1-30, Zero to Hero ((OOC))

[EugeneVoid]

This is the Out of Character thread. Go ahead and ask questions or just talk.

Players in this campaign are, as follows:
Alan Pehnereas - Purple
Shamgar001 - Green
Son of Meepo - Blue
Rjanag - Red
Sournote103

Demonicheart
Gilkanese
Hircine - Dark Green

[shamgar001]

w00t!

Are we going to know each other prior to the adventure, or are we meeting for the first time?

[Son_of_Meepo]

I'm here, but my internet at home might be out for the rest of the weekend.

[EugeneVoid]

Please know each other beforehand.

[shamgar001]

I've never done a PbP before...should I introduce my character here OOC so we can establish our preexisting relationships?

[Son_of_Meepo]

FYI. I currently have no internet at home. Posting might be slow until I get the issue resolved or find another service provider.

[EugeneVoid]

Go ahead and discuss in this forum how you know each other. If you want, you can even PM eachother.

[Rjanag]

Hi guys, I'm joining in late. Here's my sheet and background: Pitch. Are we choosing colors yet? If so, I'd like to throw my hat in for Red.

My character was kicked out of his town, where he couldn't play nice with the other kids [figuratively speaking; he's an adult]. The town I put in his background is just a generic dwarf village in the mountains, so I was figuring it could be the town where we start out, or near where we start out; maybe he met up with you guys doing whatever you were doing nearby not long after he got kicked out.

[shamgar001]

Rogan is the last member of the Ferrumar clan. Most of them were wiped out in a Troglodyte attack when he was a young child, and the few who escaped assimilated into other families in Rikgruve. Rogan has taken up his father's mantle of the chief warden of the clan of which he is the last member.

Personally, I would love a little more detail on the setting. With whom exactly are we at war?

Also, dibs on green

[Alan_Pehnereas]

My character's name is Jechtt (pronounced "jet"), and he's a white-furred worg. For those not familiar with worgs, a worg is much like a wolf, except intelligent. He has deep secrets that he does not share.

Here's his sheet.

His background, in a nutshell;

Spoiler

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Jechtt, like many other worgs, was born and raised by orks as a battle beast. One day, this brave worg decided he didn't want to pillage, raid, kill, and destroy the lives of the innocent. He turned against his trainer/ master, killing him, and fled.

He has lived on the outskirts of the Rikgruve since, living as though he were a wolf. While he has not made himself a part of the society, he has loosely allied himself with them, mostly so with the dwarf Rogan Ferrumar. He has fought quite a few battles against orks, troglodytes, and the undead alongside the village, and while sometimes it would be for the mutual benefit of defeating the threat, other times it is out of guilt from the things he's done.

I call purple. YES.

[Son_of_Meepo]

http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheetvie...sheetid=486782

I'll call blue.

As far as connections to the others. It's likely that he knew Rogan. Maybe Rogan did some work in the mines and knew Grimbar that way.

Not sure how I'd work in Pitch.

[shamgar001]

Grim may very well have trained Rogan in the arts of dwarven weapons, since Rogan didn't have a father to teach him.

Here's my sheet:

http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheetvie...sheetid=480733

[Son_of_Meepo]

Question for the DM.

As far as I get tell the dice roller here does not have a syntax for "reroll until a die is a minimum of x"

Since my weapon is brutal 2, I'm supposed to reroll any die less than 3 until it comes up a 3 or higher. This means possible outcomes are 3-10, which is exactly the same as 1d8+2.

In order to avoid having to repost every time a weapon damage die comes up a 1 or 2, can I just roll 1d8+2 in place of each d10?

For example Righteous Brand deals 1d10 (brutal 2) + 8. I would roll (1d8+2)+8 or 1d8+10.

Healing Strike deals 2d10 (brutal 2) + 8 damage. I would roll 2(1d8+2)+8 or 2d8+12 instead.

[Alan_Pehnereas]

Mr. Meepo!

If they are mathematically the same (which they are), you might as well use it.

[Son_of_Meepo]

Even though there are the same, I've had GMs that couldn't wrap their head around it and thus refused to allow it.

[Rjanag]

They look the same to me, too. I'm not an expert on probability statistics (and I bet there are D&Ders around who are, so we could try to ask one of them), but just out of curiosity (and wanting to kill time) I did a quick simulation to test it: I rolled 10,000 fake d10s (brutal 2) and 10,000 fake d8+2s, got the mean and standard deviation and skewness of each of those sets of rolls, and repeated the process 10,000 times to get a sampling distribution of the means and standard deviations from each run. You can see those distributions here:

Spoiler

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Histogram:
Means of measures:{table] Measure | d10 brutal 2 | d8+2
Mean | 6.499833 | 6.499864
SD | 2.291344 | 2.291312
Skewness | -.00003879825 | .0002046114 [/table]

Over many rolls the two methods generate almost exactly the same distribution. (You could probably prove it mathematically somehow, but I'm not good enough at math and I wasn't sure if I might be missing something important that affects the probability, so I figured it would be easier to just see for myself.)

(For anyone curious, this is the code for it; I did it in R, so if you know R feel free to double-check if everything's right):

Spoiler

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# Clear the workspace
rm(list=ls())

# Load e1071 for skewness measures
library(e1071)

# Repeat 10,000 times
for( i in 1:10000 ){
	
	# Just a counter to show how far we are into the simulation sometimes
	if(i%%1000==0 ){ print(i) }

	# Roll 10,000 d10s
	d10 <- sample(1:10, 10000, replace=T)

	# Reroll the ones that are below 3, until everything is 3 or higher
	while( length(which(d10<3))>0 ){
		d10[which(d10<3)] <- sample(1:10, length(which(d10<3)), replace=T)
	}

	# Roll 10,000 d8+2s
	d8 <- sample(1:8, 10000, replace=T)+2

	# Put the two vectors togther
	dice <- cbind(d10, d8)

	# Get out the means
	means <- colMeans(dice)

	# Standard deviations
	d10s <- sd(d10)
	d8s <- sd(d8)

	# Skewness
	d10sk <- skewness(d10)
	d8sk <- skewness(d8)

	# Put standard deviations and skewness into matrices
	sds <- cbind( d10s, d8s )
	skew <- cbind( d10sk, d8sk )

	# Combine the results from all simulations into big matrices
	if( "allmeans" %in% ls() ){
		allmeans <- rbind( allmeans, means )
		allsds <- rbind( allsds, sds )
		allskew <- rbind( allskew, skew )
	} else {
		allmeans <- means
		allsds <- sds
		allskew <- skew
	} 
}

# Plot
par( mfrow=c(2,1) )
library(MASS)
truehist(allmeans[,"d10"], ylim=c(0,18), xlim=c(6.4, 6.6), xlab="d10 brutal 2")
truehist(allmeans[,"d8"], ylim=c(0,18), xlim=c(6.4, 6.6), xlab="d8+2")

[Son_of_Meepo]

You really don't even need to go to such trouble, just examine the sets of outcomes.

A d10 has 10 possible outcomes {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10}.
Brutal 2 discards the outcomes of 1 or 2 leaving 8 possible outcomes {3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10}.

A d8 also has 8 outcomes {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}.
Adding 2 to each gives {3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10}.

The two sets are equal.

[Alan_Pehnereas]

@Rjanag; That alone made me incredibly stoked to work with you. Nice charts.

[EugeneVoid]

Go ahead with the d8+2 thing for the sake of convenience.

[Rjanag]

You really don't even need to go to such trouble, just examine the sets of outcomes.

A d10 has 10 possible outcomes {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10}.
Brutal 2 discards the outcomes of 1 or 2 leaving 8 possible outcomes {3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10}.

A d8 also has 8 outcomes {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}.
Adding 2 to each gives {3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10}.

The two sets are equal.

Yeah, that makes sense when I look at it. I just wasn't sure if there was any weird probability stuff to consider (for example, if any of you have seen the movie 21...it took me a long time to wrap my head around the puzzle with the three doors). I guess it's more straightforward than I thought!

[Rjanag]

@Rjanag; That alone made me incredibly stoked to work with you. Nice charts.

Heh, can you tell I had nothing to do this morning? Goofing around with dice stuff is much more fun than working

[Alan_Pehnereas]

Heh, can you tell I had nothing to do this morning? Goofing around with dice stuff is much more fun than working

It's also possible you're just awesome like that.

[Rjanag]

[Alan_Pehnereas]

So; Can I make a bullet point list of who knows who in this group?
And can everyone please relay all of their character's connections for the list?

• Jechtt knows Rogan, as the two have fought orks and undead alongside each other a few times.
• Grimbar and Pitch met eachother after Pitch was kicked out of his village. (Do I have this right?)
• Grimbar gave Rogan some training.

[Rjanag]

I like Meepo's mines connection, maybe that could be how Pitch knows Grimbar. Maybe after getting kicked out of his village he found work in a nearby mine for a short time. He's fond of neither dwarves nor hard work, so he probably would have hated it, and just looking for an excuse to leave whenever this adventure came along.

[Son_of_Meepo]

That sounds fine.

[Hircine]

Nilus was twice orphaned as a child before being taken in by the kindly druid Tieru. Growing up he was a rambunctious child with a great deal of anger that tested his foster father's patience. Eventually his rage passed and after witnessing his guardian ward of a band of brigands he decided to follow in his footsteps. After learning all he could from Tieru he set out on his own. His travels brought him to this village which is similar to the one he lived in for a time. His purpose for being here is to deal with his troubled past.

Dark Green for me please.

Nilus' Sheet

[EugeneVoid]

Would someone mind moving down to group 2?

[Rjanag]

I'm fine with being in either group. What do you guys think will make things the most balanced? If I'm right, this is what we've got so far:

Alan - striker
Shamgar - defender
Son of Meepo - leader
Sournote - defender
Rjanag - striker

Hircine - controller
Gilkanese - striker
Demonicheart - defender

So it looks like either way one group is going to be without a leader and one is going to be without a controller...would the leader-less group be better off with an extra defender or an extra striker?

[EugeneVoid]

IC thread, though I'm not quite ready yet.
Also, I may drop Gilkanese. If that will come to pass then I will make a huge group of seven.

Also, one interesting thing to note is that Alan and sournote want to be in the same group, so I believe either you or Shamgar will need to go down.