Re: [HOE] armour trick?

[Matt Crawford <matt@severian.chi.il.us>]

> > can anyone remember the way to take armour off  of a damage roll without 
> > the players knowing the target is armoured.
> 
> Don't know if there's any "official" way.  However, John Hopler once 
> recommended to me that you just do the calculation by taking the average 
> value of the reduction from one die to the next, and multiply by the # of 
> die.
> 
> For instance, if you've got AV1 you're going from 4d12 to 4d10, the average 
> goes from 6.5 to 5.5.  Multiply by 4 (the # of die) and that means that you 
> should subtract four points.

But that's not really "right" because, for example 6d of any time is
guaranteed to do at least one wound to a size 6 target, but if you
faked your AV1 by turning the player's 6d8 into 6d8-6 instead of 6d6
you'd sometimes fail to even get the "certain" 6 points minimum.

How much arithmetic can you do in your head while Marshalling?  The
right thing to do, if the player is rolling n N-sided dice and you
want to adjust it down to n M-sided secretly but fairly, is to take
the player's total X and change it to



Never mind.  I just deleted the formula because it didn't take
re-rolled aces into account.  With smaller dice you get more aces.

Go ahead and subtract the number of dice times the armor value, but
watch out for the floor.