Aberrant RPG - warp distances check

[Mr Fox]

Ok, someone double check my math here. The Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years away. For a Nova to warp there it would require:

Quantum 5 (5 auto successes)

Mega Perception 5 (reduce diff by 5 = 5 successes)

Perception 5

Warp 5

Spend a willpower for an auto success

Thus 11 automatic successes + 9 out of 10 dice rolling success to get to that 2.5 million light years. So it is in the conceivable realm of possibility assuming a near perfect roll which is extremely unlikely. Luck 5 would help bring it into the realm of actually happening. (Not counting power-maxing here)

That would definitely take more than a 30 point nova so no starting character could do it (without maxxing). I figure it at 33 nps bare minimum with a min/max character that would have no other skills. 38 nps if you add in Luck to make it more likely to happen.

[Courier]

Various issues, some which help and some that hurt.

1) There's nothing in the book about Luck adding to power rolls. Considering powers like this one (and power maxes, and other situations), IMHO you shouldn't house it in, but it's your game.

2) Ignoring that Long Warps don't have a difficulty, for something like this you should roll Megas since they increase the standard deviation. Although you're average goes down slightly (to 0.9 succ per mega), the chances of you getting an absurd number of succ goes up.

3) As per page 36 of the APG, you need 14 succ to go 4.3 light years. A million is 1,000,000; so that 14 succ required shoots up to 20 succ for getting to Addromeda.

Q5 means 5 auto, that leaves only 15 more.

5 Perception average 2.

5Q Power max averages 2.

5 Warp averages 2 (drop this to Warp 1 for an out of the box guy).

Or 15 normal dice (11 normal dice out of the box)

5 Mega-Perc average 5 (rounding up).

So that's 11 succ on average (9 for Mr. Warp 1), meaning you'd only need 4 above your average (6 for W1).

So... if I were a lot better at math I'd be able to tell you exactly what the odds of them getting there are, but instead let's make the computer to do lots of work and get an approximation. I made a random number generator and had it run 1000 trial runs (dropping the last 4 normal dice for the out of the box guy, so they had the same die rolls otherwise) Out of 1000 tries, Mr. Warp 5 was successful 109 times, while Mr. Warp 1 was only successful 39 times.

So I expect W5 can do it something like 11% of the time while W1 can only do it 4% of the time.

To put those number into perspective, it costs a willpower point to throw a powermax so you can do it once a day on average, so it's like 9 days worth of effort for W5 to get there but 26 for W1.

EDIT: I realize you said to do it without maxing but we really needed those extra dice.

[Courier]

This works a lot better with Mastery BTW. Mastery doubles the effect of a power, rather than double the distance IMHO that means every succ gives you 20x rather than 10x. Thus 10 succ (with Mastery) take you an extra 1024 (2^10).

So it only takes 16 succ to equal the 20 we needed before (we might only need 15, I rounded up several times). We'd also start with an extra autosucc because of Q6.

So we'd roll the same dice (actually one more on P-Max) but only need 9 or 10 succ.