Uncertainty is not randomness (add-on)

The post about randomness kept echoing in my head in the days that followed... I have to admit that although I had decided to add a certain strategic aspect to the game through mechanics related to the way results are obtained, I had never fully realized that I had created a system that rewards strategic approach more than the randomness of the dice roll.

I will revisit this concept to try to convey to the reader what I have in mind with this reasoning: since the basic mechanics of VI·VIII·X are common for any type of action (there are some tweaks, but the base is the same), I will use an image from an old post (let's see if anyone remembers this image...) to represent the process each player should go through to decide how to have their character act. We are in a duel: the player knows that he has an action, and so does his opponent (let's keep things simple and assume that each character has one action per turn). The player has to decide on his strategy: attack or defend? And to choose the option, what might be the expected result?

The base mechanic can be simplified to the extreme, as in the picture above: the result of the character used against the opponent is the sum of three addends. One known and fixed (the 'Known stat' of the character), one unknown and fixed (the 'Unknown stat') and one variable depending on the result of the dice roll (based on the ES score). The first reasoning then boils down to making an estimate of the US and what it might get from the die roll.

And then comes the second reasoning: the player has to take into account that the three addends have (almost) the same weight, as each maximum value is 10. The part related to chance is that of the ES, while there is also the part related to the so-called 'uncertainty', that of the US (assuming the player has not worked out what its value is). Thus, within the same mechanic, there are three elements, all of equal (or almost equal) weight: the certain part (KS), the uncertain part (US) and the chance part (ES).

The strategy will have to be much more refined, also due to the fact that in this context the order of the declarations also counts a lot in strategic terms!

The purpose of this short explanation is to show the different components of the mechanical rule and how they should fit into the player's thinking!