Re: [HOE] GURPS DEADLANDS DELAYED!

[Darrin Bright <darrin@neobright.net>]

At 05:37 PM 1/17/01 -0500, you wrote:
>Why not just roll twice and spread out the curve a bit, makes royals more
like 1
>in 46656, still not exactly poker odds, but a bit closer.  Or make the higher
>hands only accessible after rolling 3 6's on the first rolls, and rolling
again
>to see which of the higher hands you get.

That's basically what I did. You roll 3d6 for your Hexslingin' skill just
to see if the hex worked. If it worked, you rolled on a table to determine
the hand drawn. On the first table, you could get Nothing, Ace, Pair, Two
Pairs, and Three of a Kind. If you rolled a 3 or 4 on that table, you got
to roll on another table with higher hands. There were three tables, the
third going up to a Straight Flush, and I think I managed to keep all the
probabilities to within 1-3 percent of what they were supposed to be, but
the way jokers and drawing extra cards works can really screw with the
odds. As a GURPS player pointed out later, what I'd really done was use a
mechanic called "multiple criticals" that was introduced as an optional
rule in the Reign of Steel book. 

I'd post the details if I could, but since I posted the original to the SJG
Playtest forum, it's technically owned by SJG.