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Tie in opposed roll


roberrober

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"True" is a non-emotive term for me, not a weapon... at least the way I try use it. (If I failed, I apologize.)

It says in the text that the only way for there to be tie is if the numbers are equal.

On the previous page (p. 142) it says "If both participants succeed, the winner is whoever achieved the better result." I choose to read "better" as "higher roll." (Perhaps I'm wrong!) So the rules seem to be the same as the QuickStart. They might be changing in the future. But I"m looking at the words on the page and when I read them it seems to be saying what was said in the Quickstart -- though perhaps with less clarity.

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9 hours ago, creativehum said:

Without knowing how many rolls you've made I can't be sure... but that's kind of amazing, right?

Seems amazing to me. For the example opposed roll given earlier in the thread, with Hide 30% opposed by Spot 30%, the possible results shake out as:

  • Hide wins (gets a better degree of success) 25.16% of the time
  • Spot wins (gets a better degree of success) 25.16% of the time
  • The two tie (get same degree of success and same roll) 1% of the time
  • …and something else happens (same degree of success but different rolls) 48.68% of the time

Without meaning to be emotive, I think it's reasonably important to know what the designers intended to happen for the most likely result of this opposed roll, the result which occurs almost half the time for these particular skill levels.

The "something else" results occur less often as skill scores increase: for Hide 75% vs. Spot 75%, only 30% of the outcomes are "something else", and for Hide 90% vs. Spot 90%, only 22.88% are. But that's still more than a quarter of the time at 75% skill and more than a fifth of the time at 90%. It's not a rare corner case that is unlikely to come up at the table.

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In the case of Scan vs Hide, I play that the Scan is active and the Hide is pasive, so the Scan is actively trying to see the passive Hide. Ona tie, the Scan is not victorious, so doesn't see the Hidden Adventurer.

Nothing wrong with that. 

Some people don't like Ties, as it is an unresolved roll. Personally, I don't mind Ties. Not everything necessarily has a clear-cut winner. 

I'm English. We watch Test Cricket. Sometimes, a game is tied after 5 days of glorious Cricket.

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On 6/19/2018 at 1:44 PM, David Scott said:

At the table, i'm not going to change the RAW for a post by one of the authors on a website (we have a number of copies at the table). If an updated PDF appears then fine, but until then it seems clear how it works.

If it changes to what Jason says, then there will just be more ties. Personally this works great.

To me, though, it's not clear at all.  The rules say "better", but don't say how they determine which roll is "better" within the same grade of success.  Is lower roll "better", or is higher roll "better"?  The advantage of high winning, is that it gives an improved chance of such a success to the higher skill, though I agree it is not intuitive,

The rules really need to spell it out unambiguously, in order to resolve this confusion.

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22 minutes ago, soltakss said:

In the case of Scan vs Hide, I play that the Scan is active and the Hide is pasive, so the Scan is actively trying to see the passive Hide. Ona tie, the Scan is not victorious, so doesn't see the Hidden Adventurer.

Nothing wrong with that. 

Some people don't like Ties, as it is an unresolved roll. Personally, I don't mind Ties. Not everything necessarily has a clear-cut winner. 

I'm English. We watch Test Cricket. Sometimes, a game is tied after 5 days of glorious Cricket.

As you describe it, a tied roll isn't really like a tied Cricket match - the defender wins because he stays hidden. There are only two possible outcomes here, spotted or not, whereas in most sports a 'true' tie is a third option.

Which probably means situations like this shouldn't be resolved by opposed die rolls. I have seen similar discussions for other games, so it is not a problem unique to RuneQuest, though the high probability of ties exacerbates it, in my opinion. I'd like to see some official rule for situations where opposed rolls cannot logically lead to a tie.

Edited by Colgrevance
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I was reading Magic World, and they have a very similar situation crop up in the rules (p. 49), and I think the solution is probably how it is supposed to work in RQG.
 

The way it works in MW is that is SLs are the same, both succeed. The example they give is something sneaking past a guard, and if both succeed with the same success level then the character successful sneaks past the guard, but the guard is altered that something is amiss. So by extension the character who is hiding isn't spotted, but the one who is spotting notices that something is wrong. 

 

 

Edited by Atgxtg
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38 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

I was reading Magic World, and they have a very similar situation crop up in the rules (p. 49), and I think the solution is probably how it is supposed to work in RQG.
 

The way it works in MW is that is SLs are the same, both succeed. The example they give is something sneaking past a guard, and if both succeed with the same success level then the character successful sneaks past the guard, but the guard is altered that something is amiss. So by extension the character who is hiding isn't spotted, but the one who is spotting notices that something is wrong. 

 

 

I like that solution, though it still leaves some questions. Depending on how you frame the contest, you could call that a win for the observer - the sneaker didn't get past the guard unnoticed, after all. And what do you do if both fail their roll?

I do not think this discussion is a storm in a waterglass, either, as someone being stealthy or trying to hide something happens almost every session at my gaming table - after all, it is an important part of social conflict, too (someone hiding his true emotions/intentions from others).

Edited to add: And I think after 40 years of rpg development that problem should be well known and be addressed by any newly published rule system...

Edited by Colgrevance
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46 minutes ago, Colgrevance said:

I like that solution, though it still leaves some questions. Depending on how you frame the contest, you could call that a win for the observer - the sneaker didn't get past the guard unnoticed, after all.

Actually he did, partially. The guard gets the feeling that something is up, but not what. The sneak still hasn't been located,  nor does the guard know that the sneak got past him. Think of all the times on TV or in film where this sort of thing happens and then a cat meows and the guard blames the cat. Or when one guard thinks he heard something, and gets his buddies to search an area, only to miss the sneak, and then think that the guy must have been hearing things, or that it was the wind or something. Or when the sneak tosses a rock in another direction to distract the guard.

If the GM roleplays it, there would probably be lots of times when someone on guard thinks he might have heard something or seen a shadow move that turn out to be nothing, so this shouldn't automatically become an alert situation.

Quote

And what do you do if both fail their roll?

Sneak failed to get past the guard; guard didn't notice anything. 

 

Edited by Atgxtg
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I do not let players roll to get past one specific guard (then they would probably have to do several rolls, greatly increasing their probability for failure), but I do see your point. I'd just like it to be spelled out more explicitly in the RQG rules, maybe:

sneaker succeeds & observer fails: sneaker stays hidden without anyone noticing (as long as the overall situation does not change...) = total success for sneaker
sneaker succeeds & observer succeeds: sneaker stays hidden, but has to overcome additional obstacles because observer got suspicious = partial success leading to a new contest to resolve the new situation

sneaker fails & observer failis: sneaker has to chose another approach, but observer stays unalarmed = partial success leading to a new contest to resolve the old situation
sneaker fails & observer succeeds: sneaker has been noticed = total success for observer

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And if the rules had a sidebar stating something like the sneaking resolution example above and that blackjack resolution is not used because this way there are more ties (=partial successes), leading to more complicated and thus interesting situations (or whatever the real reasons were), I would be very impressed by the new RQG. But the way it is, a lot of the rules and their underlying design choices leave me scratching my head and lead to lenghty (and ofter pointless) forum discussions. THAT is why I think extensive designer's notes should be mandatory for modern rpgs (sorry, it's my pet peeve...).

Edited by Colgrevance
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Another area this comes into play is with Spirit Combat.  There the text says a tie is "where both participants succeed but achieve the same quality of result".  So two successes no matter what each persons spirit combat skill is or what they rolled would always be a tie.  I assume that is intentional here and they want to only see lost of MP if the quality of result is different?  So different than opposed skill check ties?

Which leads me to using a weapon in spirit combat.  Does it work in the same way as above?  IE, you need to have different quality of result?  OR does it work like opposed skill checks and if both succeed then one wins depending on whether you take high roll, low roll, or whatever.

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5 hours ago, Skovari said:

Another area this comes into play is with Spirit Combat.  There the text says a tie is "where both participants succeed but achieve the same quality of result".  So two successes no matter what each persons spirit combat skill is or what they rolled would always be a tie.  I assume that is intentional here and they want to only see lost of MP if the quality of result is different?  So different than opposed skill check ties?

The Spirit Combat rules in the RQ Quickstart (p.19) say that if the result is a tie, "both parties take damage."

 

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11 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

The Spirit Combat rules in the RQ Quickstart (p.19) say that if the result is a tie, "both parties take damage."

Which would mean physical and spiritual combat don't work on the same basis.

And the question asked above has a meaning here : what happens when both fail their roll ? No-one takes damage, or both ?

If you consider that no-one takes damage, you'll be in a situation where spirit combat between 2 characters with high skill will be very quick because most of the time, someone will lose MPs, and one between 2 characters with low skill will take forever.

Edited by Mugen
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1 hour ago, Mugen said:

And the question asked above has a meaning here : what happens when both fail their roll ? No-one takes damage, or both ?

If you consider that no-one takes damage, you'll be in a situation where spirit combat between 2 characters with high skill will be very quick because most of the time, someone will lose MPs, and one between 2 characters with low skill will take forever.

Yeah. It's doesn't seem good. 

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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A few points:

Physical Combat and Spirit Combat don't use the same rules. Combat uses the combat rules, and spiritual combat uses Opposed Rules. Since Spirit Combat doesn't use Strike Ranks (or, rather, always occurs on SR 12) and loses a host of other tactual options found in Combat, it makes perfect sense to me to use another method of resolving conflict. The Opposed Rolls system.

Once we turn to the RQG rules, we find that in the description of Spirit Combat on p. 368:

Quote

If both combatants succeed, the winner is whichever combatant achieved the better result.

Which is a phrasing that seems to confuse a lot of people, but it is clear to me: The higher roll wins when the success value is the same. Ties exist, but only when the numbers are the same in the two die rolls. So whatever concern people have that there will be tons of ties isn't a matter of the rules at this time.

Meanwhile, we can't discount Fumbles, Special results, and Crits which change results drastically. Even characters with low ratings will have a 5% or so shot for Special results. And Fumbles and Crits are always hovering at the edges.

While I can see the concern about two spirit combatants with low values going at it and the combat taking forever, my own reaction is 

If I'm not very good at this, why am I risking doing this when I can get any of those results on the Spirit Combat Fumble Table?

The Crits, Special results,  and Fumbles will even things out over time.

"But Pendragon isn’t intended to be historical, just fun.
So have fun."

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1 hour ago, hanataka said:

We should consider a simpler case. What if two riders are horse racing?
A clear winner should be decided by the Opposed Roll of Ride skill.
Too many draws are not appropriate. Means to prevent draws are necessary.

There is already a method to prevent too many draws in the rules. Ties only occur when the numbers rolled are the same and  the quality of success is the same. 

There is a less than 1% chance of this happening.

"But Pendragon isn’t intended to be historical, just fun.
So have fun."

-- Greg Stafford

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4 minutes ago, creativehum said:

There is already a method to prevent too many draws in the rules. Ties only occur when the numbers rolled are the same and  the quality of success is the same. 

There is a less than 1% chance of this happening.

I hope so. But the text is ambiguous.

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2 hours ago, creativehum said:

Which is a phrasing that seems to confuse a lot of people, but it is clear to me: The higher roll wins when the success value is the same.

 

13 minutes ago, creativehum said:

Ties only occur when the numbers rolled are the same and  the quality of success is the same. 

 

Uh, yeah. According to the Opposed Resolution rules on page 6 of the Quickstart:

  •  If both participants succeed, the winner is whoever rolled higher.
  • Tie: A tie (where both participants succeed but roll the same
    number) means the situation is temporarily unresolved.

So that is exactly how it supposed to be handled in the Quickstart. 

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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The text literally says what I typed above:

"Ties: A tie (where both participants achieve the same type of success but roll the same number)... If both participants rolled a critical success the result is a tie."

I keep seeing people posting that this is ambiguous. For some reason it seems bluntly clear to me.

"But Pendragon isn’t intended to be historical, just fun.
So have fun."

-- Greg Stafford

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17 minutes ago, creativehum said:

I keep seeing people posting that this is ambiguous. For some reason it seems bluntly clear to me.

If read you back, there is a link to a posting by one of the authors saying that ties are not about rolling exact numbers but comparing levels of success. Because of this it’s now likely that the text in current PDF will be changed to reflect that when an update appears. If I’d thought about it I’d of checked the printers proof when I had it in my hands on Sunday. 

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16 minutes ago, David Scott said:

If read you back, there is a link to a posting by one of the authors saying that ties are not about rolling exact numbers but comparing levels of success. Because of this it’s now likely that the text in current PDF will be changed to reflect that when an update appears. If I’d thought about it I’d of checked the printers proof when I had it in my hands on Sunday. 

At this point I'm not sure exactly what the clarification will be. (I know many people assume what it is, but we don't know yet... Though you did have the answer to this mystery in your hands!)

 

in any case, my point is the current rules already have a ethos for reducing the number of ties... As quoted above. One only has to use the method presented and -- voila! -- less ties.

"But Pendragon isn’t intended to be historical, just fun.
So have fun."

-- Greg Stafford

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3 hours ago, creativehum said:

A few points:

Physical Combat and Spirit Combat don't use the same rules. Combat uses the combat rules, and spiritual combat uses Opposed Rules. Since Spirit Combat doesn't use Strike Ranks (or, rather, always occurs on SR 12) and loses a host of other tactual options found in Combat, it makes perfect sense to me to use another method of resolving conflict. The Opposed Rolls system.

Once we turn to the RQG rules, we find that in the description of Spirit Combat on p. 368:

Which is a phrasing that seems to confuse a lot of people, but it is clear to me: The higher roll wins when the success value is the same. Ties exist, but only when the numbers are the same in the two die rolls. So whatever concern people have that there will be tons of ties isn't a matter of the rules at this time.

I realize they are different, which is why I asked the question (for both spirit attack against spirit attack AND using an enchanted weapon).

But I think you are missing the part in "Tie" where it says "same quality of result". It doesn't say anything about same rolls on the same level of success like opposed skills does.  So it does not mean the higher roll if they both have normal success wins.  Which is different than opposed skill rolls.

Edited by Skovari
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