Reducing randomness (but still keeping it)

[theTrav]

This is a completely stolen mechanic, I did not come up with it myself. I saw it in a board game I recently got (stone age, I recommend it)

when you fire the smelters, calculate its load as a batch, roll your random numbers for each of the pieces of ore in the smelter and sum the results. Divide that sum by the "rareness" factor, drop the remainder and then that's how many pieces of metal you get.


Since the board game works in d6's I'll do the gold example for it.

You have 3 cave men panning for gold. gold has a 6 "rareness" factor.

roll 3 d6, you get a 1 a 4 and a 5, slightly above average, but no 6es. If this were the H&H mechanism you would get no gold. But if you sum the numbers, you get 10, which divided by six is 1.something drop the something and you get 1 piece of gold.

So basically you still have a chance at not getting anything, but a) your odds are better, b) you can guard against the chance of getting nothing by adding more volume and c) if you know the minimum chance you may be able to guarantee getting at least 1 bar from each smelt.

[Devour]

What board game is this?

[theTrav]

What board game is this?

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/34635 stone age

[kobnach]

I rather like the randomness.

[Devour]

It's 1.6 recurring, by the way, so it'd be 2 gold pieces. =D

[theTrav]

It's 1.6 recurring, by the way, so it'd be 2 gold pieces. =D

depends on how you implement it... The board game floors rather than rounds so you'd get 1 gold piece (it makes it a lot easier to do the maths because you can just count the pips