21 April 2021

What are my odds? Description as DC

I had a recollection of seeing an exercise someone had done that assigned all our common words to state a likelihood of something happen to a percentage value - I did not find that but I did find a report with US/UK policies for communicating probability and I thought it might be useful to convert it to DCs.

Descriptor % span d20 span DC
Almost no chance / remote 1 to 5 1 21
Very unlikely / highly improbable 5 to 20 4 18
Unlikely / improbable (improbably) 20 to 45 9 13
Roughly even chance / roughly even odds 45 to 55 11 11
Likely / probable (probably) 55 to 80 16 6
Very likely / highly probable 80 to 95 19 3
Almost certain(ly) / nearly certain 95 to 99 20 2


Setting this up so an average person of average stats in D&D succeeds an even chance thing 50% of the time, we anchor to DC11 for 'roughly even chance'. This makes "almost no chance" things impossible for an average person to achieve without help, tools, bless or something equivalent. Similarly, it is possible to fail an almost certain task 5% of the time. To my mind, if the dice is being rolled, there ought to be a chance of it failing - if it cannot fail, no dice should be rolled.

This also means that your average D&D character rapidly becomes a creature beyond the abilities of mere mortals in just a few levels. Given that the fraction of PC's among the populace is supposed to be small, this still makes some sense - but it gives a sense of how amazingly different a character dropping a +7 modifier onto a roll is - they will succeed at highly improbably things as often as the average person will make the even chance.

I am still seeking that original article I saw - I know I read it in 2008-2010 so it is out there somewhere. I will follow this up once I find it.

Source:

UK AND US POLICIES FOR COMMUNICATING PROBABILITY IN INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS: A REVIEW on ResearchGate - just click download to get the pdf.

2 comments:

  1. Bookmarked! I really like this because it gives the GM a chance to maintain the narrative rather then breaking into gaming. Why should the player know the exact chance of success? After all, in real life how many of us are able to calculate that we have a 70% chance of success whereas we can usually determine if our odds are Likely/Probable.

    I'm going to use this in my game.

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    Replies
    1. Glad to hear it may be useful! I have found some more on this and will pull together another post soon. It may add flavour but it is not as simple and straightforward as this.

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