The Gaming Den

Oh, sorry, didn't know about that. Thanks.

For reference, in case people haven't played D3 for a while: There are ten difficulties. You can choose among the first four immediately, from your very first character. The last six get permanently unlocked once you get a character to level 60. It definitely was a problem that in vanilla Diablo 3 y...

It was 1.5 when you said that a Fighter takes 1 or 2 rounds. Then you changed it so maybe a Fighter takes 3 rounds. That doesn't just change the figures for the 2 Fighter 2 Monster battle, it also changes them for 1 Fighter 1 Monster. 1.88 < 2.

It seems very strange that zombies should be immune to critical hits, considering how famously you have to shoot them in the head.

What's supposed to be the difference between the Aberration type and the Monstrosity type?

can you transmit a OTP key throug a previously set up OTP? Yes, but you don't get anything useful for doing so. An OTP key has to be at least as long as the message it's encrypting. If you've managed to securely transmit a 512-bit OTP, you can use that to unbreakably encrypt 512 bits of information...

You may have wanted to use slightly fewer examples of titanically successful sales juggernauts in that list of video games, silva.

GnomeWorks, please, you really don't know what one-time pads are. Read about them or stop posting about them or both.

We have Denners defending the position that Natural Spell shouldn't be entirely removed from the game, not the position that it is exactly as valuable as Toughness.

What's Nunnally even a weird back-and-forth romanization of?

If I didn't fuck my math up, for every X the probability that a 2d6 will roll at least X is at least as high as the probability that a 1d8 will roll at least X, and they're only equal in edge cases where it's guaranteed or impossible.

Sometimes you take a hit to your attack bonus in D&D 3. Does that mean it's exactly as bad as THAC0?

If you make your system (1d100 + Skill) vs DC 100 roll high, then your chance of success is exactly equal to your Skill. It's just that degrees of success and opposed rolls are slightly easier to calculate, too.

Reflect on that for a few seconds the next time you start jerking off to a game with so few rules and a bunch of injunctions to play the story, not the rules.

Occluded Sun you goof, what if your code is "act according to my whims"? Indeed, for any possible set of actions, it's possible to have a sufficiently large, complex code that mandates all of them. So really what you want to look at is the Kolmogorov complexity of a character's code.

You can only even attempt to pick the lock if you have a set of thieves' tools. So you don't quite get the situation where level 1 commoners with no skills succeed half the time.

You're right, I was off. I was attempting to crunch the chance that 1d20 + 0 rolls higher than 1d20 + 13, in which case the level 1commoner with zero training performs better than the level 10 specialist. The actual odds are a little over 5%, and the odds that the commoner wins or ties are 7%. So yo...

With a +13 bonus, you beat a first-level commoner 65% of the time. That's pretty fucking far from "reliably", considering you're nine levels higher and are specializing in the activity.

At this point I'm pretty sure Silva is being consciously contrarian, first identifying positions in opposition to what he thinks Den Consensus is and second coming up with some incoherent nonsense justifying them.

Well, if you do that with enough stuff, you end up with a skill system that has no content in it. If the only stuff you allow to remain covered by skills are things that any random level 1 commoner can do almost as well as a specialist, why exactly do you have skills?

Between this and K's rants about how archers shouldn't be able to shoot across rivers and Pyromancers shouldn't be able to create light by setting things on fire, does K just not want any characters to have any capabilities at all?

My speculative story is that for Modern Warfare 2, they were very self-consciously attempting to be Bigger And Better Than MW1, so they stuffed in as much random bullshit as they could to make it epically vast. And then, somewhat famously, after Modern Warfare 2 came out there was a huge dispute bet...

Call of Duty 4's AC-130 level. Right after you do a mission of carefully sneaking past big groups of enemies and avoiding their attention, you get to play as the fucking giant plane they call in to support your team and annihilate those same enemies with impunity.

Two silva posts and no mention of "evocative"? Thank god for small miracles.

How fixated are you on this Jenga concept? Extremely, it appears, but whatever. Can you at least put some thought into it beyond "I want stealth to have tension... And a nearly-toppled Jenga tower is full of tension! Bingo!"? Dice are a pretty good RNG for a physical board game. They're pr...