Okay, this is my newest entry in this series and a teaser is below. The whole thing can be found here: http://skirmisher.com/node/317 Up until this point, I haven’t spent any time on the common tools of table top gaming: dice and cards. For the most part I’ve been avoiding probability on purpose. Work has gone into examining how important game balances along with systems that are impartial. But the tools for how to achieve this have been left to the wayside. One of the reasons for this is the sheer complexity of the material. As I hope to show in this piece, game design is an act that is far from rational and masochistic all the while being somehow rewarding. The first, and least complicated feature, is linear probability. One rolls a die and the chance of anyone number resulting is one out of however many sides there are on the die. The standard six-sided die gives a 1 in 6 chance. Pretty simple, right? If you are designing board games or other fairly simple random systems, that is all you need to know. Fortune is a harsh mistress and the universe hates you. Okay, that is a bit snarky. The universe does not hate you; it just does not care because you give up all power (and choice) to random, stupid chance. In a standard deck of playing cards, the chance of any one card coming up is 1 in 52. What about a particular suit, color, or digit? 1 in 2, 1 in 4, and 1 in 13. Great, now what, you ask? What is the chance of drawing a specific hand in a game of five card poker? 1 in 52 x 51 x 50 x 49 x 48 if nobody else gets a card first. And, yes, that is the easy stuff.
