Do not fall
I'm also thinking about the idea, to implement a kind of an additional first person view (POV) to the game.
This means, that you roll the dices like usual, but you can select one of the horses and use an additional RIDING table for the horse handling, where you can find for example values for dirt (impact to your visibility), problems with the saddle, lashes or reins, combined with jumps (different possibilities to handle them), the temperatur and also contacts with the horse or jockey next to you or the steering and overtaking. And so on.
If you would play that with your friends, it can add some more fun to the races and also add special challenges too. For example, if the reins get loose, you can try to fix them (but you will loose speed during that time) or you continue the race, but this increases the chance to drop out, so there would be also some strategic decisions during the race.
I would say, we can use the following values for the jockey part:
| Value | Reason | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Endurance | Power, fitness | Slows down |
| Saddle | Problems, Stability | Drop out, slows down, touches |
| Reins | Problems, Grip | Drop out, slows down, toches |
| Dirt | Visibility | Slows down |
| Jumps | Miss right moment, handle of landing | Drop out, slows down |
| Distraction | By other horses or jockeys | Slows down, touches |
| Lash | Handling | Speed up, but reduce horse power |
| Injuries | Fall | Chances of minor or heavy injuries, if you fall |
Touches would mean collisions with other horses or the boundary fence.
The part with endurance/power, general handling, distraction and reins could be an adapted calculation based on age), for jumps the weight and so on. So I think, I will rework the existing jockey table and add these columns and think about the right combination of values. But if we look closer:
| Value | Impact by |
|---|---|
| Endurance | Age |
| Saddle | Age (=Experience) |
| Reins | Age (=Experience) |
| Dirt | Age (=Experience) |
| Jumps | Weight, Age, Endurance |
| Distraction | Age (=Experience) |
| Lash | Age |
| Injuries | Age (=Experience) |
We can see here one problem and what I don't like: everything would be based just on the age. I think we need another approach and this means a mix of different values as a kind of basic experience points and then they are used together with a converter dice table to get smoothed results.
Maybe if we create a kind one or two basic values for jockeys, based on a mix of:
- amount of races
- age
- weight
- positions in the past
- amount of troubles in the past
- amount of minor or heavy injuries
I will think about it. And we can add two more values - one is for "Calmness" of a jockey and "Aggressiveness" (but I don't like this harsh word, so let's use "Motivation" instead). The first one can reduce troubles, and the second one maybe pushes the RUN table results (one time each race and on special conditions).