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Is the save-rolling mechanism fair?

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  • AnonymousHeroAnonymousHero Member Posts: 98
    edited August 2016

    This is pretty much confirmation that any strange behavior is the result of some other systemic flaw, like the specialist factor mentioned earlier. The rolls themselves are fair, it's just that they are also modified by a whole lot of stuff, some of which can be difficult to discern and identify since we mostly only see the one single end result with no idea how we got there, exactly.

    Observation/survivorship bias. Never underestimate the splendor and/or flaws of the human pattern matching ability. It's ridiculous and especially exposed during games of random chance, e.g. rolling for stats.
  • lefreutlefreut Member Posts: 1,462
    edited November 2019
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    Post edited by lefreut on
  • Grond0Grond0 Member Posts: 7,318
    Thanks for the link @lefreut

    In relation to whether the RNG is fair I'm pretty sure that the generator itself is fair. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that the results seen by the player are - as these are subject to modification by other processes. For instance it took me years to understand why I sometimes failed saving throws unexpectedly (one particular issue was I didn't realise that some enemies, such as liches, were coded as specialist mages). In that instance I'm not suggesting there was any fault in the game, but it's easy to think there is if you don't understand the underlying mechanics.

    One point about rolling I've seen mentioned a few times on the Forums is HPs on level up provided by the EE. My characters now consistently get HPs above the mean you would expect from the RNG, so I suspect that some underlying mechanic in the game has changed. I know that there had been discussion about introducing an IWD style level up, providing above average HPs, and possibly some work was done on that that has introduced a bias even though (as far as I know) such a change has not officially been made.
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