User talk:Tarkisflux/Rants/Breaking the RNG 1

I think even a single standard deviation (off the die used) might be classified as almost going off the RNG; for example, for a d4, the standard deviation is ~1; for a d6, it's ~2; for a d8 and d10, it's ~3; for a d12 it's ~4, and for a d20 (what we're probably interested in the most) it's 6. (Yes, I know I used very loose numbers for the some of those dice, especially the lower ones, but I wanted to keep to whole numbers.)

When you hits on a 4 what most people need a 10 to hit, the miss chance becomes fairly negligible (only 15%) and additional bonuses to hit don't change the overall damage on average very much. - Ghostwheel, 21 May 2011

Well, yeah. On a flat system a standard deviation from the middle is between a third and a quarter of the total space (approx .285ish of die size). Since actually off is a little less than half the total space, that's pretty close to off the RNG for these dice because there just aren't many numbers on them. The larger your resolution space (like d100 or d1000 or whatever) the more room you have between them because you have additional numerical granularity (though you can never add two standard devs to a flat RNG without going off if you've chosen the middle as your starting point), and in those cases 1 STDev is probably not close to off. But for these, sure, we can classify that as almost going off for these dice. And if you want people to not go anywhere near off and stay very close to each other you should limit their available bonuses so that they don't stray too far from their expected bonuses.

The problem of going off the RNG has never been about average damage for me though, it's been about people being unable or just not needing to participate in challenges because the gulf between bonuses was too big. But then I don't share your desire to deal with fights primarily via damage. - Tarkisflux, 21 May 2011