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Message: <blockquote data-quote="stephenh" data-source="post: 1571357" data-attributes="member: 8620">Hmm I think there are some mistakes in what you posted.I realised over the weekend that although there is a very large number of total combinations, there is in fact a trivial way to calculate the average for all values (assuming you treat the values all in the same way, which is not what happens when you start specifying rules such as at least 1 stat above 14). You just need to calculate the average points score for a single stat and multiply by 6. There are only 6*6*6*6=1296 combinations in total for a single stat.For normal 4d6 drop low I can reproduce my average I listed earlier and if I use negative points for values less than 8 like you do i get the same number as you do (28.53). However beyond this I am sure your other averages are incorrect. Applying the cuts you suggest I get the following averages: 32.17 for at least 1 value greater than 14, 33.18 with the previous cut and all stats of at least 8. (using your negative scoring for values below 8 in both cases).In fact it is pretty trivial to demonstrate that if you apply a cut where all values are equal to or above 8, then your average, relative to no cut, must be *greater*, not lower as you suggest. Consider for example, the average points score for a stat, as I discuss in my first paragrah. If you remove all rolls below 8 (i.e. totally ignore them), you are basically removing a series of low (all negative for a cut of 8) numbers -- thus your average can only increase. I wonder if you have calculated your averages by dividing by the total number of all possible rolls rather than the reduced number of combinations possible after applying the cuts? Hmm I don't think it can be that -- I would expect a bigger change.I guess I would be interested to know how you did it in full? Once you start saying at least 1 stat above 14 I can't see a simple way of doing it (because at least one stat is being treated in a special way relative to the others). You have to generate full stat arrays -- You can't just use average stats as I do earlier in this post. I can see that you might be able to simplify things a bit by generating stat distributions and applying some sort of weighting, but I don't see how you would do it off the top of my head, and I imagine it would still be pretty complicated.Generating sets of random stats has the advantage that is is very simple to do, and providing that you generate enough random sets the errors on the values you get are very small -- about 0.5 % (i.e. better than to nearest 0.01 of a point which I think is as accurate as we need really) for 1 million stat sets.</blockquote>

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