Just would like to share my work on a dice probability calculator. I know there are some other ones out there, but I found them riddled with errors (1 Character + 1 Challenge dice should only give a single success chance of 25%). I'm a bit of a fan of probability calculations (a bit rusty though) and thought I could do it better.

www.mediafire.com/

Note: I didn't factor in the 3rd (or consecutive) roll on Expert dice due to righteous successes , I'll get those in version 2.0

Feel free to use, update and share. just a little credit would be nice.

That's very nice. I like the way you present the results. Great stuff!

Nice tool ...

I got a warning about a trojan horse though when I downloaded it ....

Nice little calculator, very clear and I like the 'at least' portions of the results.

One question, why limit the number of dice, does it make calculation easier?

EDIT: I did not get a warning and I scanned it with multiple virus scanners after downloading (Even before Boehm's post).

if you in un-hide the "calculations" section take a compare the combination formulas for 3 dice and 6 dice you will see they increased in difficulty exponentially. I stopped at 6 because that is the max amount of Characteristic/Conservative/Reckless a player should really be using. I'll try to to goto 8 on my next revision.

As for the virus alert, I cannot imagine how. I literally just opened a new excel document and started from scratch. All original work. No vb scripting at all.

LordBobman said:

My thanks, while 6 is the maximum for PCs NPCs and certain spells can push the limits further... the same applies to the other types of dice too!

Right, good point.

I'll get on that this week.

LordBobman said:

No idea .... maybe my antivirus is just a bit paranoid or maybe its the site you uploaded to ...

The virus is on one of the pop-up pages it loads. The file is ok, and the website too

Can any recommend a better upload site?

OK Version 1.1 is ready...

www.mediafire.com/

Notes:

-All Dice Types go up to 10 now!

-Fixed probability on Expert dice.

-Added Fatigue and Delay Chances

-I zipped it this time because some browsers sometimes had trouble with a direct xlsx downloads

Wow! 10 dice each? I look forward to rolling a 20+ success just once!

Thanks for this, it's really useful.

(Again, no virus alerts on my end)

speaking of statistics ... is it just me or is there almost no difference between the 2 misfortune dice from basic defence cards and the 1 difficulty die from the adcanced cards (aside from CS effects...)?? Sure - the special abilities can be pretty nifty in some cases ... but in others kinda not ...

Boehm said:

Regarding banes and challenges, two misfortune and one challenge dice are very similar.

Dang! you guys discovered a bug in my formulas. I mistakenly assigned the Challenge 1x and 2x bane chances the wrong percentage. (should be 12.5 % for each not 10 %)

here is the updated excel sheet (v1.2)

www.mediafire.com/

Anyways, my thoughts on the challenge vs 2 banes debate is as follows.

The chance of rolling something (not Blank) :

Challenge= 87.5 %

(2)Misfortune= 75 %

Success chances:

Challenge= 1x 25%, 2x 25% (Weighted Average= 75)

(2)Misfortune= 1x 44.4%, 2x 11.1% (Weighted Average= 66.6)

Bane Chances:

Challenge= 1x 12.5%, 2x 12.5% (Weighted Average= 37.5)

(2)Misfortune= 1x 27.8%, 2.8% (Weighted Average= 33.4)

Chaos Star Chance:

Challenge= 12.5%

(2)Misfortune= 0.0%

The Challenge die is better in all catagories but not as much you would want for an action card purchase.

LordBobman said:

Which is why ...given the statistics the main reason to buy the advanced defence cards are to take advantage of the 'special' ...ei. increased soak, remove a recharge token on an attack (ie. riposte!) or free disengage to get the the hell out of there ....

Boehm said:

Good Point. Forgot about the extra side effects.

I like statistics, but I'm more of a fan of the Monte Carlo test.

But with the Warhammer dice Roller I have at hand I can only use 1000 rolls at a time. 10.000 are minimum to get near the Gaus-form.

According to my dice roll sessions I test against 2 Blue, 2 Green, 1 yellow. Something like Strength 4, two in conservative and Weapon skill. 1 Challenge is base difficulty. The testet Misfortune and Challenge are put on top.

Update, Im currently rolling 10.000 times for the test setup. Will post Results.

LordBobman said:

For this reason my take is to as far as possible purchase other defence cards (as long as they grant 2 black dice), then only take the advanced in order to set up combos ... ie. advance parry + fast weapon (+invigorated or other cards allowing removal of recharge tokens) +usage of fortune points to potentially allowing the use of Riposte every round

.... or advanced dodge +catlike reflexes +basic parry/block etc (throwing everything in!)... for situations where you get engaged by multiple opponents hoping to achieve a dodge & disengage on the first attack in order to immediately disengage avoiding the other attacks ...and then run for it! This occationally worked pretty well for my weak, unarmored archer - essentially her strategy was to avoid closecombat, by using impaling shot etc. continually running away from her opponents and using the above trick when charged ....

That being said, we (in Gallows group) play with Chaos Stars adding a challenge on top of other effects, which still doesnt change the statistics much - but atleast makes the actual miss chance slightly larger (approx. 1.8-2.5%, assuming a 'standard' attack) when comparing a the difficulty die to 2 misfortune dice.

It's true that for NPCs against players the difference isn't big unless their card has a nasty chaos star effect.

For monsters however there are a good deal of monster attack cards where a chaos star grants the player a free attack.

Boehm said:

The standard challenge die has an average percentage of 50% for a challenge.

Adding another challenge to the chaos star increase this to 63% according to the excel sheet.

If you're using the excel sheet you have to change the chaos star to zero or you'll change the challenge die to having 9 sides. unless you did in some other fashion.

But 1 out of 8 is 12,5%

But when changing it on the second sheet, it doesn't change any of the results on the first sheet. I don't know anything about excel really

As for the excel sheet. Are you using the righteus success. The chance to get a sigmars comet isn't 16.67% Since the expertise die can't end on a righteous succes I'd say it's roughly 1 in 5 which is 20%

Gallows said:

The second sheet "Die Stats" is just for reference. Nothing you do there will influence the results.

Make sure you are using V1.2? That one has the proper odds for Expert dice.

If you want to treat Chaos stars as a challenge, in addition to the regular result, you'll need it change cell E263 from 25% to 37.5% (You will need to "Unhide" that row)

LordBobman said:

oh, cheers. Yeah just downloaded the new version. Great stuff. Very easy to use and a great overview of the results. I'm sorry but how do I unhide the calculations?

Gallows said:

spreadsheets.about.com/od/excelformatting/qt/070814unhiderow.htm

Cheers, very nice