[Mechanics] Dice v. Cards

Tonight's my last night on-shift, and only because I volunteered to take someone else's due to family emergency. I'm happy I can help, and it doesn't honestly work out badly for me, but I'm still feeling it. I come onto my shift starting at 10, and I've already polished off my Blue Raspberry Jolt and the first of my Red Bulls, and well on my way through the second. I tend to drink all four before 5 am, though, so that's not too unusual, but I am worried because even though I'm managing a little better lately, my caffine consumption has continued to climb and my chances of getting moved off nights continue to drop since they've canned my would-be replacement.

But! I'm glad I was able to inspire viski to think about character musical tastes. It's a fun mini-game I like to play, along with some other characterization things (What's their favorite TV show? Who where their heros when they were children? are two other questions I'll occasionally ask). I remember I did one D20 Modern Persona character as an organizational report from a government invested in tracking arcana users, while another one had a character sheet that looked like school records. Man, I loved playing those games and doing shit like that. It's one of the thing I loved about playing with smaller groups - principally, you can pull more weird shit more often. 

Actually, I was thinking about the difference between card pulls and dice rolls in LARP compared to table-top NWoD this afternoon. The pulls, I think I worked out once with the aid of some math-wonk friends, are generally more favorable for PC actions on the whole, but you lose the 1-100 chance that you could pull off a really spectacular roll. I forget how it works mathmatically now, but when pulling, I think you have a 30% base chance of one success via pull, and for every 5 dots/specialties/spent will, you can rely on 1 success.

While I'm not a math expert, what I've seen happen to people is that they see the reliability of the results and figure that if they're going to be good at something on a moments notice, they won't be able to rely on the dice. They'll need to make sure their traits can at least hit a 10 reliably (usually +5, skills+stats to hit 50%) and if they want to be able to hit 50% on two successes, without counting 10-again (which messes up my shitty math) they'd require +10 (5-pull, +5 for one, +5 to hit 15 and two successes). On your average everyday non-superpower pull, you're pulling Stat+Skill+specialty, so you'd need what amounts to Olympic-level capabilities since that 10-again is generally in the relm of 'was gonna have a success anyhow'.

So, one success is easy for almost anyone to get. You're going to have people walking around with exp to spare though, so 2 successes is basically the bottom line for 'competance' in inter-PC play. Looking at dicepools for special abilities (rotes or disciplines?) on supernatural characters, you're going to start hitting people who can get between 3-4 successes, and once you can hit that threshold, I'm pretty sure you can do it routinely and anyone who can do it routinely is only going to have to worry about a usurper in the bracket below them 10% of the time (and they have 10% to break into a higher success bracket anyhow).

I don't think this would be quite an issue except that there are people who have just tons of exp. to put into their power catagories, and the exp. to go up in a level's ranks is in multiples so a beginning player without MC exp and a character with the MC to invest, who invest the same percentage of exp into roughly the same area are going to be way out of each others league. I'm not talking about just a few dots behind but what amounts to a magnitude. 

I'm not totally convinced this is a problem, but it is an issue I've run into. I'll show up to Mage with a character I'm pretty fond of and run into double masters with substantial gnosis, and I discover that putting ranks into multiple Skills doesn't really help me unless I doulble-check to make sure said skills segue into Rotes that are in the magic catagories I've put ranks into, because some dude or lady made sure their key skills are all sitting at 5+specialty with appropriatly high stats, and they're sitting on a Mastery level.

Me: "Maybe we should talk to them?"
Someone else: "Why, when we can just Magic the crap out of it?" 
*pull*
Else: "Bam! 4 successes! Let's move on."

I guess part of the problem is that magic can be such an 'I win' card (heh) and that the Mage venue is small enough that having just one or two really big guns pretty much colors the area. The person I was principally think of was the character Munin, who's an utter bad-ass and bascially sitting in the same relms as my character is - Mind, with some Prime. Space doesn't really suit me, so I think I'll see Atol branching out into Forces as he becomes more comfortable with the raw sound he works with and the technology he uses. I feel Mind is his 'ideological' relm, where Prime and Forces are skills that come to him because they're practical outgrowths of his practice. 

Space is... I dunno. Helpful, but not really his 'thing', and less so since the Space Mastah has shown up. ^_^;

So, anyhow, I was feeling like card-pulls really sets things up in tiers based on how many successes you can typically expect to pull, and those successes feed on themselves - especially in Mage, where expertise in an Arcana not only opens you up to more abilities, and more powerful abilities, but acts at a pull-adder in addition to relevant skills.