So I'm working on a game that's got (to my knowledge) a novel mechanic; at least as far as tabletop roleplaying goes.
So the central game mechanic is essentially lifted from Yahtzee: characters want X of a kind or a straight of X dice in a row, but they also need to do this Y times in a particular roll.
The dice pool is of variable size.
Unfortunately, I can't think of any way to program this for something like AnyDice, and while I wasn't bad at math in high school I primarily did math in high school so I wouldn't have to do it in college.
With that said, here's the insight that I've gotten so far:
Every possible combination that yields X in a straight or row is acceptable, so you've got a pretty good chance of having at least some straights or rows, even with the system minimum of three dice.
X*Y will likely be a significant factor; if you want X>=3, Y>=1 in a pool of 3, your chances are roughly 6% (between the three of a kinds [6/216] and three-length straights [6/216] that are possible, but my math may be off here when doing the permutations). I believe that trying the same thing with X>=1, Y>=3 is the same calculation (e.g. you'd need results like 2, 4, 6 or 1, 3, 5). You also have the opportunity to have X>=2, Y>=2, which works out to something like 10-12% (I tested this by hand because I have no clue how to calculate this. Obviously if X or Y is greater than Z there is 0 chance of success, because you can't roll four of a kind with 3 dice, but X+Y>Z still leads to some successes, and actually more than X=Z or Y=Z. Where X+Y=
I think this would need a matrix to represent potential probabilities, but I'm also pretty sure that there's a handy formula to calculate the probability of a result given X, Y, and Z that I'm just unaware of.
