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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4983333" data-attributes="member: 82106">There are some other possible sources of variability. For instance 2d6 vs 1d12 damage weapon, which Monte Carlo will show slightly different population standard deviation for in length of number of rounds. Personally I'm not sure that Monte Carlo REALLY matters a huge amount, though it is true that the distribution is added information. However the really interesting stuff is going to be sets of opponents and then you get into the murky waters of what are the effects of tactics. You can reduce the battle down to the blows struck and abstract tactics in terms of simply opportunities to attack, etc, but how do you account for the fact that the evolving nature of the battle itself feeds back into how it plays out? Even taking a simple battle with say 3 opponents on each side where they are all roughly similar creatures with basic melee attacks. Now you can pretty well model that abstractly, everyone is going to get to swing at somebody and who wins is likely to be decided almost entirely on which side focuses its attacks better. I don't think you'll learn a LOT more with this kind of scenario than with one-on-one fights. But what would be a step up from that? Lets say one side has a creature that can deploy an area attack. How many of the enemy can it hit on each attack? Is this going to affect how much the other side groups its units together (presumably they need to be close to each other to all concentrate on one target). Exactly what is going to happen now is going to depend highly on exactly who moves where and when. So you can run that fight 1 million times and determine the effects of tactics randomly, but the veracity of the result depends on how true your "random effects of tactics generator" is to what happens in real games.I kind of fear that by the time you get to something approaching the level of complexity of a level 1 party fighting a level 1 encounter with some typical monsters the number of guestimations required to do that "effects of tactics" is going to be large and nobody will ever know how accurate it is, except by actually collecting data from real combats.And I think that is really the ultimate key. This is an area where nothing is going to beat real world data. Still, it could shed some light on certain very specific questions. I just think people would have to go back and do some sanity checking against real world data all the same.</blockquote>

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