This post has content warnings for: palisade 27 spoilers.
- He/Him + They/Them
One Canuck built the #ttrpg tag and the #mecha tag. And that was me.
Cohost Cultural Institution: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots
Priv: @Scampriv
You must log in to comment.
in reply to @mguzdial's post:
Yup! It's using the strategy they've been playing with so far.
I kinda wonder how much tapping to get successes would even improve the odds. I see a lot of people mentioning that, but they did do it this episode and it wasn't that helpful. I guess it wasn't the optimal scenario (for the Cause) and it would be better to do with 1 win on each side?
Important to note that you can tap a Cause faction twice (destroying it) to auto-win any conflict turn scene. So if they were using them effectively then yes! They could have guaranteed we'd be looking at 14 Cause wins rn.
Really appreciate the stats work above! Wild to see how that breaks down.
With this note though, I feel like I've missed something and/or we're reading different rules.
In the edition I have: First, you tap a faction just to defend at all, otherwise the Authority wins that scene and gets their outcome. Then, tapping a second faction lets you skip one roll, giving you a single success in a scene. A tapped faction can then "take an action that would cause them to be tapped," in exchange for being destroyed (which is to say, a destroyed faction gives /a single success/ on a turn, not "auto-win any conflict turn scene." That's a huge difference.
And then it takes a Supplier Faction successful outcome to bring back one single faction (or untap 2), or the PCs can do a Long Term Project or a Sortie outcome.
I have not done all the math on that, but it feels like it would take more than "using them effectively" to turn that into 14 Cause wins. Especially given that when, again, there is no one to defend at all, the Authority just wins scenes outright (which is why it's been so scary to tap something to begin with).
Glad my weird stats work was at all useful!
(RE: double tapping factions and that leading to 14 cause wins) Apologies, I was representing this as being simpler than it is in the above comment. This gets a bit complicated, so my response will be a bit long, but I'll try to explain what I meant/the underlying stats.
If you all had been using tapping factions to try to secure wins for the Cause (so on 3rd rolls when it was tied), then the median case flips, so that the most common outcome would be 9 cause wins and 5 authority wins at this point (it basically negates the effect of the reroll). Assuming there had been no change in downtime activities there would have been 2-3 factions destroyed (taking 8 additional taps total in the most common case), but that does assume that some of those 9 cause wins weren't used to untap factions. If they were used in that way (part of what I meant by "effectively" above) then no factions would be destroyed at that point.
The larger part of what I meant by effectively (which would obviously never happen for a show) was playing for the Cause with a semi-optimal strategy. By always using the Supplier on defence during the major scene, one could tap up to two other factions in that scene to win it (as needed, so not always tapping two), thus getting the supplier outcome and untapping those two factions. Assuming the PCs were willing to untap your Supplier each downtime, you can repeat this (boring) strategy to a median case with 11 cause wins, 3 authority wins, and no destroyed factions. From there it's just a bit of luck or PC involvement to nab the last 3 (if the PCs are willing to untap roughly 5 factions during each downtime).
It's boring of course, but effective if you have a power gamer for the cause.