Antistone said:

The attacks would still have hit, but would not have killed the target if Lucky hadn't been used, because the damage would have been considerably lower.

Antistone said:

Sorry, if "the monster would have lived without Lucky" isn't useful to you, then you may as well ignore me in this thread. Then again, you don't even play this game, so I'm unsure how any amount of information about Lucky will be useful to you.

Thanks for the egotism and rudeness though. I'd forgotten what it was like to chat with you.

James McMurray said:

That wasn't the information you gave in the previous post, but yeah, that's pretty much worthless. I can't compare it to any other skill or hypothetical bonus without compiling similar statistics on them (which I couldn't do, even if I wanted to, without more information on the circumstances of your game), nor can I tell what the benefit was in absolute terms without the ability to calculate what resources it would have cost the heroes to finish off the monsters without the skill (each could be anywhere from a single fatigue to multiple attacks, depending on the circumstances).

I imagine you'll decide that comment was egotistical and rude as well, even though it includes no boasts or personal attacks and is all factual and directly relevant to a topic you broached.

If you'd like to offer tips on how to explain to someone that their results are poorly articulated, their literal claims are impossible, their likely actual data is useless, their conclusion is meaningless, and how they could have done a better job, all without coming across as egotistical and rude, feel free.

I reside in Remy's camp. I'll state for the record that I am surprised no one has yet mentioned Laurel of Bloodwood taking full advantage of this skill. In fact, I am inclined to believe it was made for her.

On another note, this skill is a killer in combination with others. And for one thing, it does wonders in outdoor encounters - Soaring Demon anyone?

I think it is a very subjective question, but I would never refer to Lucky as a "worthless" skill. Not even mediocre. I would love to have my ranged companion running Lucky and Born to the Bow in my advanced campaign. We drew Trenloe, Mad Carthos, Laughing Buldar and Lord Hawthorne for our campaign against the Demon Prince. You know we stuck Trenloe with the ranged attacks and gave him these two skills. Him and Mad Carthos murdered Kar-Amog-Atoth's Demon in one turn at Diamond difficulty.

I don't think I can come up with any useless skill since RtL came out. I feel they tied up some loose ends and tried to make everything useful. I mean, even Sir Valadir has a chance!

Antistone said:

I know how I could do it. I don't know how you could do much of anything without coming across that way, but then again you'[re the type of person who visits boards of games he doesn't play to downgrade its designers and advertise his own "improvements" so that's unsurprising.

I stated up front that it was a very small sample of anecdotal data. Ergo, it can't be considered meaningful, empirically useful, or a well-formulated experiment. If your goal was to state the obvious in typical putz-like fashion, you succeeded admirably. If your goal was to add something to the discussion, you failed (as usual) and would do better to actually experience the things you try to talk about on a daily basis before trying to make value judgements.

And in case you were wondering I don't think you ever will, nor do I expect you to change. I just like poking mad cows in the eye. It's amusing to see them try to defend their behavior by pooing in the hay everyone else came to eat.

James McMurray said:

It was a little more than that: your claim was factually impossible .

And abrasive though Antistone can occasionally be, at least he doesn't resort to personal attacks, unlike you.

Slightly more on-topic (not, admittedly, to the original title of this thread, but we wandered from that quite some time ago- heh ho), I am pretty much absolutely certain Lucky is an extremely weak skill in base Descent. I can't really speak for the campaign expansions, but for the record, I would be extremely surprised to discover that it was other than "very bad" in Road to Legend, either. For contrast, I don't like Crack Shot either, but my assessment of it is far from watertight: it's a very hard skill to assess without using it in play a lot.

Lucky, though, is pretty much mathematically dreadful. It is, without any real argument, strictly worse than Marksman, and I've never seen anyone tout Marksman as a particularly good skill. In fact, it's not merely worse than Marksman, it's a lot worse. It's bad for several reasons:

• It always gives you whatever you don't want. You can always choose whether to take range or damage from a power enhancement, and Lucky then adds whichever of the two you didn't choose, i.e. whichever you wanted least. It is therefore useful only when you need both, and even then its value is only in the added damage.
• Range is itself pretty weak in Descent. Situations where you really need a lot of range are quite rare.
• Its bonus is very variable and impossible to predict, reducing its usefulness for heroes, for whom variability is almost always bad.
• The bonus it provides is in and of itself very low, averaging only 1.5 range/damage even with 3 trait dice. Other skills provide bigger, less variable bonuses specifically to damage or range.

Regarding Laurel, obviously her ability combos quite well with Lucky. Even with Laurel, I wouldn't call it "good", though. She still only gets the bonus when she spends 1 fatigue on her ability, she only has 2 trait dice, so she'll struggle to get more than an average of +1 damage out of it, and it still has the variability problem. Laurel's ability essentially negates the first two of my bullets above, but the last two still ensure it isn't very good.

For the record, I'm not saying I'd have picked it if it were my character. It was his starting skill, and I don't remember what the other options were (but there definitely were none that screamed "gotta have me!" so it may have been his best option from the 4 he pulled). But it was most definitely far from a meaningless skill in the one session I used it in, as shown above. Whether Marksman or Inner Fire would have done the same, I don't know. I was only tracking the times it changed the outcome, not how much it changed it by. It seemed to me that it was a fairly useful ability for Kirga to have, but that was definitely impacted by the maps we pulled, and it would be far weaker for another character who wouldn't benefit so much from hanging back and blocking off extra spawn points.

As for Antistone, he constantly derides the designers, the company, and the game. Whether that counts as personal attacks or not is immaterial. Only an egotistical jackass does that sort of thing when he visits someone else's "house." Doubly so when he then follows it with advertisements for his own ideas on how things should be. It's a credit to the company's self control that they allow him to treat them like he does while sitting at their figurative couch. I don't have the legal or PR concerns they do, so I'll happily tell him exactly who he is every time he does it, then laugh at his efforts to explain that he's doing the right thing.

Regardless of anyone's age, we expect that all forum members will treat each other as adults.

Quite simply:

• be respectful
• feel free to disagree, but remain calm
• refrain from personal attacks

Please remember: it can be incredibly difficult to know exactly what was meant by a forum post. Without the luxury of hearing the tone of voice and their expression, it's very easy to misinterpret the written word.

Often, erring on the side of caution and being civil is sufficient.