Critical Rolls for THE GROGPUBLIC OF ROME

[JasonPratt]

Not a crucial roll in the sense of the game's end being at stake, but there's quite a bit of personal cash at stake (in the game, not real life) in this roll.

Context: this is Sulpicius.



He smirks like that all the time, but in this case he has a reason. Despite coming from a below-average senatorial family, with below-average stats, and despite not even being aligned to a Player's Faction, Sulpy has amassed 28 Talantons of silver in his personal treasury.

He got that cash by not being aligned to a Player's Faction. At a certain point each Turn, each Player has one chance at Persuading a senator to join the Player's Faction, whether from another Player's Faction (which is usually harder), or from the Forum generally (which is usually easier).

A Player has to roll within a target window to do this, equal to or lower than a target 2d6 total. This target number is determined by the Persuading senator's Influence plus his Oratory skill, minus the target senator's Loyalty, minus another 7 if the senator already works for another Player (and minus the senator's number of minions if he's in the Conservative Faction), minus also the target's personal cash.

On the other hand, the senator chosen by the Player to try the Persuasion can give bribes to the target senator from his own personal cash (not from the Faction Treasury). This cash once ante'd up belongs, win or lose, to the target senator now. Which means it will managed (spent, redistributed, etc.) by whomever controls that senator.

On yet the other hand, every other Player gets one chance (in asynch forum play) to add a counterbribe -- from their Faction treasury, not from any senator's personal cash.

After this, the Persuading senator's Player has one last final-bribe opportunity to add more cash from his Persuading senator's personal cash.

Adding and subtracting all those figures together, arrives at the target window for the Persuading Player to try not to exceed in a 2d6 total. But there's one more catch! -- the highest possible target total is 9. Any naturally rolled 10, 11, or 12, will automatically fail. No amount of bribing or personal Influence can change that. (This rule keeps richer and more influential players from destroying poorer players by persuading away all their senators automatically.)

Sulpy, in that snapshot, has passed through one or maybe two Persuasion attempts already, and has collected 28 tons of silver basically in bribes and counterbribes. Of course, each time he adds to his personal treasury, that makes him ever more resistant to actually joining a Faction. Why should he? -- he already has as much or more cash than some Factions on any given turn!


Enough context? (Probably more than enough... )

Okay, the current situation. The Aristocrat Faction Player, I.I., wants to try Persuading Sulpy. His best senator for this (with the highest total of influence and oratory) is the Statesman Scipio Africanus; so back during the Revenue Phase I.I. distributed out a lot of cash to Scipio for this attempt later. And now it's later!

Sulpy's stats, between his (self-)loyalty, and his personal cash, total -36. In order to maximize his chances (target window 9), Scipio has to add an initial bribe of 18 Talents. Sulpy is now going to get this cash, too, one way or another.

The Militarist and Conservative Players, Tripoli and Arizona Tank respectively, want to discourage I.I., whose Faction is getting kind of overpowered (although the Militarists recently passed him solidly in total influence...!), from focusing on his personal gain when the Republic is under constant threat from the Wars clustering upon them right now. Between them they have agreed that Tripoli will spend all 8 of his Faction cash counterbribing Sulpy, while AzTank will spend half as much as is necessary to keep I.I. from succeeding -- that comes out to 18 more Talents in his case.

In effect AzTank was gambling that making the chance harder, not impossible, would be enough to convince I.I. to back off instead of risking all Scipio's money on what will amount to a little more than a 1/4th chance at best (saving AzTank 4 Talents).

Instead, I.I. has decided that the Godawfully huge pot Sulpy controls is worth the risk -- and if he fails, then he has at least put Sulpy more-or-less permanently out of reach for anyone else to try later. So he antes up Scipio's final 22 Talents for the final bribe.

One way or another, the meager smirky Sulpy will now control 28 + 18 + 8 + 18 + 22 = NINETY-FOUR TALANTONS OF SILVER! That's more than the Republic itself often has at the end of Revenue Phases so far! It's a good thing he's willing to just be rich and not also ambitious...

So much for the setup. I'll run the roll in the next post, in case I need to edit this one. 

[JasonPratt]

2d6 roll. The total must be 5 or LESS. Any total 6 or more will lose.

(Weirdly, there are no less than three dice roller modules in the toolbar now. There seems to be no distinction? I'll aim at the one in the middle. )

This dice roll has been tampered with!
Rolled 2d6 : 4, 6, total 10

[JasonPratt]

RRrrrrgh, I do not understand why it say that the roll has been tampered with! I'll need to run experiments, maybe one of the other dice roll modules isn't broken...??

Anyway, I know there has been no edit. (The post itself would show subsequent editing, too!)

A total of 10 would always lose, regardless.

Oh, in case anyone is wondering why my math might be one notch off: I forgot to mention there's an Evil Omen event affecting this roll, dragging the target number not-to-exceed one notch lower, in effect making Sulpy's Loyalty equal 9 instead of 8. (A second Evil Omen randomly popped up on the next Player's round, making most rolls worse by 2 instead, but that doesn't affect this roll, which for various political reasons is lagging asynch behind where the game is for everyone else.) Anyway, my calculations did include that, as can be seen in the main game thread here: http://grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=22942.msg643102#msg643102

So, Scipio's personal cash goes to zero. Sulpy's personal cash goes up to 94, which he shall continue to warily watch while subtly smirking over in the corner of the Forum.

Onward to the Senate Phase this Turn!

[mirth]

I don't know that there are any other dice rolling plugins for SMF. And it can be difficult getting support for these things from the folks who make them. I'll see what I can find out when I have the chance.

[JasonPratt]

Did you turn on the font resizer for the module? I didn't have the problem at first, so something had to have changed in the background, and I haven't done anything as far as I can recall. But you were going to do the font resizer for the module, so that it wouldn't be such tiny print.

If you've activated that, try deactivating it and we'll run an experiment to see if that helps.

Meanwhile, here's a test of the first and the third dice-roll module shortcut -- I think these are only multiple shortcuts, they seem to produce no differences, purely a {roll}{/roll} command.

This dice roll has been tampered with!
Rolled 2d6 : 5, 2, total 7

This dice roll has been tampered with!
Rolled 2d6 : 3, 5, total 8


And for comparison, here's me simply typing out the code.

This dice roll has been tampered with!
Rolled 2d6 : 2, 3, total 5

[JasonPratt]

Okay, as I expected, no distinction there. (But be aware there are now three shortcuts to the dice-rolling code on the toolbar, one of which is grouped with youtube commands and spoiler tags and offtopic tags and... changelog?)

[bbmike]

Doesn't the fact that the post itself doesn't show it has been edited mean that the dice roll hasn't been edited? Or is there a way to hack that?

[mirth]

Did you turn on the font resizer for the module? I didn't have the problem at first, so something had to have changed in the background, and I haven't done anything as far as I can recall. But you were going to do the font resizer for the module, so that it wouldn't be such tiny print.

If you've activated that, try deactivating it and we'll run an experiment to see if that helps.

Meanwhile, here's a test of the first and the third dice-roll module shortcut -- I think these are only multiple shortcuts, they seem to produce no differences, purely a {roll}{/roll} command.

There was nothing turned on in the module. I changed the font size using a CSS style which is entirely separate from the dice module.

The dice roller is a third party module so it's basically what you get from whoever developed it. I don't think it is actively supported any longer either. I'll look at the code and see if i can do anything with it.

[mirth]

I've fixed the issue with the tamper warning. You can see the tests I did in this thread:


https://www.armchairdragoons.com/forum/index.php?topic=641.msg10321#new

[bbmike]

^That dude's an intellectual T-Rannasaurus Rex!

[JasonPratt]

^That dude's an intellectual T-Rannasaurus Rex!

...seems like there should be a chaw joke in there somewhere.

Great! -- and also, there's only one dice-roller shortcut in the shortcuts again, too, so yay for that.

I'm now trying to figure out why the post 'title' doesn't act like a hyperlink I can right-click on to generate an address pointing to the post. (This will be important on occasion later, if the players agree to migrate the game here for dice-rolling convenience.  )

[JasonPratt]

hm, not yet. Tis odd.

Oh, and dice-rolling test, forgot that, let's see... Combat and several other rolls require a 3d6 so:

Rolled 3d6 : 6, 3, 2, total 11

[JasonPratt]

Drat, my working theory was that I didn't have something in my profile toggled correctly. But I've gone over every tab I can find, and I don't see anything that would indicate that functionality (turning post title hyperlinks on or off).

On the other hand, quotes do generate hyperlinks that I can click on! -- I noticed that when I quoted bbmike a minute ago.

Also, user ip is a hyperlink under the post title. Just not the post title.

Brant confirmed that standard functionality should apply: I should be able to right-click the post title (just like right clicking the thread title) to generate a direct link to the post.

Must ruminate on this puzzle a while.

[JasonPratt]

Ah, wait! Wait wait wait wait...!

I don't have post titles showing! I don't know why yet, or how to turn them on (and I didn't see a functionality for that yet in my profile thingies). But all I have are the date and timestamp. Those are the hyperlinks in some places, like Facebook posts, but not standard for forum, so no surprise that isn't working!

New theory: if I can figure out how to turn on my post titling, that will be hyperlinked as normal.

I am generating post titles; I see one every time I come here to the new post window. I'm looking at the current post title now, which is simply (no brackets) {Re: Critical Rolls for THE GROGPUBLIC OF ROME}, as would normally be expected since I haven't gone out of my way to change a post title.

I'm changing it to {Re: testing post title hyperlink functionality}, which I was able to do. Now let's see if the new title shows up...

[mirth]

Ummm....your welcome for the dice roller being fixed