First, thanks for all the thoughtful, well-reasoned and helpful replies. I appreciate the analysis.
I'm a bit amazed nobody has brought up Tom Stoppard's wonderful "absurdist, existentialist tragicomic" play
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It's arguably most memorable scene has them quite humorously discussing probability and the law of averages (start @55 seconds on youtube
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern "Heads"). In short, Gary Oldman's Rosencrantz (there's an excellent movie version) keeps getting "heads" over and over in his flips of the coin while they (Tim Roth as Guildenstern) effectively muse about the seeming conflict between every individual toss having a 50-50 chance vs. the aggregate unlikelihood of getting one constant result over time (Oldman says he gets "heads" 78 times in a row).
Priceless, and entirely on topic...
30% to miss is quite a large probability to be honest. Most of the time people consider to-hit chances as "at X tries you will miss Y times". That will be truer(not true mind you) when your sampling universe is quite big. Such as at 10 million hits you will get closer to proposed hit chance but that might not be that visible or accurate over 100 or 1000 hits.
Whether the game takes distance into account, as one response postulated, is precisely the kind of "hidden factor" I'm wondering about. It would be absolutely silly for the game not to reveal such, but it would help explain why, as Zerkain listed, 90% feels like 70%, 70% like 50%, 50% like 25% and so on.
I haven't been playing my ranger long enough to claim anything near 1,000 shots, or even 100. But I noticed this "serial missing" enough during last night's session to prompt me to ask. Noaloha's notion of replaying my most recent encounter (where I did miss four times in a row, as I had previously -- instead of "heads" picture me saying "no way" over and over) is compelling (since I saved just before), so I'll have to try that to see if the results are different.
Any further comments are most welcome.
And, yes, the whole
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is very much worth watching, if you are so inclined.
Thanks,
Geezer
