How much math knowledge is needed to design a RPG system? High school level math is enough?

>all these people having probability in highschool

Well fuck, maybe I just forgot. Highschool was a loong time ago. I mean, I did know how to calculate dice result probabilities before University, I got to have picked that up somewhere.

it was offered in highschool, I didn't take it because I took the alternate path.
the Norway guy is the first person I heard about it being mandatory from.

Well except the crazy Russian professor, but I don't believe most of what he said, because he seemed to think the material in the 400 level math course on field theory was mainly stuff we should already know from highschool.

>Probability is reasonably self-evident unlike other fields of mathematics.
I'd disagree, because there are several things in probability that are actual counter to our intuitive biases.
The car/goat question is really hard for people without a decent understanding of probability.
And until you train yourself people don't get how multiple instances of moderate probability stack.
And of course the misunderstandings of how randomness works.

For example, how much is "an extra die" worth at varying levels? Specific examples:
how often will 1d6>2d6?
how often will 2d6>3d6?
how often will 5d6>6d6?

Guess first, then look at answers:
Have you made your own estimate yet?
9%, 15%, and 24% of the time.
Filler text of nothing.

Not much. You do need to have played a lot of RPGs, DMed a lot of RPGs and read and understood how and mostly why X or Y game work the way it does. D&D is a special case and has its own meta-rules. Don't make a fantasy heart-breaker unless you plan to do one. Don't put down any rule that doesn't have a purpose in play that fits well with the rest, and make your rules procedures of play.

The fucking hell, probablity wasn't "mandatory" as a class; it was just part of the regular mandatory math curriculum.

US dude from TX

Oh and here in France, we do some probability in one year of high-school then two specialties (science and economics) keep down that road. The third spec is litterature, and is an introduction to humanities at the expense of math and in-depth biology and chemistry/physics.

Enough to know what the fuck you're talking about. You can usually learn the basics by inputting ideas and comparisons into anydice.

>The car/goat question is really hard for people without a decent understanding of probability.
No, the Monty Hall solution is just always REALLY poorly explained. I would consider myself reasonably intelligent, but I didn't understand that shit for years until someone else put it into a different perspective for me altogether. Mathematicians just suck at explaining themselves to normal humans. If they got good at it, I imagine the hate for mathematics would dissolve.

I've gone through about 5 different explanations for that. Some people understand different ones better, bu some are stuck on it not sounding right.
It is counter-intuitive, even if it's not that complex.

I figured Xd6+Y wasn't swingy enough, but I never ran the odds to find out it was that bad.
Geez.

Went to HS in Sweden. We had some probability in the A course (which is the first/junior year, for most people)

I just checked the current teaching plans for Norway.
You're supposed to have had basic probability by seventh grade, and you should have mastered probability represented by percentage, fractions and decimals, as well as use concepts like sample spaces by tenth grade. This includes "experimenting and running simulations with probability".
If you take a "general education" in high school, probability is present no matter which mathematics course you take.

I wonder why nobody loves you, user.

Math is the least of your problems.

Yes, basic math and algebra would be enough. As other anons have said, you will need to understand probability to balance the game.

I'll take this as confirmation that my memory is just shit, then.

Don't feel too bad. I grew up in an upper middleclass New England suburb and I never encountered statistics until after my first trip through college.

What are the others?

Grammar/spelling
Writing
Layout
Art
Game design
Playtesting
Marketing
Community management

Add game theory to the list.
A wrong set of incentives makes even the best game an unsalvageable clusterfuck.
Also, just a fuckton of experience with a variety of RPGs.

You need to at the very least understand probability. Otherwise you end up with problems like in White Wolf's games where the better you are at something the more often you fail at it.

To be fair, probability and statistics are taught in grade school. So high school math should definitely suffice.

Yeah, no. As I said here Grade school math in Sweden.

None if you want to make a purely narrative system.

I don't know how long ago you went to school but I'm from Sweden and we were taught propability.

I'm unfamiliar with White Wolf's systems, what problems did they come with?

Each 1 you roll in your dice pool subtracts successes.

So you learned this about the same time as Introductory Cocksucking then?

He's mistaken.

What he's talking about is oWoD's botch system, which--due to the way the math worked--meant that the more dice you rolled (aka the better you were at something), IF YOU FAILED (which became less and less likely the more dice you rolled), the more likely that it would be a botch.

Someone with 3 dice would fail more often than someone with 10 dice, but IF the person with 10 dice failed, it was almost certainly a botch, while the 3 dice person had normal failures more often than botches.

I'm trying to imagine this user's vision for his post
"Man, I want them to go like 'whoa! this guy is basically just a total piece of shit out of nowhere! Holy christ what an enormous turd this guy is, I can't believe it'. That's what I'm going for with this one"
[Post]

...

Ever since I've discovered the Internet, people have been calling me a fucking idiot, but I understood the Monty Hall problem the second time I looked at it. At first, it sounds counter-intuitive, but then you just look it over and it makes sense.

I've explained it to people before. None of them found it as interesting as I did, but some of them believed me. Some didn't and still don't.

A lot of people just can't grasp odds. It's like they refuse to. They think the entire world is just a vat of chaos and it's futile to try to understand how things work. If you explain the Monty Hall problem to these people, they'll ask you to physically show them, and when you inevitably pick the goat (because your chances to pick the car aren't 100%) they'll laugh and get super smug about it.

What should really piss you off is I am from Florida and it is taught here in middle school.

Then again, you have to be able to factor your death probability on the fly every time you go outside.

You know, OP, you only need to know as much math as you design it to have. D&D has awful dice systems and am annoying amount of math. Design your game better.

>laughingfamilyguyforeigner.jpg

The level of math depends on the complexity of your model. Imagine the simplest RPG possible with random outcomes- you flip a coin for success/failure and accept the unmodified result. That's not going to require difficult math, but you'll need to break some outcomes apart to handle them more robustly and that can introduce delay and tedium.

this. Its your game, design the way you think works best

>How much math knowledge is needed to design a RPG system?

It is less about the amount of math knowledge and more about the will to plot math growth and other changes. A lot of system designers just did not do all of the work they should of. Or they just said fuck when they did find issues. Example NWoD.

I have seen a few people claim that, but no math to back that up.

forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/main-forum/the-classic-world-of-darkness/615300-owod-dice-probability-chart

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OK1pf7N3tIoPYYhX0kL37s-awQ0owwKNZlopwZ4EjHI/edit#gid=0

Is there something that I am not getting?

It says it right there.
Difficulty 7-9
10% botch for 1 die.
The % goes up afterwards then eventually goes down.

Huh, did not stop that. However I would like to point out it goes under what it was at one dice at five. This means it is a issue for harder check only at a dice pool range of 2 to 4. A issue, but a rather small one.

If you're american, then not. If you don't know about probability with multiple dice, then you can't make a good system period. Even if you do, math is not the most important part. It's important for balancing, but you won't have math problems in balancing unless you try to develop a system too complex for yourself.

As a rule of thumb, if you're not sure about your capacity to do something known to be hard to do right, you're not able to do that something right. You can try, but bear in mind that it probably won't turn out great.