Natural 20 and Monsters.

[Mance]

Preface

Back at my univercity days - i had a hobbie - probability theory Cant say i'm calculating much nowdays... But sometimes i do Most of players of BGTSCC knows - rolls of hostile NPCs aka monsters is... very weird to put it mildly At beginning of this week i've tried to figure out how their rolls actually works

Chances

Monsters (or at least most of them) scoring critial hits at natural 20. Chance to roll 20 is 5%. Well... Its supposed to be. Only monster i found which actually rolling 20 in 5% of cases - is basilisc at Durlags Towers exterior. Also there is one intersting monster at this locaction - skeleton archer, which arent scoring much of criticals untill he switches to melee. When it does his critical rate goes up to 35%. Most of other monsters scores natural 20 with 10%-20% probability. So it looks like their critical rate is predetermined, cause i've calculated probability for each mentioned monster several times - results always was same.

Some other monsters

Xvart warrior 15% (other xvarts 10%)
Trolls at Troll Claws - 20%
Gnolls at Reaching Woods - 20%.

The Question

The question is... If their crit ratio is predetermined. (or perhaps its hit ratio?) What they are rolling? Or they arent rolling anything and ilussion of rolls is just for D&D Immersion?


P\S how i calculated probability? i've written 100 of rolls of each monster into notepad. And calculated probability. 3 times. So its 300 rolls for each metnioned monster Yes, i know, i'm weird

[ShineDown]

The server is set to 'hard mode'. This means pve monsters score higher more often.

[Mance]

The server is set to 'hard mode'. This means pve monsters score higher more often.

Yeah, I figured its some "custom hard mode" But i'm still curious how it works. And why

[ShineDown]

This link should give you an idea of the why. The exact math I'm not certain of but I'm sure someone has decoded it someplace but likely a long long time ago given the games age. You still might be able to find something if you look.

https://nwn.fandom.com/wiki/Difficulty_setting

[Ewe]

Your statistical analysis is a bit meaningless without also providing the chi squared calculation. It would take more time than I have to go into detail, but I pulled a link from google that should be enough to help you do the calculations:
https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions ... ie-is-fair

The link ShineDown provided didn't say anything about increased critical rates (other than 20's don't count as crit in lower difficulty modes).

Moreover, you might want to read up on pseudo-random numbers. I doubt NWN2 is using a crypto level random generator. Knowing Obisdian they probably aren't even seeding it correctly.


*edit*

One other thing that occurred to me, it's unclear to me based on your post if you're recording 20 rolls or recording confirmed crits. As your AC and their AB would play a role in the later which may be skewing your results.

[Mance]

Your statistical analysis is a bit meaningless without also providing the chi squared calculation. It would take more time than I have to go into detail, but I pulled a link from google that should be enough to help you do the calculations:

Disagreed. Overloading post with numbers is bad idea. But perhaps its just me.

The link ShineDown provided didn't say anything about increased critical rates (other than 20's don't count as crit in lower difficulty modes).

Agreed. Its says nothing about altering rolls probabilities. If there is any altering - its not difficulites from original nwn, its custom one.

Moreover, you might want to read up on pseudo-random numbers. I doubt NWN2 is using a crypto level random generator. Knowing Obisdian they probably aren't even seeding it correctly.

Well, its actually good theory. Pseudo random generators rarely causing issues with simple tasks like rolling d20. However... i've seen a flawed dice roller for skype once. So its possible.

One other thing that occurred to me, it's unclear to me based on your post if you're recording 20 rolls or recording confirmed crits. As your AC and their AB would play a role in the later which may be skewing your results.

I was recording 20 attack rolls only. Not confirmed crits.

[ShineDown]

If you want to test and see if it's custom just load up the single player, try it and then set it to hardcore mode in the gameplay options to see if there is a difference.

[Camera9]

I've been playing this game for a while now and I've always had the impression that also "1s" aren't coming out with 5% either for PCs; they're much more frequent!
I might be wrong though, I haven't counted them...

[Valefort]

PCs roll fairly, NPCs have slightly loaded dices.

[Ewe]

Well the thing is without posting your chi squared or standard deviation we have no clue as to the statistical significance. Also the confidence interval to see if you even sampled enough.

[Deragnost]

I'm adding something Ombra told me about like... three years ago.
Since he had this thing on his mind as well, noticing how skeleton with a spear used to land critical hits more often than a PC with a spear, he decided to investigate and check the rolling dice system.
Went into the core of the program and so on. Well.
It seems that Bugsidian never actually insert a random dice generator, but simply put a list of numbers, written randomly, and the program follows the order given.
That means that every roll, every single attack, is predetermined and not exactly random and ruled by chance as it should be.

Simply put, instead of having a 1d20, a 1d6, a 1d4, a 1d8, a 1d10 or a 1d100...

It is a sequence written similarly to:

1-10-2-3-9-6-11-20-20-17-12-1-1

and so on.


...because yeah, Bugsidian couldn't do even a rolling dice system properly.

[Ewe]

Here's one of my favorites, can you guess correctly?

[izzul]

Here's one of my favorites, can you guess correctly?

within 30 seconds, below is the imposter.

[Camera9]

Within 30 seconds the answer is: no, I can't decide XD

[Raivana]

I've always been under the impression that there are a number of variables that decide the NPCs' rolls.. It has always "seemed" like new characters start out with far better luck.. then once you have established yourself and have valuable gear, or perhaps more levels, that should make things easier, it tends to make things even harder as the NPCs start rolling 20s far more frequently.. Hard to really say though.. Would be interesting to find out the truth behind it all though.