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“Difficulty Factor” from prior editions?


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Possibly dumb question: the “Tournament of Dreams” adventure (published during KAP 1e, I think) mentions a particular “slope has difficulty factor of 5. A horse or knight climbing the slope must achieve a success of 6 or more from a DEX roll to get to the top….”
 

Is “difficulty factor” a 1st edition thing? Did 1e use a resistance table like older CoC or something? Or is it just referring to like a -5 modifier or similar? Me no understand.

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39 minutes ago, Btchoutex said:

Is “difficulty factor” a 1st edition thing? Did 1e use a resistance table like older CoC or something? Or is it just referring to like a -5 modifier or similar? Me no understand.

It is a 1e thing: "Sometimes the gamemaster assigns difficulty factors, a number which must be overcome by the knight’s resolution roll."

Thus, some things had 'difficulty' associated with them, meaning that you rolled as if it was opposed, with the opponent's roll being a success equal to the difficulty. Rolling against a difficulty 5 meant that if you rolled anything from 1 to 4, it was still only a partial success. The later editions removed this and instead assigned a negative modifier to the skill roll.

Mathematically, it works pretty much the same:
Assuming skill 15 and difficulty rating 5, you have 20% chance of partial success, 5% draw, 45% success, 5% critical, 20% fail and 5% fumble.
Taking Skill 15-5=10, you get 45% success, 5% critical, 45% failure and 5% fumble.
Since you have to beat the difficulty rating, partial success or a draw = failure in what you were trying to do, so you can see that these are actually the same.

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2 hours ago, Morien said:

It is a 1e thing: "Sometimes the gamemaster assigns difficulty factors, a number which must be overcome by the knight’s resolution roll."

Thus, some things had 'difficulty' associated with them, meaning that you rolled as if it was opposed, with the opponent's roll being a success equal to the difficulty. Rolling against a difficulty 5 meant that if you rolled anything from 1 to 4, it was still only a partial success. The later editions removed this and instead assigned a negative modifier to the skill roll.

Mathematically, it works pretty much the same:
Assuming skill 15 and difficulty rating 5, you have 20% chance of partial success, 5% draw, 45% success, 5% critical, 20% fail and 5% fumble.
Taking Skill 15-5=10, you get 45% success, 5% critical, 45% failure and 5% fumble.
Since you have to beat the difficulty rating, partial success or a draw = failure in what you were trying to do, so you can see that these are actually the same.

Ah, thank you! That makes sense. Oh, btw, I recently saw a reference to a cool "eligible ladies/wife" NPC generator you made at one time. Is that still available anywhere?

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9 hours ago, Btchoutex said:

Ah, thank you! That makes sense. Oh, btw, I recently saw a reference to a cool "eligible ladies/wife" NPC generator you made at one time. Is that still available anywhere?

Not sure, but you might try to take a look at the Nocturnal forum archives... I thought I had posted like 1000 random ladies there. Or maybe it was the Discord channel. Anyway, I can do that when I have a moment, probably in a few days. 

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On 9/3/2022 at 5:27 PM, Btchoutex said:

Ah, thank you! That makes sense. Oh, btw, I recently saw a reference to a cool "eligible ladies/wife" NPC generator you made at one time. Is that still available anywhere?

The generator lives on my hard drive, but here is a link to where I posted a bunch of ready-rolled ladies:

 

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On 9/3/2022 at 3:17 PM, Morien said:

It is a 1e thing: "Sometimes the gamemaster assigns difficulty factors, a number which must be overcome by the knight’s resolution roll."

Thus, some things had 'difficulty' associated with them, meaning that you rolled as if it was opposed, with the opponent's roll being a success equal to the difficulty. Rolling against a difficulty 5 meant that if you rolled anything from 1 to 4, it was still only a partial success. The later editions removed this and instead assigned a negative modifier to the skill roll.

Mathematically, it works pretty much the same:
Assuming skill 15 and difficulty rating 5, you have 20% chance of partial success, 5% draw, 45% success, 5% critical, 20% fail and 5% fumble.
Taking Skill 15-5=10, you get 45% success, 5% critical, 45% failure and 5% fumble.
Since you have to beat the difficulty rating, partial success or a draw = failure in what you were trying to do, so you can see that these are actually the same.

It's similar, unless your skill is superior to 20.

With a skill of 22, you have 15% chance of failure against Difficulty Factor 5, but retain your 15% chance to get a critical success.

Anyway, I think the biggest problem is it is not easy to create an "Ease Factor" in the rules which could be used for any kind of favorable occasions. A possibility could be to use numbers in the high range of the d20 and consider that any roll above this number is a success no matter your skill. That is, in a situation with an Ease Factor of 17 if I have a skill of 13, any roll between 1 and 13 or between 17 and 20 would be a success.

But it's clearly not as simple as DF or modifiers...

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