Is Cursed Luck usually/supposed to be declared before or after the players roll.

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ChrisDDickey
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Is Cursed Luck usually/supposed to be declared before or after the players roll.

Post by ChrisDDickey » Thu Jun 14, 2018 7:54 am

The example in the GMG pg 460 seems to indicate that Cursed Luck is rolled before the players dice.
The player announces he will be making a melee test, the GM says "wait", rolls a cursed luck test, determines that how many dice are "cursed", then the player rolls his test, and the highest dice are set down to 1.
However the way I have always seen it played is that the GM waits until the result is announced, and then decides whether to "curse" the roll retrospectively. Obviously he rarely curses rolls that are already failures, and is more likely to curse rolls that are huge successes.

As I have mentioned in previous questions, the reason I am trying to suss out the "correct" way to do it, and the "most popular" way to do it, is that I am writing an Earthdawn character sheet for roll20, and I want to put special code in to implement the cursed luck function.
The easiest way is if cursed luck must be declared in advance. The GM rolls Cursed Luck targeting a characters MD, and the program notes the number of successes, and the next test that character rolls, the program adjusts the correct number of highest dice. The results get reported in the normal way.

Retrospective Cursing is harder to implement. The program has to always save the last roll (or even the last few rolls), Then there has to be a way for the GM to say "curse that roll", and well, it is just more complex, and probably a bit more unwieldy. But the advantage is that it allows declarations ether before or after the fact.

So obviously I am only going to code one of these, and the question is should I code pre-decared cursing, or retroactive cursing.
Is there an official "this is how it is supposed to work"?
Which way do most gms actually use?

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RazanMG
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Re: Is Cursed Luck usually/supposed to be declared before or after the players roll.

Post by RazanMG » Thu Jun 14, 2018 11:49 am

After the roll, just like Avoid Blow. It can only be used once per round, so its not gamebreaking.

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etherial
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Re: Is Cursed Luck usually/supposed to be declared before or after the players roll.

Post by etherial » Thu Jun 14, 2018 1:08 pm

RazanMG wrote:
Thu Jun 14, 2018 11:49 am
After the roll, just like Avoid Blow. It can only be used once per round, so its not gamebreaking.
So, it wants to be used like Avoid Blow, but because dice are Cursed before rolling for Bonus Dice, I think it has to be done in response to Action Declaration. That's basically how it works in the example text in the book. And since Cursed Luck can cause the Dice to Rule of One, I think it's A-OK that it sometimes means the Horror Curses an Action that would not have succeeded anyway.

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RazanMG
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Re: Is Cursed Luck usually/supposed to be declared before or after the players roll.

Post by RazanMG » Fri Jun 15, 2018 12:43 am

All depends on how "good" in using Cursed Luck is that Horror. Some can use as a response but before the cursed roll, but more powerfull Horror could use it after the roll (before exploading dice). Depends how nasty that Horror is. Thats how I see it. Nothing is sure with Horrors.

ChrisDDickey
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Re: Is Cursed Luck usually/supposed to be declared before or after the players roll.

Post by ChrisDDickey » Sat Jun 16, 2018 11:16 am

I might add that Corrupt Karma is a seems to be a very similar power, and that one certainly is meant to be done before the roll.
I would want to code them both similarly, ether both entered by the GM before the roll, or both reinterpreting the roll after it has been made.

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