I started working on something @Ren pitched, and realized it might be something other games would want. It’s basically a roll/scene command. So…
roll/scene Alertness vs What's that?/4 rolls everyone in the scene vs the check.
His suggested format for output is something like: <FS3> Successful Alertness vs What's that? (a NPC)'s 4: Crushing (Bob, Sandra, Murgatroyd) | Standard (None) | Marginal (Hubert, Hortense).
To which I might add a second line with: <FS3> Failed Alertness vs What's that? (a NPC)'s 4: Crushing (Archer) | Standard (Barry) | Marginal (Lana, Mallory) | Draw (None).
That’s interesting. Why would rolling alertness be an opposed roll though? What is it that you’re opposing? Most “roll perception” checks I see are just straight-up rolls.
Which kind of ties into the rub from my perspective… there are straight rolls, opposed rolls, in-client rolls, web client rolls… that’s a lot of work versus just having the GM ask everybody to roll alertness (or conversely roll it themselves).
Why would rolling alertness be an opposed roll though? What is it that you’re opposing? Most “roll perception” checks I see are just straight-up rolls.
Someone else’s stealth. A foggy night making it difficult to see through. Etc.
It’s entirely possible that it’s just a cultural thing on GH, but we tend to roll vs stuff.
If it’s a bigger hassle than it’s worth… nbd. I can cobble stuff together.
Yeah, someone else’s stealth would be a vs roll, but the other stuff like a foggy night would normally just be modifiers. There’s actually big difference statistically between doing a versus roll against 4 (which would cancel out 1-2 successes on average no matter what your skill was) and a -2 modifier (representing a “significant” challenge under the rules), which highly skilled people would just shrug off.
That’s tangential to your actual point, but just FYI
Every game is entitled to have house rules and adjustments. It’s an open system.
I can only comment on how the system was designed to work
Competent Carl (5 dice – 3 skill + average attr):
-2 modifier: 76% chance of success
vs a 4 npc (really 6 dice): 41% chance of success
Extraordinary Edward (9 dice – 6 skill + good attr):
-2 modifier: 96% chance of success
vs a 4 npc (6 dice): 68% chance of success
It seems very strange to me that Extraordinary Edward, with his awesome alertness, should only be succeeding 68% of the time against a casual perception check, but that’s just me. Highly skilled people are intended to succeed the majority of the time in FS3.
Either way, opposed vs. unopposed makes a tremendous difference in outcomes.
Setting all that aside (sorry, went off on number geek tangent) - roll/scene for an unopposed roll could be handy. Thanks for the suggestion. If that’s something a bunch of folks want, I’ll consider implementing it. I probably won’t do opposed rolls for the reasons mentioned above though, so hopefully you can make something that meets your game’s needs.
I do think also having vs would be handy for situations where characters might be up against each other, though, i.e., Everyone’s Alertness vs Alice’s Stealth as she tries to sneak something by them. Extraordinary Edward should be more likely to catch it than Competent Carl, but Alice should have the chance to fool them both, and I would think it should be based on how good at stealth she is and how good at alertness they are, as you said. An extra benefit of a scene-based roll is that it means that Alice is only one level of sneaky at a time – 3 succ vs both of them, say, rather than 3 vs Carl and 7 vs Edward for the same single action/event.
It also doesn’t just take away the need to wait or type a lot (although it does!) – it can cut down on the resulting spam as well, which gets nontrivial sometimes in big scenes. Instead of 10 lines for the 5 people in the room (or 20 for the 10, or…), it can be just one (or maybe two) with the results. I know that I’ve seen people opt to forfeit the chance to notice something or similar not because they don’t at all want to or think their character shouldn’t but because they’re uncomfortable adding to all those rolls in the room.
Yeah, I hear what you’re saying. I just haven’t seen that scenario very often, and I think you can accomplish the same thing by just doing a roll/scene for everyone else plus a single roll for Alice. It greatly simplifies the roll/scene interface (particularly on web) and it’s still not very spammy.
I’m all for a roll/scene as well. When I run portal scenes and people may not be responding for hours, I can already manually roll each person… but if I could roll them all with a single command? It’d make my life a lot easier.
