Is Cursed Luck usually/supposed to be declared before or after the players roll.
Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2018 7:54 am
The example in the GMG pg 460 seems to indicate that Cursed Luck is rolled before the players dice.
The player announces he will be making a melee test, the GM says "wait", rolls a cursed luck test, determines that how many dice are "cursed", then the player rolls his test, and the highest dice are set down to 1.
However the way I have always seen it played is that the GM waits until the result is announced, and then decides whether to "curse" the roll retrospectively. Obviously he rarely curses rolls that are already failures, and is more likely to curse rolls that are huge successes.
As I have mentioned in previous questions, the reason I am trying to suss out the "correct" way to do it, and the "most popular" way to do it, is that I am writing an Earthdawn character sheet for roll20, and I want to put special code in to implement the cursed luck function.
The easiest way is if cursed luck must be declared in advance. The GM rolls Cursed Luck targeting a characters MD, and the program notes the number of successes, and the next test that character rolls, the program adjusts the correct number of highest dice. The results get reported in the normal way.
Retrospective Cursing is harder to implement. The program has to always save the last roll (or even the last few rolls), Then there has to be a way for the GM to say "curse that roll", and well, it is just more complex, and probably a bit more unwieldy. But the advantage is that it allows declarations ether before or after the fact.
So obviously I am only going to code one of these, and the question is should I code pre-decared cursing, or retroactive cursing.
Is there an official "this is how it is supposed to work"?
Which way do most gms actually use?
The player announces he will be making a melee test, the GM says "wait", rolls a cursed luck test, determines that how many dice are "cursed", then the player rolls his test, and the highest dice are set down to 1.
However the way I have always seen it played is that the GM waits until the result is announced, and then decides whether to "curse" the roll retrospectively. Obviously he rarely curses rolls that are already failures, and is more likely to curse rolls that are huge successes.
As I have mentioned in previous questions, the reason I am trying to suss out the "correct" way to do it, and the "most popular" way to do it, is that I am writing an Earthdawn character sheet for roll20, and I want to put special code in to implement the cursed luck function.
The easiest way is if cursed luck must be declared in advance. The GM rolls Cursed Luck targeting a characters MD, and the program notes the number of successes, and the next test that character rolls, the program adjusts the correct number of highest dice. The results get reported in the normal way.
Retrospective Cursing is harder to implement. The program has to always save the last roll (or even the last few rolls), Then there has to be a way for the GM to say "curse that roll", and well, it is just more complex, and probably a bit more unwieldy. But the advantage is that it allows declarations ether before or after the fact.
So obviously I am only going to code one of these, and the question is should I code pre-decared cursing, or retroactive cursing.
Is there an official "this is how it is supposed to work"?
Which way do most gms actually use?