Exalted 2e

successes and a botch

Let's have a short look at the dice mechanic of Exalted, 2^nd edition.

It's a dice pool mechanic, you roll some d10 and each die that rolled at least the target number counts as a success. The default target number is 7, so you have a 40% success rate per die. You typically need to roll between one and five successes to get something done. As a bonus, each 10 rolled counts as two successes. Rolling no successes at all means you fail, but there's an additional snag. If you rolled any 1s while failing, the result is a botch, which is supposed to be extra bad.

So, here's an AnyDice program that calculates the odds for pools with up to ten dice. A result of -1 indicates a botch, a result of 0 is a failure, the rest indicating degree of success.

function: evaluate ROLL:s {
 SUCCESSES: ROLL >= 7
 if SUCCESSES > 0 { result: SUCCESSES + (ROLL = 10) }
 if [count 1 in ROLL] { result: -1 }
 result: 0
}

loop DICE over {1..10} {
 output [evaluate DICE d10] named "[DICE]d"
}

It's not the fastest way to compute it, but it's clear and gets the job done.

Using a slight tweak and the transposed view, we can see how the botch-failure-success odds change with the pool size.

loop DICE over {1..10} {
 output [lowest of [evaluate DICE d10] and 1] named "[DICE]d"
}