Hi All,
I've noticed that there hasn't been much information in regards to the statistics behind the second sea 2nd edition system. For my own curiosity I've decied to calculate out how many raises one would expect based on a players Trait/Skill combination. Due to the fairly complicated die rolling system I calculated these via simulation (50k die rolls per trait/skill combination). I've included a link to an excel spreadsheet with my results. Happy 7th Sea-ing!
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0By4b8RClyhG0Tm9uaTE4ckdTWTQ
I'd be very interested to see your methodolgy on this. I was never able to get around the condition that the "best" grouping was the one which produced the most Raises and left the fewest unpaired dice.
“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.”
- H.L. Mencken
The short answer is that I'm prioritizing number of raises first and using the most dice second. The algorithim I'm using sorts N dice from highest to lowest than checks for all combinations of dice from 1 die to N dice that sum to exactly 10. If there are combinations of dice that sum to 10 it looks for the combination that contains the lowest individual die values, removes all of those dice, than restarts the algorithim. If at any time there are no combinations that sum to exactly 10 it increases the sum it looks for by 1 (so from 10 to 11) and restarts the algorithim. This continues until the sum of all dice are less than 10 (or there are no dice left).
For 3+ skill/exploding dice/danger a somewhat modified algorithim is used but the same basic principle is kept in tact.
I wrote the code in R (a statistical programming language), if there is interest I'm more than happy to post the sourcecode.
The other place I got hung up was re-rolls: technically the lowest die isn't always the most efficient to reroll. If you have a 9,7,2,1, it's more efficient to reroll the 2.
“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.”
- H.L. Mencken
For re-rolls I'm having determining all raises then re-rolling the lowest leftover die. This is not the optimum strategy when dice can explode / skill = 4 but it is the lowest "risk" as you will never lose a raise because you decided to make a risky re-roll.