Re: dice probablility question

Grip said:

On Aug 7, 3:01 am, Richard Heathfield <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Grip said:

How do I figure out what the average roll is if I roll 4 dice and
remove the lowest die?

This sounds remarkably like rolling up AD&D characters. :-)

The mean is a little shy of 12.2446. Not much of an edge. If I were
you, I'd go for best three of five, which gives you a mean of 13.43+.

Pretty good Richard. I'm actually the DM and am looking at variations
for character roll ups, but want to keep the average score around the
same as the standard routine.

I have to tell you this.

His name was - well, let's change names to protect the guilty, and call
him Socrates.

Socrates was always skint. He had nowhere to live, officially, but he
got by, by sleeping on our floors. He never, ever washed. Ever. You
could fry chips (or English French fries, as Lotus WordPro calls them)
in his hair. He wasn't even remotely Oriental in appearance, but seemed
to have adopted some aspects of Oriental culture - he was keen on games
like Shogi and Go, although he was rather usless at playing them, and
he liked to make out that he was a martial artist (albeit not very good
at it).

Socrates loved AD&D, but - true to form - he was absolutely useless at
it. Actually, he could do the role playing all right, but he never got
any longevity out of his characters, because he simply couldn't roll
dice. He failed every saving throw, he missed with every swipe of his
trusty sword, and he never, ever won a roll for surprise. He couldn't
find a secret door if it were swinging open.

And when it came to rolling characters, he was just as bad. We used the
"best three of four" rule, and some of us had built some pretty nice
characters up over a long time. But Socrates, bless him, just couldn't
manage more than a 6 or 7 at best.

On one famous occasion, we decided it was high time that Socrates had a
decent character. So we gave him a whole handful of dice, at least a
dozen, and told him to roll his character's strength. He rolled. He
looked. He calculated. He yelled with exultation: "SEVENTEEN!"

We looked. We smiled. We said, "No, Socrates, you only count the best
three dice..."

--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -www. +rjh@
Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
.

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