A Few Questions/Observations From an Old Player

[Oramin]

BTW, Mondkalb, that picture looks familiar. Is that from 1st Edition AD&D somewhere?

[Mondkalb]

BTW, Mondkalb, that picture looks familiar. Is that from 1st Edition AD&D somewhere?

Hehe, that is a crop form the cover of the amazing Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss. When it hit the shelves in 1992 it changed computer role playing games forever. I needed to buy a new computer to play it and to enjoy the first real three-dimensional environment in a CRPG.
Of course I had played lots of other CRPGs before, both on the Amiga and later on the PC (btw Moria was among the first ). But Ultima Underworld really hit my heart.

I think the image is appropriate for Angband because of the glimpse of a maze of up and down staircases.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Underworld:_The_Stygian_Abyss

[Oramin]

Is the double damage for Orb of Draining working for Paladins?

I just shot a Sorcerer with an average life of 457 with a 43 + 3d6 Orb. He only lost a single * from his life bar. According to the description he's Evil. Sorry, I don't want to take the time to Probe him since I'm severely short on Speed at the moment (only +3 base down on L37).

[Derakon]

The message should say that the monster is "hit hard" if they're affected by it. The paladin spell is exactly like the priest spell except that it does IIRC 50% less bonus damage (3d6 + clvl/2 instead of 3d6 + clvl, or something like that).

[Oramin]

I *think* it said it was hit hard; I've seen the message for other monsters.

What I'm wondering is why with those numbers, only a single * was removed from the life bar; it should have been 2.

[Derakon]

Well, the average is just that -- an average. The game uses a normal distribution to calculate actual monster HP, with a standard deviation of .125 * (average HP), rounded up.

Your minimum damage is 61, doubled against evil for 122; for that to take 1 star off the monster must have had 1220 HP, which is 13 standard deviations away from the average. Hm. That seems implausible, but then again stranger things have happened in Angband.

[half]

Well, the average is just that -- an average. The game uses a normal distribution to calculate actual monster HP, with a standard deviation of .125 * (average HP), rounded up.

Your minimum damage is 61, doubled against evil for 122; for that to take 1 star off the monster must have had 1220 HP, which is 13 standard deviations away from the average. Hm. That seems implausible, but then again stranger things have happened in Angband.

Presumably it just has to have more than 610 HP, then it might take off (e.g.) 19% of its health which might remove just one star.

[Timo Pietilä]

Presumably it just has to have more than 610 HP, then it might take off (e.g.) 19% of its health which might remove just one star.

610 is still quite a lot higher than 457.

How exactly is monster HP calculated? For larger critters with breath weapons big deviation from average can cause rather nasty surprises. I think that was the reason for FORCE_MAXHP-flag in old versions for dragons and stuff. What about uniques: can't see any differences for those compared to normal in monster.txt, except the UNIQUE-flag, does that imply fixed HP? (I assume so)

[Derakon]

Presumably it just has to have more than 610 HP, then it might take off (e.g.) 19% of its health which might remove just one star.

For some reason I thought there were 10 stars of health, not 5.

Timo: uniques don't have varying HP. And I think if you're running the stats sufficiently heavily to rely on, say, an Ancient White Dragon doing no more than 211 damage with its breath attack, then you're trying too hard.

[Timo Pietilä]

Timo: uniques don't have varying HP. And I think if you're running the stats sufficiently heavily to rely on, say, an Ancient White Dragon doing no more than 211 damage with its breath attack, then you're trying too hard.

Sometimes I do take on monsters that I know are very dangerous, but who start losing their breath power immediately, like sneaking on sleeping AMHD without rPoison trusting that after I hit it with my arrows it will not be able to breathe more than around 600 points of damage.

It is the first move that counts. If it doesn't use it's poison breath immediately I might be able to kill it. If it does, I bail out immediately. However, if that first breath is 700 points even after that attack I might be dead.

So how unlikely it is that AMHD could have, say 2300 HP instead of monster.txt indicated 1848? That's only 24% increase, and if that sorcerer had 610 instead of 457 it is 33% increase.

[Derakon]

That's 1.95 standard deviations away; I don't remember how to do the relevant stats myself but a friend informs me it should be about 2.5%, i.e. 1 in 40 will have at least that much more health. (Odds of being at least two standard deviations away from the mean are 4.55%, but half of those are two SDs below the mean)

[Timo Pietilä]

That's 1.95 standard deviations away; I don't remember how to do the relevant stats myself but a friend informs me it should be about 2.5%, i.e. 1 in 40 will have at least that much more health. (Odds of being at least two standard deviations away from the mean are 4.55%, but half of those are two SDs below the mean)

OK, I'm going to have to ask this: What an earth is "standard deviation"?

[Oramin]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation

[Derakon]

Wikipedia link

In layman's terms, the standard deviation measures how "scattered" a distribution is. For example, a 1d12 is more scattered (has a higher standard deviation) than a 2d6, which has a higher standard deviation than a 3d4. A low standard deviation means that you consistently get values close to the average / rarely get values far from the average. The standard deviation is also a value, though, so you can gauge how rare a given result is by measuring how many standard deviations away from the average you are. For example, in our example we use an SD of 1/8th of the monster's average HP.

1848 / 8 = 231 (the standard deviation is 231)
2300 - 1848 = 452 (finding how far we are from the average)
452 / 231 ~= 1.95 (that value in standard deviations)

Once we have the number of standard deviations away from the average we are, we can use that value plus knowledge of the distribution to determine how unlikely it is that an AMHD would have that many hitpoints.

[Oramin]

I was just using Til-i-arc (Fire Brand and Cold Brand) on a 5-headed Hydra. The damage message said I was burning the Hydra.

Since Hydras have a vulnerability to Cold, shouldn't I be freezing the Hydra instead?