Hmm. If there are automatic successes then the lab would be pretty easy to abuse. Just max out your int and then spam making myogen and elastinup until you’re invincible. Perhaps something like Gambler’s Dice which prevent long spans of bad luck. There’s already a floor on luck (can’t be less than a 10% chance of success no matter your debuffs), so perhaps lowering the ceiling could help, too.
Viewing post in Not a bad start. Looking forward to further refinement.
Two things about "making stuff at the lab". You still need a battery for each one, which is its own gate. And because your gauges will still run with each "action", you have an increasing chance of failure even if you've made something 10 times. At least, that's how it is with the current setup. Saving up batteries will not protect you from dying due to sleep deprivation or bursting. Especially since you can't use items while in the lab.
So I would say that if we have a chance at guaranteed checks when making stuff in the lab, it would require two conditions. 1st: You've made that product at least 10 times. 2nd: Your mental fatigue is no higher than 50%. Once Mental Fatigue is past 50%, your odds of success start dropping hard. That should make the reliable production too difficult to obtain without save scumming. Sound reasonable?
I like that solution. Good idea. The task has a pretty heavy mental fatigue right now (0.4, if my memory serves), so you’d be able to make two per day if you had the batteries. That still seems like a lot, but maybe it isn’t given the need to find batteries. I’m still worried a bit about people finding a first order optimal strategy and just optimizing the fun out of the run.
One other consideration is whether it’s worth adding the special case. I like systems based stuff where behaviors emerge naturally, and adding special checks for whether the person has made a certain number seems to interfere with that. Or I’ll forget and make some change to the intelligence checks and end up with a strange bug.
Perhaps then it’s worth looking back to your earlier point about guaranteed success on any roll. Just thinking out loud: There’s always a 10% chance of success. I don’t really want to change that. If it’s changed so (net bonus after penalties > greater than the check) -> guaranteed success, then once a person’s int bonus exceeds 2 they auto succeed on everything (until they get tired). That seems a little imbalanced. Could also do the D&D thing where it has to be ten-over, which doesn’t have an exact mapping here. I’m going to have to think about it more. If I can’t find anything better then maybe the special case is fine.