Dungeon Scrawler

Well, I've had the data ready and just needed to whip up the blog post... last week? I don't know. Time flies. But then my favorite board game publisher dropped a playtest kit for an expansion to one of my favorite games. I've been... uh... distracted. (If you like board games and you like flavorful fantasy role playing games, you might just like Oath , too!) And then I realized I wanted more data than I had gathered, so I had to refactor and rerun my simulations! And then  I realized I had a critical bug in my refactored code, so I had to fix that and rerun my simulations again.  Slow and steady, friends. Today is all about Ganging Up .  After some script tweaks, I can now simulate an arbitrary number of player characters vs. an arbitrary stat block. (If you want to play with that, check out the code here .) NOTE: I'm not going to code up anything for multiple v. multiple opponents, and here's why: A multiple vs. multiple scenario quickly devolves into a series of...

 More questions need to be answered: How much does always attacking first do for you? How do Detachment rules affect matchups? (I'm saving the question about multiple attackers, since that will require me to do a little more programming before I'm ready, whereas these other questions can be answered pretty quickly with the tools I already have working.) DEX saves This one is quick: how much of an advantage does it give you if you can guarantee you'll go first? At the weak end of the spectrum, it's a 20% bump against an even match, and the benefit falls off to 10% at the opposite end of the spectrum. Armored opponents reduce the impact of going first, and the stronger you are to begin with, the less the DEX save matters. Both of those make sense: the longer a combat lasts, the less going first actually matters. I wanted to check the flip side too, though. If you're guaranteed to go second, how bad is that? There's some nice parity here. The result is almost the i...

I'm back! My last entry on this subject was such a tease, and going the route of writing code to simulate combat odds was quite a rabbit-hole. (It's just the sort of thing that I can lose myself for hours on). In any case, the big revelation came from some helpful advice on Reddit (shoutout to u/south2012!) to use a Monte-Carlo method with simulated combats instead of a a pure-deterministic approach. That unlocked the ability to run simulations with completely arbitrary stats, and never run into the really thorny programming cases. Today, there are two questions I want to dive deeper on: If I can mechanically improve a character in just 1 way, what should I prefer? How much does impairing enemies and enhancing attacks shift the odds? Mechanical Improvements Now, Cairn isn't really about  mechanical advancement. Even so, Cairn has numbers, and they matter. Players will want to equip themselves to increase their odds of survival! The question though is what gets you the mos...

I like Cairn . Into the Odd and it's children have been a breath of fresh air to me. I also like combat. The default assumption in Cairn about combat is generally "avoid it". Even so, as it's bound to come up sometimes, I would like to build up good intuitions for how the math shakes out. (For reasons I'll elaborate on later. But forget that for now, on to the goods.) Basics Let's start with a simple table of average dice output for each damage die: d4 d6 d8 d10 d12 Average 2.5 3.5 4.5 5.5 6.5 This is a well understood result: the average roll is about half the dice total (slightly better because numbers ) and when you increase the dice total by 2, you increase the average roll by 1. Nice! Armor The oft-cited conclusion based on the above result, however, is that in terms of averages, each point of Armor a defender adds is like red...