crossposting this from my twitter/tumblr so it'll be accessible here :)

hi! let's talk about modding EotP if u want to play it w a poly relationship! normally i think my philosophy would be to leave hacking/adaptation entirely up to the players - i trust u guys to bend things around to meet ur needs - but ppl have been asking + i do have some thoughts!

a lot of this is gonna be about what is, to a lot of people, probably super basic dice probability - but when i was designing EotP it was all new to me, so bear with me! i wanna lay it out so that my kindred Gays Who Hate Math can understand how to adjust things however they want

so one of the main things that need to change is that for the challenges/marital trials, both players have to roll a d8. but now we need more than 2 players to roll a d8 to participate, and that totally changes the ranges and the probabilities, so we have to fix it!

rolling several dice and adding them together is different than rolling a d20. you have a way higher chance of collectively rolling a sum somewhere in the middle. so if you split the possible sum ranges of three 8-sided die more or less "evenly," like in the top bar of this diagram, it turns out pretty unbalanced

in EotP trials have three basic outcomes: roll too low + u perform poorly, roll in the middle + u've hit just the right balance, but roll too well + u start catching feelings. but the thing is, imo, the fumble + overshoot outcomes are more fun! so ideally we want it to be equal, but when it comes down to it, depending on how the numbers sort out, i would advise letting the middle range take the hit. here's the dice calculator i used; you would just have to figure out these ranges for the # of characters in the marriage!

there are some other tweaks that can be made to trials. for example, a lot of them assign roles/tasks based on which half of a pair rolls higher or lower. w a group >2, that could be modded into highEST and lowEST, or just splitting the group down the middle into high/low camps

for the regular card prompts that drive most of gameplay, that can be pretty easily handled by just having players address their responses to all other players in the marriage, rather than just to a singular spouse as the prompts are written for. BUT, i think a cool adaptation to allow for more zoomed-in interactions within a poly character group could be to have everyone roll their d8s when a prompt is pulled, and the player handling the prompt focuses their turn specifically on the player(s) who rolled closest to their result. i think this could create some cool flow where u get insight on specific interactions within the relationship, since everyone won't necessarily be interacting w/commenting on every other player each prompt, + it would allow the party to "split"/not insist everyone is always clumped together ingame

the one thing i'm sticking on is the boiling point mechanic, which is how the game ends. normally it relies on 2 players rolling their dice, then choosing an outcome based on the difference btwn their results. that's harder to replicate w a group. for now my thought is to just replace that mechanic entirely with another range of high-low thresholds, like the ones above, but split into 4 instead (bc BP has 4 possible outcomes, vs 3 for the challenges); but i want to chew on it more, and if anyone has any suggestions i'd def welcome them!

in the end i rly just want ppl to feel comfortable crunching this thing up + tearing it apart + frankensteining it back together in whatever ways would be fun. im not interested in being like This Is The Official Poly Expansion Mode! or w/e. but i hope this can b a helpful start!