I don’t doubt your math. Did the probability calculation come before the special rule was tried in practice or only after it was tried but seemed counter-productive? I would have expected that the later scenario would have come up in playtesting before publication.
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You are very optimistic about the attention to detail in most playtesting.
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Fair.
My pet homebrew system uses a deck of cards much like a dice pool.* The maths involved were beyond me; it really needed a monte carlo program to work out. Instead, I did some basic stats based on a fresh deck and it looked okay. But I also made a point to playtest it multiple times with multiple scenarios and genres to make sure it “felt” alright. And it did. None of the players balked at the odds feeling off.
'* Draw N cards based on your stat; count successes based on the number of cards that match the suit of the stat. If you have a specialty, you only need to match the color of the suit. Don’t reshuffle until you get a joker.
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West End Games Star Wars first edition was where I first met dice pools. I liked it and it served purpose generally well. Then a friend insisted on using second edition with its wild “Force” die and that ruined it for me. The swinginess of that die was miserable
I ran a lot of White Wolf and I never used their botch rule as written because I’d had that experience and recognized a worse version of that action
White Wolf’s other sin in those early WoD editions was varying the target number. Intuition doesn’t work well at all from my observation for the change from “I need two fours on five dice” to “I need one six on five dice” and encouraging that was an unnecessary weakness of those games
ORE worked for my group for a couple sessions of very atmospheric Godlike but was also why it was only a couple sessions. It was novel and worked for what it was intended but what it covered was remarkably shallow at the table
Genysys presented my group with an unsatisfying variant of the classic dice pools mentioned issue of zero successes with all items on all dice netting to zero feeling really unsatisfying
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We tried the special rule during play. Failed to hit a lot. Then (separately) me and another player did the maths based on our own character sheets… and stopped using it.
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I found it almost impossible to make human characters for my IN NOMINE games. At least humans whose bodies, minds and souls didn’t just crumple when Celestials (Angels and Demons) turned their attention to them in a pause while not fighting each other.
I suspect that if I were writing it humans and Celestials would have totally seperate resolution systems but I have no idea how I would do that.
The fact that SJG wanted a resolution system they could call a d666 didn’t help.
Actually, I wonder if Angels, Demons and Mortals might be something Genesys would do well.
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The Corporeal Player’s Guide didn’t cut it?
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As I recall it the Corporeal Player’s Guide allowed you to play humans tangled up in the affairs of the Celestials. Some of them had advantages that most humans didn’t but they didn’t have the oomph to resist Celestials directly. (Maybe some of the Sorcerers who were mostly damned.)
And I never got to play with PC Corporeals anyway being too busy with the affairs of the mighty.
Though the souls of mortals were immensely important to Angels and Demons, mortals didn’t have any agency of their own. They were Jimmy Olsen in a world full of superheroes. Jimmy Olsen without plot protection.
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