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Message: <blockquote data-quote="stephenh" data-source="post: 1573089" data-attributes="member: 8620">Well I guess that we all more or less agree that 4d6 drop lowest is roughly equivalent to about 28-29 points and once you apply some sort of cut for minimum viable stats you get an average of about 30-31 ish points? I guess I originally wanted to just point out that it was higher than 25 points.Only minor issues after this point...Beyond this I guess we are mostly quibbling over minor details. I guess I should point out that in some of my earlier analysis I used a "non viable" definition that was a bit different to what the book suggests (I was trying to remember off the top of my head). Using exactly the same definitions as Anax I get values that are all within 0.1 points of everything he quotes (using my random generation method).Anax and Creamstreak have both done a "complete" statistical analysis essentially using the same method, although your values are actually a little bit different from one another. As I said earlier I use a totally different method and get values that agree more closely with Anax. To Anax: Some of the differences you see between our results are because I also used a definition of at least one stat of better than 14 rather than one stat of at least 14, as you used when comparing with me. (again I used this because I was guessing what the non viable definition was).To dvvega: I would say that it sounds to me like one of the professors you asked didn't fully understand the problem, because averaging ability scores is not the right way to do this.To Creamsteak: Firstly On calculating average points per stat:- This is a valid thing to do if you are treating all stats in the same way. It is not valid if you are treating some stats differently. i.e. Applying a rule that no stat can be lower than 8 is ok becasue the same rule applys to all stats. In contrast, specifying that one stat (out of the 6) must be larger than 14, means that you cannot average the points for the stats because one stat is being treated differently to the others. This is why applying a cut of 8 to all stats must increase the average rolled.In further evidence of this consider the average (mean) set of stats rolled after applying a cut of total modifiers +1 or better and at least one stat above 13. You get: 15.95, 14.45, 13.22, 12.02, 10.65, 8.72 (sorted into order). Given this:1) On average the lowest stat you roll is 8.72.2) Applying the rule of "all stats above 7" can be simplified to "the lowest stat must be greater than 7" -- this rule is then totally independant of the values of any of the other stats, which will have averages of the values given earlier. 3) Given the average of 8.72, in the majority of cases the lowest stat is greater than 7 -- so applying a cut of all stats equal to 7 or lower should not make have significant effect on the results. 4) In the small number of cases where the lowest value is 7 or lower you are removing cases where the lowest stat is given a points value of 0. So your average must increase. Remember, irrespective of what the lowest value actually is, the average values of the higher stats are unchanged.How about adjusting your code to calculate the average points you get when you only consider cases where at least one value is 7 or less. By the numbers you quoted earlier is must be in the high 30s at least (because when you removed them your average dropped from 30 ish to 26.5 ish). The averages stats I quoted above show that only a small fraction of cases will have any stats below 8. -- There are many more cases where the stats all all above 7 -- well over 50% of cases must already satisfy the condition of all stats above 8.The math just doesn't hang together. Look at it in reverse. You are saying that when you include stats sets with very low stat values (which would have low points values), your average points value actually goes up!!???</blockquote>

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