areustle / underclock_stats

Compare the likelihood of triggering an encounter in a dungeon crawl TTRPG using various Underclock type rules

Underclock

A simulator for the Underclock dungeon crawling mechanic originally suggested by Arnold Kemp in their Goblinpunch Blog.

This improved implementation speeds up the computation substantially, while performing 100x more samples. It also compares Arnold's original rule to several alternates of my own devising.

Goblinpunch Underclock Rule

• Ticks repeat on a Max roll (6 for d6)
• Encounter triggered when clock goes negative.
• Clock resets to 3 when it reaches exactly zero
• Omens triggered when clock == 3

Alternative Underclock Rules

• Ticks repeat on a Max roll (6 for d6)
• Encounter triggered when clock reaches zero (or goes negative.)
• Clock resets to x whenever below x but still running
• Omens triggered when clock <= x

Classic rule

• Encounter triggered when roll == 1
• Omen triggered when roll == 2

Below are the plots comparing the original rule to my alternate rules with different values of x, and for different sizes of dice. With these results I believe my "Alt 3" rule, where x == 3, is the my prefered improvement over the original rule. It maintains the same distribution and a similar mean number of rolls-till-encounter as the original rule, but foreshadows encounters more frequently (which I like) while resetting the clock more frequently, keeping the exact moment of encounter more uncertain than in the original.

Also included is the classic rule of rolling for random encounters on every tick/turn.