The Gaming Den

shadzar wrote:

Meikle641 wrote:How are tabletop RPGs marketed these days?

Social Media and smartphone apps with targeted advertising.

like Amazon's "People who bought this also bought...."

You example is neither of the categories you mentioned, but you make a good point.

Sponsored results on google too.

Yeah, about what I figured. It's hard explaining how weird the RPG industry is to the people at the business resource I talk to.

There's Gygax magazine. I haven't checked whether they have DnD5 ads yet.

Level adjustment adds to a creatures racial HD to get ECL right? So by RAW a PC Astral Deva is a 20th level character?

Wiseman wrote:Level adjustment adds to a creatures racial HD to get ECL right? So by RAW a PC Astral Deva is a 20th level character?

Well, such a character would have an effective character level of 20 for purposes of gaining levels and shit. They'd actually only be CR 15, and they'd have 12 hit dice. And yes, that's completely fucked.

-Username17

Thanks. That's what I thought.

I actually played an Astral Deva PC once, in a 20th level microcampaign. (I'd call it a one-shot, but I think we had four sessions or so before we finished it.) I had to min-max my stats to Hell and back and use a ton of dubious custom Magic items to get my numbers up to par, so yes, considering how much better I could have done investing the same effort in a proper character it is indeed totally screwed up. But it did ultimately add up to me pulling my weight in the party, by tekken juggling people with the Stun ability and using at-will Planeshift to dump enemies on inhospitable planes.

So, I thought 3.5 had done away with it, but after realizing that the average rolled Int for an orc would be 9(.5), not 8, I went to check my DMG to see if they still used the tables to figure monster PC scores, rather than having penalized scores figured the same way bonused scores are (score-10 or 11), and they do in fact have you use a chart to look up roll, typical score, and final result.

I thought it was only for Int, but it's for all scores, and Int just has its own because of minimum Int.

Why do they bother with using a special method to determine penalized scores, rather than using the same calculation which figures bonuses and works just as well?

Prak wrote:So, I thought 3.5 had done away with it, but after realizing that the average rolled Int for an orc would be 9(.5), not 8

The rolled average on 3d6 is 10.5 (8.5 with a -2 penalty), the rolled average on 4d6 keep 3 is 12 (10 with a -2 penalty). I honestly have no idea what the fuck you are on about.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:

Prak wrote:So, I thought 3.5 had done away with it, but after realizing that the average rolled Int for an orc would be 9(.5), not 8

The rolled average on 3d6 is 10.5 (8.5 with a -2 penalty), the rolled average on 4d6 keep 3 is 12 (10 with a -2 penalty). I honestly have no idea what the fuck you are on about.

-Username17

He's referring to this rule. It's one of those rules that no one actually uses, but somehow sticks around. It seems to have the goal of preventing a player tanking a stat to zero. Of course, this only applies if you look at an orc as a monster, not a race.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Prak wrote:So, I thought 3.5 had done away with it, but after realizing that the average rolled Int for an orc would be 9(.5), not 8

The rolled average on 3d6 is 10.5 (8.5 with a -2 penalty), the rolled average on 4d6 keep 3 is 12 (10 with a -2 penalty). I honestly have no idea what the fuck you are on about.

-Username17

Look, it should be common knowledge by now that I suck with statistics and probability. Hell, I have the thread you made to tell Ellenser about probability bookmarked for my own elucidation.

But I can figure out straight dice averages. So, yes, I know that the average of 3d6 is 10.5. I have no clue what dropping a die does to the average roll, so I stay away from such calculations.

But for Int in D&D, because 3 is the floor, the average orc int is 9.5, rather than the 8.5 the dice would suggest, because you're generating a number between 3 and 16.

But that's assuming you use a vaguely sane way of determining racial mods for monsters, rather than the way WotC wanted people to do it.

I see what you're getting at: The minimum possible INT is 3, not 1, as it would usually be on 3d6-2, which should on paper shift the average up a point.

However, on a closer look it doesn't because you can still generate rolls that would modify to 2 or 1. The bell curve itself isn't shifted, so the fact that those rolls are adjusted up to the floor of 3 does nothing to the average.

The fact that you remove a ~0.5% chance of getting a 1 and a ~1.4% chance of getting a 2 and instead raise your chance of getting a 3 from ~2.7% to ~4.9% does in fact raise the average. Just... not by much.

I just woke up so I might be terribly off here, but I'm pretty sure that you now have essentially a ~0.5% chance of +2 and a ~1.4% chance of +1, for a total modifier to the average of 0.005*2+0.014*1, which would raise your average from 8.5 to ~8.524.

Prak wrote:Look, it should be common knowledge by now that I suck with statistics and probability. Hell, I have the thread you made to tell Ellenser about probability bookmarked for my own elucidation.

But I can figure out straight dice averages. So, yes, I know that the average of 3d6 is 10.5. I have no clue what dropping a die does to the average roll, so I stay away from such calculations.

But for Int in D&D, because 3 is the floor, the average orc int is 9.5, rather than the 8.5 the dice would suggest, because you're generating a number between 3 and 16.

Ah. I see where you're fucking up. Momo is right by the way, but I think you'll probably want a bit more explanation as to why. The basic story is that the average of a die roll is not always the smallest possible result added to the largest possible result divided by 2. We use that as a shortcut, but it's only actually accurate when dealing with a uniform distribution or centered bellcurve. The longform for determining an average is to add up every possible die result and then divide by the number of possible results.

So when determining the average of a d6, the "right" way to do it is to add:
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 = 21
And then divide by 6, getting a result of 3.5. However, since it's a uniform distribution, we know that the 1+6 gets us the same value as the 2+5 and the 3+4. So we can skip a bit and just average the beginning and the end - all the middle parts will average the same way.

When we determine the average of 2d6, the "right" way to do it is to add:
2 + 3 + 3 + 4 + 4 + 4 ... + 11 + 11 + 12 = 252.
And then we divide by 36, getting a result of 7. But we don't do that, because we can just average the 2 and the 12 because it's a well centered bellcurve and there are just as many 6s as 8s and just as many 10s as 4s.

But let's consider the average of something that is not well centered. Like say, a White Wolf die. It has ten sides, but most of those sides are counted as "zero," with just a few of them counted as "one." Then there's one side of the die (the side which ironically actually has a zero on it) which is either counted as 1 plus a bonus die or as 2 depending on which White Wolf product we're looking at. For clarity of the discussion, let's assume we're looking at the version that counts as 2. So the lowest value is 0 and the highest value is 2, but the average is not 1. We instead go about doing this the right way, and add up the sides on the dice and divide by the number of sides:
0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 = 5
Now we divide by 10, and see that each die produces an average value of one half (note: average values on white wolf dice vary considerably from game to game, a nWoD die is worth one third, but this is a Scion die that is worth one half).

Now this goes back to our example Orc. We're rolling 3d6 and getting a well centered bellcurve, so we can skip the thing where we add up all 216 possibilities and then divide 2268 by 216 and get 10.5. But when we shift with a floor, it's no longer perfectly centered. There's only one result of 16, and three results of 15, but there's zero results of 1 or 2 and ten results of 3.

We are still extremely lazy people, and we don't want to add up all 216 results and then divide by 216. Because that seems like a lot of work. So what we actually do is ignore the floor entirely, work it out as a smooth bellcurve going from 1 to 16, then we add up just the differences from those values provided by the floor and divide that by 216. So we upshit 2 on the one result that is a natural 3 and upshit 1 on the three results that are a natural 4. That's a total upshift of 5, divided by 216 is 0.02315.

Then we add that to our base average value of 8.5 and get the true average: 8.52315. But if you round it off to two significant figures, that's still 8.5 - because the floor value only comes up on one in 54 rolls and doesn't change the average by even one tenth of a point.

-Username17

How do hydras interact with AoAs? (3.5)

fectin wrote:How do hydras interact with AoAs? (3.5)

I assume you either mean AoO or AoE. I don't even know what an AoA is.

The usual interpretation is that a Hydra is allowed to perform one AoO per round per head.

AoE attacks do regular body damage to Hydras, but if you hit them with AoE fire and you've bothered to cut some heads off, then you'd presumably cauterize all the available stumps.

-Username17

My bad: AoO.
That interpretation seemed sanest and was what I thought first, but didn't fit with the other mechanics, or with them having combat reflexes.

The closest reading I could get to normal rules was that each head got multiple AoOs, and could react independently (so stepping up to a hydra gets you bitten 8 times). That seemed... too blendery.

fectin wrote:My bad: AoO.
That interpretation seemed sanest and was what I thought first, but didn't fit with the other mechanics, or with them having combat reflexes.

The closest reading I could get to normal rules was that each head got multiple AoOs, and could react independently (so stepping up to a hydra gets you bitten 8 times). That seemed... too blendery.

It's a huge beast with a speed of 20 and no ranged attack. It probably should be somewhat blendery for the folks that ignore the "Do Not Melee" sign it's wearing.

The closest reading I could get to normal rules was that each head got multiple AoOs, and could react independently (so stepping up to a hydra gets you bitten 8 times). That seemed... too blendery.

That's how we've always done it in my group. You do not charge the hydra.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Prak wrote:Look, it should be common knowledge by now that I suck with statistics and probability. Hell, I have the thread you made to tell Ellenser about probability bookmarked for my own elucidation.

But I can figure out straight dice averages. So, yes, I know that the average of 3d6 is 10.5. I have no clue what dropping a die does to the average roll, so I stay away from such calculations.

But for Int in D&D, because 3 is the floor, the average orc int is 9.5, rather than the 8.5 the dice would suggest, because you're generating a number between 3 and 16.

Ah, thank you, Frank. I'm genuinely going to try to take a stats class in the near future since I need a math class for general ad anyway and my stats and probability skills are so weak.

Thank you for the help.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Prak wrote:Look, it should be common knowledge by now that I suck with statistics and probability. Hell, I have the thread you made to tell Ellenser about probability bookmarked for my own elucidation.

But I can figure out straight dice averages. So, yes, I know that the average of 3d6 is 10.5. I have no clue what dropping a die does to the average roll, so I stay away from such calculations.

But for Int in D&D, because 3 is the floor, the average orc int is 9.5, rather than the 8.5 the dice would suggest, because you're generating a number between 3 and 16.

However, by the chart I posted upthread, they shift the score up such that a roll of 9 or 10 is only reduced by one, and a roll of 8 of less is not reduced at all. This moves the average up to 9.259.

Oh. That's... that's awful. That's awful.

Okay.

So going with the way Frank put it (which is better), we now look at the ways there are to get 7 or 8 on 3d6-2 (9 or 10 on 3d6) and add 1 to those, and then we look at the ways there are to get 1-6 on 3d6-2 (3-8 on 3d6) and add 2 to those. There are 52 ways to get 9 or 10 and 56 ways to get 3-8 on 3d6, so that's 52 +1s and 56 +2s, for a total of +164. We divide that by 216 to get an increase of ~0.759, increasing the average from 8.5 to ~9.259.

That's actually a notable increase, largely because it's not a simple floor. Thank you, TiaC, for pointing that out.

I see Trollman still enjoys his teachable moments.

What are people actually playing these days? I haven't touched a TTRPG in about 3 years. Any actually sane systems out there? Who's going to GenCon this year? (Yes, I saw there's a thread for that, but I'm lazy and this is an annoying questions thread.)

rapa-nui wrote:What are people actually playing these days? I haven't touched a TTRPG in about 3 years. Any actually sane systems out there? Who's going to GenCon this year? (Yes, I saw there's a thread for that, but I'm lazy and this is an annoying questions thread.)

I'm running M&M 2E and Shadowrun+EotM right now; the former is intended to be a couple month affair, followed by a one-shot Eclipse Phase game. The latter has been going on a year now.

I've largely accepted that the best systems are inherently limited to what people are willing to play, and are further limited to people who you would actually enjoy gaming with. Barring those restrictions, the most sane systems for me are M&M, Shadowrun, and 3.X

Just looked at M&M 2e on wikipedia and it looks like it might be OK. Do things generally stay on the RNG or does it fall apart at higher PL?