra die, you just a)gave them the chance to get 4 hits, and b)gave them a huge increase to their 3 hit chance). This swap gives the defender a much greater advantage then taking a die away from the attacker.

If you want to conceal wounds from your characters, just tell them their wound modifiers. They don't know how much damage they have taken, only how it is effecting them.

EDIT: If you want, I can throw some percentages at those scenarios, but not right now at 1:30 in the morning.

DING! DING! DING!

I think we have a winner folks. Simple, with almost no deviation from the RAW, this method allows the player to 'feel' how hurt his character is without actually giving him a quantifiable value for it. I should have thought of this myself.

Thanx for the idea.

Frankly I'd find it a terrible addition to the gm's workload, and prefer to leave as much as I can in the hands of the players. I'm quite lucky, since they tend to be pretty good about such things. Also, the damage they sustain is usually at either negligible or near death levels, and rarely in between.

If you really want the extra work of keeping track of your players' wounds for them, then I would go with the most recent suggestion, and just tell them their wound penalties. They'll have an idea how many boxes they've taken +/- 2, but it maintains a level of uncertainty.

Ummm... No. Just no.

Someone posted something like this on /tg/, unfortunately, the thread isn't quite archived. It was for D&D, but they were given messages instead of wound modifiers. Half health was something like:
"Your vision dims, you feel somewhat cold and your limbs don't move quite the way they should."

I'm not a writer, I've neither the talent or the arrogance to be one, but you get the idea.