Resources> FMA Odds

Here's a table with the probability of the attacker's die (down the column) beating the defender's die (across the row)--so if A is a d6 and D is a d10, we see that A has a 25% chance of beating D. I'll come back and revise this from time to time to cover questions like Are two GMS/P better than one GMS/L?.

There is also a spreadsheet (33KB, or zipped at 6KB) to help you calculate the odds of other Attack-vs-Defense dice combinations. For the Attacker column and the Defender row, put in the number of combinations that correspond to that score for the dice you're using. For example, next to the 7, you'd put a 1 if you're using a d8, a d10, or a d12, but you'd put a 6 if you're rolling 2d6. Yes, this is clear as mud--but I know you're bright so hopefully you can cope until I can put together a better explanation. Further to the right, you'll see a place where you can input probabilities for up to four dice and see what your chances are of getting 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 hits. For those who don't want to bother with Excel, here's the basic table.

		Defender
Attacker		d4	d6	d8	2d4	d10	d12	2d6	2d8
	d4	.375	.250	.188	.063	.150	.125	.028	.016
	d6	.583	.417	.313	.208	.250	.208	.093	.052
	d8	.688	.563	.438	.375	.350	.292	.194	.109
	2d4	.844	.656	.500	.414	.400	.333	.201	.113
	d10	.750	.650	.550	.500	.450	.375	.311	.188
	d12	.792	.708	.625	.583	.542	.458	.417	.276
	2d6	.931	.838	.715	.691	.597	.500	.444	.276
	2d8	.961	.909	.836	.789	.745	.654	.639	.458

Here's how to use the probabilities. In StarGrunt, you get a minor hit by having one of your attack dice beat the target's defense die, and you get a major hit by having two or more of your dice beat the target. Let's say you have a squad with d10 firepower and a d6 quality, and your target is in soft cover in the second range band, so gets d8 for his defense die.

• Chance of a major hit is .313 (for the d6) x .550 (for the d10) = .172
• Chance of both dice missing is (1 -.313) x (1 - .550), so .687 x .450 = .309
• Chance of a minor hit is 1.000 - (chance of both missing + chance of both hitting), so 1.000 - (.309+.172) = .519

Your chance of doing a minor hit or better is therefore .172 +.519 = 69.1%, including the 17.2% chance of a major hit.

If you add a SAW gunner with FPd10 to your squad, you have eight different possible results (ABC, AB, AC, BC, A, B, C, none hit). Working out the probabilities, we find the chance of having at least a minor hit or better is over 86%. More importantly, that includes a 45.8% chance of having a major hit--over two and a half times the rate before we added the SAW.