Lucky 7: U13's Smaller Twin

 I was walking across a field thinking about ways to simplify Unlucky 13. What I came up with was Lucky 7. My original intent was to maybe make it an optional rule in the U13 book. After giving it some thought, I might actually reverse those roles: L7 will be the main rule, and U13 will be an optional alternate.

My thought for a Lucky 7 logo

The First Thought

My thought as I was walking was to replace U13's 2d12 with 1d12. Rolling 1d12, we can't expect a success to be 14+, so we drop that to 8. The failure result becomes 6 or less, with a "7" being the "Lucky 7" result: it defaults to a failure but can be converted to a success if the player is willing to accept a consequence.  In other words:

Outcome	U13 2d12	L7 1d12
Success	14 - 24	8 - 12
“Consequence”	13	7
Failure	2 - 12	1 - 6

So I ran the L7 numbers. I was very pleased to see that they were pretty much within 3% of the U13 probabilities.  One thing that made me less happy, though, was that the 1-3% difference was always to the player's disadvantage.

James Suggests a Fix

I mentioned my concern to James and he immediately said "Just shift everything by one, though the name won't be as cool." That means that 7 would now be a full success, and 6 would now be the "yes, but" result (if the player so chooses): 

Outcome	U13 2d12	L7 1d12
Success	14 - 24	7 - 12
“Consequence”	13	6
Failure	2 - 12	1 - 5

The numbers ended up looking like this:

Chance of success. Click for a bigger version.

I really like these chances, even more than the distribution in U13. For a task of "average difficulty" the player has a full 50% chance of success normal, which rises to 58% if he's willing to take the "Bad Thing" when he rolls a 6. This is a ~4% benefit for the player over U13.

The Name

I think I can still keep the "Lucky 7" name, because 7 is the number you need in order to succeed without any negative consequences. Maybe "6" will be called an "unlucky 6."

Benefits of L7 over U13

As I said, this might become the "main rule," and relegate U13 as an alternate rule. There are two main reasons for this:

1. As I mentioned above, I really like the probability distribution better.
2. Dealing with 1 die is easier that 2 dice; there's no math involved. This advantage is magnified with using penalty or bonus dice, because it's easier to scan the dice for the lowest or highest die than it is to look for the two lowest dice in a group.

Amiright?

What do you think? Do you like L7 more than U13, or should I go back?