Even so, the numbers are designed such that it's extremely rare that a very weak character will just happen to have something else picked to help him. Probably winning at blackjack has better odds.

The point isn't that it's impossible, just that the vast majority of the time players will hate drawing a Visionary card because it most likely won't last long. In PVB stories it's quite the opposite - we just wait to see how he gets himself out of this mess.





What I'm getting at here, and why I have so much difficulty with statistics-based games is that I'm terrible with math. I once attempted to write for another shared universe, but it was run by D&D-type statistical gamers. I was literally expelled from it because I could not provide statistics for the characters I was using.

Basically the conflict was that they wanted every story that was written and submitted to conform to statistical analysis and rolls of the dice, and I thought it was more fun and interesting to have surprise twists. I got a lot of "you can't do that, the stats don't support it" and the either the stories were rejected outright, or if it slipped through because someone was in a hurry, it was pulled later and other stories re-written to remove mine from continuity. The other writers got tired of my inability to grasp the numbers and voted me out.

Part of the problem, of course, was my tendency to create characters who weren't really fighters but were highly creative. That caused a problem either for me or for them, because statistically they should have turned up dead in each story. Rather than let them die and create new characters each round as in a tabletop game, I pulled clever surprises instead.

So to this day I feel like a numbers system for characters is extremely limiting. I guess it's good for keeping things on track during a game that needs strict rules (though I'd never really get a handle on it), but it's no substitute for good storytelling.