Fundamentally, every plan spreads dice thin. D100s are absolutely wild and fuck with human expectations because there's so many possible outcomes. Options with a 50 needed to clear them sound like a 50% chance of passing with 1 die, but in practice there are 50 outcomes that don't finish it in 1 turn. Putting 2 die technically increases the chances, but the outcome can be anywhere from 2 to 200. It has a high chance of getting above 50, but not guaranteed because it's entirely possible to get below it.
Therefore dice are spread thin for every plan. The law of averages is a tendency rather than a hard rule. Your math may be correct on paper but in practice every dice roll could turn single digit regardless of plan.
That's like arguing that you don't need to go to work because a winning lottery ticket might blow into your pocket.
The math I did (anydice.com) is specifically set up to give straight answers about the probability that the dice rolled
will turn up the result I described. If I say we have a 55% chance of progress completion, it's because I ran the numbers and we do.* Yes, that means there's a 45% chance that we don't complete the project. In most of those 45% of scenarios, we'd be getting close to finished, and in some cases falling far short, just as in some cases we'd have a ton of overkill. For every 'straight single digits' outcome there is an equally likely 'straight 90s' outcome that is equally pointless to plan for.
*(Assuming, of course, I don't forget a -5 bonus somewhere in the mix, or forget to carry the two or something)
...
More generally, whether to spread dice thin or concentrate them depends on the context.
If you have a single project that ride-or-die needs to get done in a hurry to avert disaster, you do it and accept some chance of overkill or wasting resources if you have a turn of uncharacteristically lucky rolls. Or even average rolls. Because the consequences of being
un-lucky and failing the action are bloodcurdling, so you stack the deck in your favor at some cost and potential waste.
If everything is just "stuff we'd like to have" and especially if there are penalties for an intensive short-term "shock effort," then splitting attention and resources makes a lot of sense... as long as you aren't fucking yourself over by the choice of how to split them. See below.
Also they're progress bars rather than hard pass or fail difficulty checks, so any progress on a project is useful even if it doesn't finish right away.
See, that's the thing. Actions like the ones for Bureaucracy often
aren't progress bars. Notice that we don't have a listed Progress cost for those. What often happens in cases like that is a straightforward "the higher the roll, the better the result," and often you don't get a second chance. Based on past experience, with an option like:
[] Find Prior Records [Knowledge]: The records of merchants, nobles, bailiffs, and more, all contain hints of land use, economic activity, and material usage. Gathering and collating all this information will be an immense task, but it will also be a vital one that will greatly simplify many of your plans and objectives. (Max 2 dice, rolled.)
...Basically, if we roll a 4, I'm pretty sure we're getting a fucky result. The records catch fire, or they've all been smuggled off to the provinces, or they were written in Klingon and we have to hire a translation staff just to know what the passcode is to the magically locked vaults in the basement, or something dumb like that. We don't just get four points on an X-point progress bar, usually in cases like this. We're stuck with the consequences of the bad roll.
So if it's important to actually do well in this initiative- and it is- then we're under some obligation to actually take the time and resources to do it right, rather than throwing a skeleton crew at it and hoping for the best. Two dice, instead of one. Prioritizing and concentrating efforts matters, and just YOLO-ing it because "hell, we could get lucky and everything could be great" isn't a good plan.
...
Likewise, look at:
[] Establish Subsidiary Offices: While the city of Belles is unquestionably the most important, there are many lesser cities and locations that you will need to operate in extensively. Establishing branch offices in some of those will be a difficult process that will take up some of your existing staff, but it will be helpful for the future. (No dice limit, rolled.)
There is a clear implication in the first bolded passage that this will take up some of the very staff we're struggling to amass. It might not be a good idea to do that while we're still eating a -5 malus from being short-staffed in the first place. Moreover, it's "rolled," which usually means "roll higher, get better result, roll crappy, get crappy result that you're stuck with for a while." It's an action that, if it's worth doing at all, is worth focusing enough effort on to get a good result. Not a progress bar action like a factory or a canal program.
So when
Golem Making and Grain Saving puts one die on
Establish Subsidiary Offices and one on
Find Prior Records, instead of concentrating on one or the other...
I find myself thinking back to my days of playing
Civilization IV and hearing Leonard Nimoy's voice say "if you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both."
