Humans are really really bad at undestanding randomisation. Weighting dice is the best way to stop people thinking you're weighting the dice.
100% agree.
I won't believe that there is an actual problem with the current (pre patch 4) RNG until I see a detailed statistical analysis of a huge number of rolls. Humans just can't do this "by eye".
The thing is. We are playing an adventurer. We are aspiring Conans, Gandalfs or Galadriëls. Aragorn 's Andúril misses the orc 3 times in a row while being shot at with poisoned arrows and fire, but fortunately Iluvatar can reload the saved game and retry.
You can have a fine distribution after 100 rolls. Hooray, the RNG is good. Only, no combat lasts that long. So, we don't want to play mindles sword swingers who randomly hit opponents and reload when the dice go wrong. We want to be a hero, who can fail, of course. But not because of a streak of bad dice rolls. A DM will prevent this from happening.
And there are quite a lot of these streaks , too many, from my experience with the game. So, a RNG that performs OK over large samples is not necessarily OK for a game like this. (my opinion)
If the die rolls are truly random then there will be streaks. A set of die rolls that have no streaks is simply not random. Your intuition on this matter is fairly common, but it is really what Rack meant above when he/she stated that Humans are really bad at understanding randomisation (or at least part of what they meant).
If you don't want streaks then you don't want random rolls.
Exactly, that was indeed what I meant to say. "Blind" randomness is not a good system to decide combat in heroic fantasy role playing environments. The system came from wargames where line infantry and cannon face eachother and get to do some amount of damage, which can be simulated by a die roll. For one-on-one combat, as an episode in a long term campaign, I'd like the combat to be more in line with a fantasy novel.
On the table top, the DM can't fudge the dice rolled in public, but if the party really has bad luck and is on the verge to be wiped out in a very non-heroic way, he/she may figure out some ways to intervene on the opponent's side. (Morale breaking, another monster entering the scene, lots of movie cliché's are available) OK, maybe it's not the general view of RPG gamers, but my concern is getting immersed in a heroic story.
I can't seem to express very well what I mean exactly, but inedeed, we agree that I don't think that
pure , unmitigated randomness does a favour to fantasy RPG"s and that it is not the best mechanism to use. I will certainly try out the loaded dice patch.
Apart from "the streaks" I feel that there are still some other wacky things going on with hit resolution. The percentages shown just don' look very accurate. I already posted somewhere that L4 Lae'zel ususally has between 80-88% hit chance with the sword of Tyr on an average opponent, but misses perhaps once in two. My observation is that my raven familiar has a higher hitrate than Lae'zel.
Shadowheart's guiding bolt usually comes around 65% but hits very rarely.
My ranger has a very good bowshot and usually comes out around or just over 90%. From this level on, the percentage seems to match well.
