29 September 2017

Averages

The average roll of an honest six-sided die is 3.5.

You may notice that you cannot roll a 3.5 on a six-sided die.

GURPS rules that it rounds down to 3.

The average of two six-sided dice is 7, which is not rounded at all.

Now...

If I have 3.5 points of penetrative damage that's modified by the pi+ modifier of 1.5 that gives 5.25; but the rounded result of 3 gives 4.5.

These would be further rounded to 5 and 4 respectively.

When I express the average damage, should I use the raw numbers until I get to the end (where it's 5.25) or use the rounded number per die (where it's 4.5)?

It seems like it's more accurate to not drop the fractions until the last calculation is done, but I don't like doing probabilities enough to calculate it.

2 comments:

  1. Wonder if the greater than 3 is the result of less weight from the six holes and more weight from the one hole?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. An honest die has an equal chance of landing on any number. The average is the mean of all the results. (1+2+3+4+5+6)/6 is 3.5. You can also figure out the average by adding the lowest result to the highest result and dividing by two.

      Elementary probability and statistics.

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