Entropomancy Charging Math

The Secret Prayers of Gamblers (Mark Pernice)

 

Entropomancy initially appears to be surrendering yourself to chaos. However, when you look at how you get charges, it's more about taking calculated risks. In an ideal world, you'd find an activity with an exactly 10% chance of injury or monetary loss. However, that's easier said than done. Casinos try to keep a player's chance of winning a game below 50% so that they can make money in the long run. Your best option is to wager large amounts of money at blackjack, where with perfect play you can have a 49.9% chance of winning or breaking even. Though if the house uses multiple decks and certain rules, that can drop down to just 48%.

If you'd rather risk your physical well-being, toss an object ten feet into the air and play chicken with gravity. Falling objects deal 1d10 damage per ten feet and you can roll dodge to avoid the damage if you know it's coming (see page 72 in Book 1 for the complete falling rules). Put 90 of your starting percentiles into an identity that substitutes for dodge and you're good to go. If it improves through failure (Book 1, page 45), that can push you past the 10% chance of failure. But just slam back two shots of vodka and the -5% penalty will make it risky enough again. The main drawback with this strategy is that you start with a measly 30% in your adept identity.

Significant charging is a bit trickier. If you opt for the classics and play Russian roulette, you can optimize your chances with some clever tricks: use a ten-shot revolver for an exact 10% chance of failure, aim the gun at your foot instead of your head, etc.  

If you don't have a gun or enough hardened notches to reliably point one at yourself and pull the trigger, try parkour! A 50-foot drop inflicts 5d10 wounds if you fail the dodge or fitness check to tuck and roll. Some sort of acrobatic identity at 65% is enough for a 12% chance to miss the jump and take 5d10 damage. Unfortunately, there's a 23% chance that you'll still take 4d10 damage. If you screw up and get an experience check, this activity may not be risky enough to count for significant charging. The cutoff point is at 69%, where you only have a 9% chance of suffering 5d10 wounds. 

No matter what you do, major charging is still a pain in the ass. The simplest way is to assign your Favorite relationship to another bodybag during corkboarding and ask them if they want to play Russian roulette. You just need to point the gun in such a way that if it goes off, the bullet will pass through your skull and into theirs. If you take turns pulling the trigger, there's an 81% chance you'll both survive with one major each. Of course, there's also a 19% chance you both die, but you didn't become an entropomancer by worrying about little things like that. You could also be a jerk and only promise to give them a chance at glory, backing out at the last second after you've gotten your major. But that's risky. If you're clever, you'll saw off the trigger guard so both of you can get your meat hooks on bang switch. The two of you are both risking your lives, but since you're doing it simultaneously, you only have to roll the dice once.

You can also gamble with your spells!

The Evil Eye lets you wager an extra d10 damage on a 50% chance. Most of the time, it's not worth it. However, if you roll particularly badly for damage, the expected value of rolling another die can be higher than if you didn't gamble.

To explain, lets say you roll a 12, dealing 3 points of damage. If you add another d10 you have a 50% chance of rolling an even number and inflicting 5, 7, 9, 11, or 13 wounds. You also have a 50% chance of rolling an odd number and dealing zero damage. This means that on average, you'll inflict 4.5 wounds, (5+7+9+11+13)/10, which is greater than 3. If all you care about is maximizing damage dealt per charges spent, it's worth it, at least in the long run.

The math is in your favor for damage values of 5 or less. You break even at 6 points (50% chance of dealing 8-16 damage and 50% chance of dealing 0 damage yields an average of 6 damage). Once you've rolled a sum of 7 or higher, either with the default damage from the casting roll or by adding d10s, it's not worth it to risk rolling more dice.

Double or Nothing is also a gambling spell, but its odds are much better than your blast's. At first glance, it seems like you have a 9% chance of wasting your charges (by rolling a result from 01 to 09), but that's before taking flip-flops into account. A novice chaos mage with a mere 15% in their adept identity can change a 01 into a 10, meaning they only have an 8% chance of wasting three minor charges. For every ten percentiles you have in entropomancy, the chance of squandering your charges drops by 1%, becoming risk free at 90%. 

Susanna “Boxcars” Edwards
Personality: Fatalistic and resigned until it directly threatens her.
Fear: Curses (Unnatural)
Noble: Making people smile.
Rage: People who think they’re too good for whimsy and wonder.
Obsession: All the world's a stage.
WT: 50 (Ms. Edwards is usually suffering from 1d10-5 wounds)
Clown 90%: Of course I can make a child laugh, not get scammed by carnies, juggle anything I can hold in one hand (Subs Connect, Subs Dodge, Coerces Isolation)
Entropomancer 30%*: (Gains Charges, Casts Rituals, Uses Gutter Magick)
Stress Trackers
    Helplessness: 4H
    Isolation: 5H, 1F
    Self: 1H
    Unnatural: 3H, 2F
    Violence: 1H
Appearance: Tall with spider-like hands. Doesn't wear any makeup when 'off-duty.' While performing, Susanna goes for a simple whiteface with red lips and a fake nose. 
Possessions: A brick with the RWS illustration for the Wheel of Fortune painted on it (she uses this to charge up), a set of keys (most of which she isn't supposed to have) to doors in the carnival, 2d10 minor charges.

What You Hear: Susanna learned magick from the carnival's fortune teller, 'Virgil,' a high-level avatar of The Guide who cursed himself with dementia to stop himself from breaking taboo. Unfortunately, that also prevents him from using his avatar powers. Susanna knows some 'activation phrases' that can temporarily suppress the feeblemind effect. She uses these to get advice before making major life decisions. She'd be happy to teach them to anyone who can help her get Virgil into a good assisted living facility or provide elder care themselves. The PCs could just try to eavesdrop, but earning Susanna's favor means access to a steady stream of minor charges, which could be useful for a Mak Attax cabal or gutter mages. She could also make single-use constructed artifacts if another adept showed her how.

While miss Edwards has figured out the exact mechanics of minor charging through trial and error, her mentor never taught her about significant or major magick. Entropomancer PCs can earn her favor by introducing her to the wider world of charges. This is a high risk, high reward strategy. Drunk on the rush of power, she'll do almost anything, including spending her significant charges on other people's behalf. The experience of generating them is enough to satisfy her for now. However, she approaches it with the same cavalier attitude as minor charging, which will likely end with her death. Teaching her about major charging is a bad idea all around. Susanna may love her mentor, but he doesn't feel the same way, even in his lucid moments. Thus, her only option is occult terrorism. It's possible Virgil anticipated these outcomes and intentionally left her magickal education incomplete.

Enrico Mendez
Personality: Cheery and outgoing, always looking for something new. 
Fear: Getting arrested (Helplessness)
Noble: Education, it's never too late to learn. 
Rage: Posers
Obsession: Air time
WT: 65 (Mendez usually has 5d10-25 wounds)
Pro Skater 65%: Of course I can make skating seem cool in [current year], film my own stunts, walk off a wipeout (Subs Fitness, Subs Status, Provides Wound Threshold)
Entropomancer 55%*: (Gains Charges, Casts Rituals, Uses Gutter Magick)
Stress Trackers
    Helplessness: 2H, 1F
    Isolation: 2H, 1F
    Self: 1H
    Unnatural: 3H
    Violence: 3H, 1 F
Appearance: Broken nose, farmer's tan, always wearing knee and elbow pads.
Possessions: A plot of land with a 45-foot megaramp built into the side of the the barn. Zoning laws wouldn’t let him build a halfpipe that high, so he registered it as an “agricultural structure.” He uses this to farm significant charges, since 5 feet of air is pretty easy with that much vert. He's usually rocking 1d5 significant charges.

What You Hear: Enrico is willing to teach entropomancy to anyone who helps him find a new way of generating significant charges. This could be renovating his ramp so he can do new tricks, or introducing him to the world of urban exploration and high-altitude parkour. If becoming an entropomancer doesn't interest you because you already are one, he can teach you some of the custom formula spells he developed instead.

Boom or Bust

Cost: 3 minor charges

Effect: Flip a coin instead of rolling a d100; heads is a crit, tails is a fumble. The spell affects your next roll and a number of rolls after that equal to the tens place of the casting roll (01-09 counts as zero). You can cast this on someone else in your line of sight for an additional 2 minor charges

 

Fickle Fate
Cost: 1-3 significant charges

Effect: The degree of success on the target's next roll drops by one step for each charge spent. One charge could turn a simple success into a simple failure, while three can thwart even a mighty crit. If you get a matched success on the casting roll, the target's roll is penalized an extra step, or by two steps if you got a crit. Like Taste of Chaos, you can only use this on someone once a day. You must have line of sight to the victim, even if only through a reflection. However, the spell noisily breaks and shatters any reflective surfaces it 'bounces' off on its path to the real target.

 

Mendez isn't aware that he can take smaller risks to generate minor charges. He's not as impressed as Susanna, but knowledge is knowledge. It's worth a mundane favor, like free access to his DIY skate park. That could count as a milestone on any skating related objective (especially one for gaining Pro Skater as a new identity). It's also useful if the PCs need a large private outdoor area for whatever reason.