Search results

Do you even understand what I'm saying? roll 6 sets of 3d6, 1,000 times. Group in order from highest total to lowest total. Look at number 100 His or her average 3d6 score will be 12. None of this is opinion, it's basic statistics. If you don't comprehend this, than hopefully I can spell...

10% of the population averages 12 or better for each stat. Do they have PC classes? Not necessarily. But, if everyone is rolled on 3d6, 10% of the population will average 12 or better for every attribute (for large enough populations - 1,000 or greater, the chance of this not happening is...

I tend to think of 36 points as a minimum when I run games now - If there are 10 million people in your world and you have them play with 25 point buy, there are over a million people as good as (or better than) them. It really depends on your story, but in my opinion the characters need to...

Insignificant Microsoft flunky, I fear not your skills at a language that isn't. :-p

No, more like top 10% of the population, which is also what 4d6 will produce on average (rather neat, that). I wrote a program which makes millions of people, but unfortunately it sorts them according to raw stats rather than point buy, so I can only confirm that 25 point buy usually equals the...

I won't touch VB classes, or VB itself, with a 10 foot pole. I feel icky just -looking- at JAVA classes. To C++, I devote my love.

The character in my main campaign has amazingly powerful parents (near 20th level) and an even more powerful mentor (mid 30's). D&D is, unfortunately, not so mystical about most of its magical items and thus we get this thing about 'dressing the part' and all. So, as I wrote it, Thantil (my...

Plastic casts have a much, much higher overhead. I forget the exact figure, but something like $20,000 per mold. Of course, per unit they are much cheaper, but the initial investment is quite significant. Still, given the popularity of D&D and Mageknight I wonder why they didn't go down this...

It's still an arrow falling from cos 30-60 degrees or so times the maximum range. If this gets to be over a few hundred yards, the arrow is falling in excess of 200 mph. Subotai's tactics were to stretch them out and smash their sides. Plate armor is very effective against arrows, in that it...

I just refer to it as Welsh because, as I understand it, that's where most of the archers came from. The training distance makes sense then, I guess. I've heard some say the range was 700 yards - but that was clearly on high ground. Since I don't know if stronger bows would make any...

In line with Endur's, I would have begun campaign-forming riddles awhile ago, but it's never too late to start... The riddles are a series of cryptic quests (find the first kiss, climb the lowest mountain, etc.) that grant them something special ("And thou shall never go hungry.") Eventually...

Are you referring to the Welsh bow? Henry VIII decreed that noone over the age of 24 could practice at less than 220 yards, and that the typical extreme range was 400 yards, with draw weights between 120 and 180 pounds for a good heartwood bow. That's a lot but then again Mongols weren't...

20 layers of linen did well enough too - the arrow might penetrate it, but it allowed a lot of people to get back up. Did the mongols ever face anything like the Welsh longbow though? Even silk has limits...

It's not just for DR and armor. That's rather a minor point, actually. I'm taking the classes out and duplicating their abilities with feats and skills, first and foremost. Secondmost is to lose the damned Vancian magic system, or anything resembling it (ala Arcana Unearthed). Though this is...

Am doing that :-p

It wasn't a direct effect. Plate armor was great and all - even against pistols and early muskets, but chain well, wasn't. It simply became too resource inneficient to make armor in general, and it actually passed out of favor before it became outmoded by muskets.

You only used daggers on an already down and disarmed knight in full plate, typically in the groin or armpit area - but I don't know of any account where someone seriously took on an armed, standing man in full plate with a dagger and lived.

In the past 9 days in said campaign his entire home country got invaded. (Invaded with the aid of teleportation-blocking rods spanning millions of square miles and gates like these that pass through the shadow. Further reason to take dim views of gates for mercantile purposes :-p )

My most amusing moment in physics was hearing the professor explain that you need to know the answer to some differential equations in order to solve them. I think computer aided human navigation would be required to do it in any reasonable amount of time, though I imagine some could actually...

I've spent around $40,000 on books... About a quarter of that on RPG books, about a fifth of which are d20 or D&D related. So um, yeah :-)