Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The Rogue - Maths are WRONG

No no guys, we are sidetracking a bit from the point.

When it comes to mathematics with Arithmetic, the answers should be cut & dry.

Although, I will concede 1 point, since it's a game.

Also, at this point, I don't really care about the level 4 rogue should get 2D6 or 5D10 or a 100D20s. I leave that to Larian & D&D 5th edition. Although our feedback on that should reach them for what's it's worth.

Now to my point, look here:


Without having to re-write the operation, within the operation, you don't round number, period. That's a math rule. BUT the output of the operation, THAT you can apply that D&D rule about removing the decimal - I concede that point.

As level 4, I would have roll any odd numbers for the "1D6 piercing" and the output would have been with a decimal.

Ex.:
Say I roll 5 instead of 4:
5 * ((4 - 1)/2 + 1) = 12.5 --> ok throw the D&D card and make it 12 instead of 13. I walk away as a player, unhappy of losing 1 point of damage and that's it, no big deal.

Now the part in the middle of the math operation "((4 - 1)/2 + 1)" CAN NOT be rounded until the operation is complete.

Is my point clearer now ?

Is it possible you attacked with dual wield?
There is (was?) a toggle on lower left side to attack with both weapons, this was by default on. That would explain the two damage numbers.

And IF it was the sneak attack portion, then ... meh ... I would prefer actually rolling a certain number of dice, not just one and then multiply it with a number.

Which again leads me to wonder, if Larian does this in purpose because they do not understand what 5d6 means, or do they want a flat distribution? Which would mean more variation than a Gaussian distribution (I hope I use the term variation in the correct mathematical sense here).

Anyway, it very much seems that you are correct @dwig

Yes, you are mathematically correct.

Why the result differs from the correct one, is what was discussed.

Larian uses the part with the word 'level' in it to just determine the number of Sneak attack dice, or so it seems.
So that equation you see is not everything that is calculated and stored as a variable.

You know what I mean?
Sorry, English is not my native language, and sometimes I am rather clumsy in expressing myself.

The order of operations convention that you are quoting is a common convention, but it is JUST a convention, not a hard law of nature. Larian should probably change the printout if they want to effectively communicate what is going on in the log, but I do not think that it is evidence that they are math impaired. They are probably just using a different convention for handling the rounding, without explaining that this is what they are doing.

It is a communication failure, not a math failure.

Personally, after some experience with programming, I've started to believe that BODMAS/PEMDAS is a bad convention.

I prefer a simple left to right convention for order of operations.

Computers are really good at maths.

This is not a programming limitation. It's the way it's been programmed.

I'm not going to be able to say whether or not there's a mistake though.

@daMichi, yes, we are on the same page.

And your english is excellent.

haha, you're funny.

ok, we can move on, I made my point.

The calculation ((Level - 1) / 2 + 1) being number of sneak attack D6s is correct and must be natural number (1..10). Why it looks like this is weird (maybe a dev overthought the formula, it happens, maybe float and rounding shenanigans made it necessary) but if you expand it's really ((Level + 1) / 2) which translates to "half your level rounded up".

This formula only works if the result is rounded. Otherwise it does not match 5E rules for number of sneak attack dice. Of course they roll once and multiply by number instead of rolling a number of times.

In my earlier post I confirmed what was happening via edit.

The game is in fact, making two damage calculations. 1 for weapon damage, and one with sneak attack. Meaning, if you scroll up in your combat log, you'll see
1. "Piercing" damage1d6+Dex damage - Weapon Damage
2. "Piercing" damage, with that above complex formula - Sneak Attack

Thanks for clearing that up (for me 😊 )!