Say What??

One of the questions I've gotten from guys who own W2W is ... "How can so-and-so have an interception rating of 45?  He was a better QB than that!"

Well, the reason for it ties neatly into the conversion conversation (I like that alliteration!), which is to say that we can neatly port over the formula and rationale for interception rating into the new game.  But before I do, let's talk a bit of math ...

Ahhhhh, you say ... here's where you trick me into listening to a dissertation on math and complex equations!  No, not really.  But, until you understand some of what you can do with math and game design, you won't really understand a rating that's used, and how it *will* work "correctly" over thousands of dice rolls.

Let's take an interception rating, then, in the context of W2W, because that context will be identical for the new game.  And let's assume that the QB we're looking at has an interception percentage of 3.9.

If you were designing a game with individual QB cards, like APBA, you can make sure the QB throws a pick 3.9% of the time by simply assigning him enough card results that can end in an interception roughly 3.9% of the time.  In a base-36 system like APBA, merely multiply 36 by .039 ... and you find you'll need 1.4 card results.  And, based on which card results end in an interception (and how often), you'd find the two results that happen 1.4 times in 36.

For percentage-based games, you'd simply say that the QB gets picked on some range that can be a range of four (base-100) or a range of 39 (base-1000).  Let's look at that base-100 number again ...

In a 2d10 system (base-100), there's no way to replicate to the tenth of a percentage point.  3.9 gets rounded to 3 or 4, depending on what you want.  But the question you should be asking here, a la Joe Pesci in "My Cousin Vinny", is "Are you suuuure?"

The answer, of course, is "no" ... we're not sure that we can't replicate that because we need to add a dimension to the base-100 system that will take us to another level, creating a base-1000 system without the need for a three-digit dice roll.

How?  By introducing a concept that was first seen in On The Green Golf ... the Activator Die, an additional d10 that allows us to do all sorts of additional things that we can't do with a base-100 system.

Here's the thought process:  For the most part, no QB with regular playing time has an interception rate higher than 10%.  So, we add the Activator Die and say that, whenever the Activator Die is EQUAL to the Ones Die from the 2d10 roll, we have an "interception check" ... statistically, this will happen 10 times out of every 100 dice rolls (00, 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, 99).

Why an "interception check" and not a straight INT?  Because all but the rarest of QBs will have an interception rate of 10%.  What the check does is make us do another 2d10 roll, that now must be less than or equal to the QB's Interception Rating, for there to actually be an interception.  Anything higher is simply an incomplete pass (overthrown, dropped by the d-back, batted away, etc).

For this QB, his Interception Rating is 39.  Why?  Because 39% of the time, when there's an Interception Check, he will throw the pick.  WAIT!!  Are you saying he's got a rate of 39%??  Didn't you say 3.9%??

Nope, I'm saying that, 10% of the time, he'll throw a pick 39% of the time.  And the math then proves an interception rate of 3.9% ...

rate = .10 x .39
rate = .039 = 3.9%

There's is a way to short-cut this, and we'll be using this short-cut in the new game.

No qualifying QB (one who has enough pass attempts to be rated in the game) should have a completion percentage higher than 90%.  Because of that, we can state, in the rules, that anytime a QB's Pass Roll is 90-99 (in our game, 00 = 0, not 100), then there's an Interception Check.  And then, just as in W2W (but without an Activator), we do another roll against the QB's rating to see if he gets picked.

And so, now you see a couple of ways that you can approach representing plays that are a subset of the whole.  Folks need to remember that the interceptions are "double-counted" in football ... they are part of the total number of pass attempts, and they are also counted separately.  A QB who is 3-5-1 actually had 3 completions, one incompletion, and one interception.