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Deck-based Ability Score Generation
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<blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8418954" data-attributes="member: 71699"><p>The distributions are indeed hard to analyse! One way I use is just to Monte Carlo them. A friend wrote a deck shuffling plugin for me, for Excel. So I can create a deck, clone it many times, and apply some basic statistical analysis to get a sense of how it performs. </p><p></p><p>Another approach is to focus on combinations rather than permutations, to get a sense of how many ways there will be to get each value. Say we are drawing pairs - we don't care about the order of the cards in the pair - so we don't need to worry about all possible permutations because (for example) 5+6 will be identical to 6+5 for our purposes. If you allow assign-as-desired, the ordering of the pairs in the deck is also irrelevant, further simplifying, because in that case (for example) 12, 17, 7 is the same as 7, 12, 17 etc.</p><p></p><p>I've found I like 12-card arrays with relatively low average values. Like this one - 8, 7, 7, 7, 6, 6, 5, 5, 4, 4, 4, 3 - which gives swingy scores from 7-15 summing to 66. Average 11.5 after TCoE ASIs. Final modifiers generally sum to +3 to +4. In my campaign, scores are allocated as drawn (and I am not concerned about 'surprise' - or rather I think of that as a feature of the whole array, and not of a given score or of total point value variance).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="clearstream, post: 8418954, member: 71699"] The distributions are indeed hard to analyse! One way I use is just to Monte Carlo them. A friend wrote a deck shuffling plugin for me, for Excel. So I can create a deck, clone it many times, and apply some basic statistical analysis to get a sense of how it performs. Another approach is to focus on combinations rather than permutations, to get a sense of how many ways there will be to get each value. Say we are drawing pairs - we don't care about the order of the cards in the pair - so we don't need to worry about all possible permutations because (for example) 5+6 will be identical to 6+5 for our purposes. If you allow assign-as-desired, the ordering of the pairs in the deck is also irrelevant, further simplifying, because in that case (for example) 12, 17, 7 is the same as 7, 12, 17 etc. I've found I like 12-card arrays with relatively low average values. Like this one - 8, 7, 7, 7, 6, 6, 5, 5, 4, 4, 4, 3 - which gives swingy scores from 7-15 summing to 66. Average 11.5 after TCoE ASIs. Final modifiers generally sum to +3 to +4. In my campaign, scores are allocated as drawn (and I am not concerned about 'surprise' - or rather I think of that as a feature of the whole array, and not of a given score or of total point value variance). [/QUOTE]
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