Maneuver success

by Brian Potter

Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1996 15:09:09 -0500 From: Brian Potter To: Multiple recipients of list Subject: Maneuver success

Some time back I sat down and calculated the odds of a successful all-or-nothing maneuver on the RM chart. I then made a table which I keep handy when playing, so I can know what kind of maneuver and bonus to use when someone tries a maneuver. I thought I'd post it, or at least part of it, since it's kind of interesting:

                                Difficulty
Bonus           Rout.   Easy    Light   Med     Hard    V-Hard  E-Hard
-5              91      78      70      34      25      18      13
0               92      80      72      37      28      21      15
+5              93      82      75      40      32      24      18      
+10             95      85      78      44      35      28      21
+15             95      86      80      48      39      31      23
+20             96      88      82      51      42      34      26
+25             97      90      84      56      46      38      29

The chances for Sheer Folly maneuvers are about half those for Extremely Hard maneuvers, and Absurd are roughly half the Sheer Folly odds. The thing that struck me most when I did this is that there is a *big* drop in success probability from Light to Medium. My assumption had been that Medium+0 would be about a 50/50 chance of success, but in fact you need a +20 on your medium maneuver to have anything like a 50/50 chance of succeeding. Another way to look at this is, on the chart above, the ranges for the different difficulties all overlap the adjacent diff. ranges, except Light and Med. don't overlap.

Just grist for the mill. If anyone cares how I did this, let me know, and I'll post to them personally. (Don't want to get into a math discussion here :)

Brian


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