Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Feb 21, 2013 10:27 pm

Rather the point, ylm.

violence in the media · Fri Feb 22, 2013 12:52 pm

...You Lost Me wrote:That just looks like a penis...

Tenser's Floating Dick?

Count Arioch the 28th · Fri Feb 22, 2013 5:31 pm

Are there any decent tips on making an ideal mounted character, assuming the leader is in fact the mount and the rider is a cohort/minion?

The idea is making villain who is a Nightmare dread necromancer/fiend blooded (yeah, it's humanoid only, bite me I'm doing it anyway), with a series of expendable riders. So multiple builds/concepts would work.

And let's face it, this could work for wargs (who are the real tops in the goblin/warg relationship) and dragons too.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Fri Feb 22, 2013 7:48 pm

"Sometimes you ride the warg, sometimes the warg rides you."
~ Ancient Goblin philosophical musing on the abject crappiness that is life

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Feb 22, 2013 9:56 pm

Why not use Leadership?

Count Arioch the 28th · Fri Feb 22, 2013 10:01 pm

Because an NPC doesn't need to take it. And it doesn't answer the question.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Feb 22, 2013 10:08 pm

Right, no, I mean as the mount. Take leadership, your cohort is your rider. Ah, and now I see what the real question is. Dragon #304 has rules for intelligent mounts, though I'm not sure how useful it would be, it's a good starting place.

Count Arioch the 28th · Fri Feb 22, 2013 10:43 pm

Closer, but I think I am still not communicating well. Other than having a cohort with levels of bard and marshal, what are good things to make your cohort do to make you more awesome?

Examples:

A white raven warblade.

A spellstitched dethlock cleric

A mounted dwarf defender with some way to shield other.

Stuff like that.

Post by **fbmf** » Fri Feb 22, 2013 11:48 pm

Once upon a time I played a goblin warg rider. Both the goblin and the warg had levels of devoted defender and the goblin had mounted combat. That way they could deflect or just flat out soak up hits for each other.

Game On,
fbmf

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Sat Feb 23, 2013 12:15 am

@ Count,

Have a 3.5 paladin be at least 10th level, read the special mount rules in the back of the DMG, laugh when you realize that it is the only ability in the game that works off of Challenge Rating instead of Hit Dice. A paladin's special mount may be a creature with a CR 2 less than the paladin it belongs to, and a flying creature is 3 CR less, but a large gold dragon special mount is CR 7 (a CR of 3 less than a 10th level paladin), has 11d12 dragon hit dice and 2d8 more and a grab bag other abilities because this dragon is a paladin special mount. Be a (replacable) large gold dragon for 20 hours every day, and when the paladin levels up you get to be a bigger dragon with more hit dice. Have the paladin take levels in cavalier and warblade anything else that advances the paladin's special mount ability, and pick up some magic crowns with the white raven maneuvers in the back of the book of 9 swords, go nuts.

Although the dragon special mount is nominally CR 7, dragons are [awesome] and hit like a CR 11 freight train of delicious cake, to which special mount abilities (bonus HD, STR, NA, Abilities!) are frosted on.

Tumbling Down · Post by **Tumbling Down** » Sat Feb 23, 2013 1:32 am

Take a look at the the Symbionts in FF and ECS. Especially look at their Share Spells ability.
Have your cohort polymorph into one or do it yourself (or have the cohort be an actual symbiont Ur-Priest or something) and use Assume Supernatural Ability to get Share Spells and use it to make your cohort Persistent buff you.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Feb 23, 2013 11:46 pm

Aranea are magical shape changing spiders, with greater than average intelligence, who speak sylvan by default, and cast as 3rd level sorcerers.

How the fuck are they Magical Beasts and not Fae?

Count Arioch the 28th · Sun Feb 24, 2013 12:06 am

Anti-spider bias.

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Sun Feb 24, 2013 12:26 am

Darth Rabbitt wrote: Probably something like this.

I find the creepiest part of that picture is how the snake seems to be looking over its 'shoulder' and holding a tentacle to its mouth. No, coquettish snake! Bad!

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sun Feb 24, 2013 5:25 am

I've misplaced my Fiendish Codices. Does anyone have FCI on them, and if so, could you tell me the CR of the Barlgura (tusked orangutang)?

Also, any particular "fuck you" abilities they might have would be appreciated.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sun Feb 24, 2013 5:33 am

CR 5, they have Invisibility and Major Image as a spell-like twice a day, and their Abduction ability allows them to grab someone and greater teleport them away if the target fails a Will save of DC 18.

Darth Rabbitt · Post by **Darth Rabbitt** » Sun Feb 24, 2013 5:35 am

Meikle641 wrote:
Darth Rabbitt wrote: Probably something like this.
I find the creepiest part of that picture is how the snake seems to be looking over its 'shoulder' and holding a tentacle to its mouth. No, coquettish snake! Bad!

All Lovecraftian monsters should know to not act coy when there's tentacle rape mindfucking cosmic horrors to be had.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Feb 27, 2013 1:56 am

How does "drop one" affect dice probabilities? Like "roll 4d6, drop the lowest" or D&D Next's "Roll 2d20, take the lower/higher"? I know iterative probabilities and dice averages, but this throws me.

Emerald · Post by **Emerald** » Wed Feb 27, 2013 2:44 am

Prak_Anima wrote:How does "drop one" affect dice probabilities? Like "roll 4d6, drop the lowest" or D&D Next's "Roll 2d20, take the lower/higher"? I know iterative probabilities and dice averages, but this throws me.

Dropping the lowest N dice will shrink the standard deviation because the results cluster together more and will increase the mean because you're removing the lowest results. For those two specifically, going from 1d20 to 2d20-drop-lower increases the mean from 10.5 to ~13.8 and decreases the standard deviation from ~5.7 to ~4.7, and going from 3d6 to 4d6-drop-lowest increases the mean from 10.5 to ~12 and decreases the standard deviation from ~2.9 to ~2.8.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Feb 27, 2013 3:01 am

Ok... slightly more detail for people who stopped at Algebra 2 and did just enough to slide by in high school?

Ted the Flayer · Post by **Ted the Flayer** » Wed Feb 27, 2013 3:35 am

The roll will be between 10 and 14 about 68% of the time you roll, and be between 7-18 about 95% of the time if you roll 4d6, drop the lowest.

That's opposed to 7-13 about 68% of the time, and 4-17 98% of the time with 3d6.

Note that in 3d6, rolling a single 18 was defined as a statistical anomaly and just didn't happen, while in 4d6 drop lowest you could expect to see it at a statistically significant (but still very low) rate.

I'm sure that's oversimplified and someone can give better numbers than that, but it should be easy enough to understand if you don't know stats.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Wed Feb 27, 2013 5:20 am

There's a free MatLab interpreter called Octave here:
http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/

grab it, script up a die roller, and simulate. Run 10k or so trials, and you'll have a good distribution. If you've used C or java before, it should take ~ 30 min for the first one, 5 min for every other.

As a side benefit, you'll know MatLab well enough to fumble through it afterwards (though, I find MatLab finnickier than Octave, TBH).

Monte Carlo FTW.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Feb 27, 2013 6:49 am

Ok, let me phrase it this way.

How do I determine the probability, or at least the average, of a "XdY, drop lowest" roll? While I'm sure I could find someone here willing to tell me the probability or average, or whatever, if I posted and waited long enough, I'd like to have some self-sufficiency here.

Emerald · Post by **Emerald** » Wed Feb 27, 2013 8:57 am

Prak_Anima wrote:Ok, let me phrase it this way.

How do I determine the probability, or at least the average, of a "XdY, drop lowest" roll? While I'm sure I could find someone here willing to tell me the probability or average, or whatever, if I posted and waited long enough, I'd like to have some self-sufficiency here.

The long and involved way to get the average is to enumerate the possible results of the roll, sum each [result]*[frequency of result] pair, and divide by the total number of results. For instance, when rolling 2d6, you can get the numbers from 2 to 12, and there are 6*6 possible results:
2: 1 way (1,1)
3: 2 ways (1,2 and 2,1)
4: 3 ways
5: 4 ways
6: 5 ways
7: 6 ways
8: 5 ways
9: 4 ways
10: 3 ways
11: 2 ways
12: 1 way
Sum up 2*1 + 3*2 + 4*3 + ... + 11*2 + 12*1 to get 252, divide by the number of results (36) to get the average of 7.

The easy way to do it is to use something to calculate it for you. Octave will do it via random trials, I've written a Python script to calculate it exactly if you want a copy of that, and if you just want a quick visual to get a basic sense of a given expression there's Anydice.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Wed Feb 27, 2013 2:45 pm

Yeh, you've got to count them, I think. There should be a general solution, but I doubt it's easier to use than programming a count loop, or whipping up something in a spreadsheet (which is my usual method).

That anydice link works fine though. http://anydice.com/program/115 for best 3 of 4d6.

Add multiple outputs to put your graphs on the same sheet there. Try my little favourite 1d10+5 and 3d6 on the "at most" tab for a little beware the illusion of curves. http://anydice.com/program/1e77