Friday, September 11, 2009

School Happened

I apologize for the lack of timely updates, school has interfered with the large quantity of time it requires to update the program. A simple update is underway, though unfinished, which will include a minor fix to the Vorpal Crit checkbox, changing the min/max damage for Vorpal, and showing hopefully helpful hints in the bar at the bottom for when you mouse-over each component.
Because of the huge number of components I have, naturally this last step takes a long time to write.

Current Program Suggestions:
Make a much better GUI, currently it is huge, crowded, and ugly. (very hard)
Make a reroll pool for such things as Elven Accuracy. (also very difficult)
Add more attacks, which may get it closer to dealing with nova territory. (would take forever)
Add better attack dependencies, including recursive damage calculation for Rampage, and multiple attack dependencies such as from Quick-hit Bracers.(most difficult thing here)

Essentially, these additions will take weeks of work. Time I don't really have at the moment, taking a full load of engineering classes.
I think all of those additions would be great for the program, however, and eventually I want to get around to implementing them. For now, accept the program as it is, and don't hold your breath for an update that will solve all your problems.

10 comments:

  1. The once-per-round calculator miscalculates (or is missing an option) on the odds of a crit when dealing with multiple hits.
    It should have two modes:
    1) First hit: it triggers on the first hit, crit or not. The chance of it doing crit damage is the chance of a crit on the first attack, plus the chance of a miss on the first attack times the chance of a crit on the second attack, plus the chance of missing both the first two attacks times the chance of a hit on the third attack...
    2) All hits: The chance of it doing crit damage is the chance that ANY hit is a crit (trying to avoid extra credit for double crits).

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  2. Yeah, it's set in mode 1 right now. You're right, a player could choose not to apply his once-per-round damage on his first attack, regardless of whether it was a crit.

    If the player was selective, they could wait to trigger their OPR damage until they got a crit, but they risk losing it altogether if they don't land a crit on a later attack. I assumed that most people wouldn't take that risk, which would complicate the "to-hit" percentages for OPR damage.

    So unless you're a player with
    a. Very high crit chances(and several attacks)
    b. A generous DM who lets you deal crit OPR damage if you EVER crit in the round
    c. High-risk tendencies
    ...chances are mode 1 is fine for you, and will probably give you a higher DPR. I'm guessing you're a player with a or b though, otherwise you wouldn't have noticed. Fair enough, I'll tack "add option for OPR damage" to my list of ideas to work on when I get around to this again.

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  3. Mode 1 actually violates the rules for most OPR sources. Hunter's Quarry, for instance states "If you can make multiple attacks per round, you decide which attack to apply the extra damage to after all the attacks are rolled." Indeed, I don't know of any OPR source that doesn't have that clause (or something similar). As a result, Mode 2 should be the default, not Mode 1.

    Also, damage penalties aren't being handled correctly. A damage penalty can't reduce the damage below zero, but the program will spit out negative DPRs (which are based on average damage). 1d6-4 (as an arbitrary example) should have 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, & 2 as the possibilities which averages to 0.5, but the program lists the average damage (in the lower right hand table) as -0.5 (the average of -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, & 2). The program should apply modifiers to the possible dice rolls and then average the results rather than averaging the dice rolls and then applying the modifiers.

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  4. Love the programm and works ok as it is. Has some flaws but one can work around. Looking forward for possible updates.
    Cheers from Gernamy

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  5. Anon 2 makes some good points. I was unaware of the precedence for OPR damage; didn't know that it was designed to give you the maximum possible damage.
    He also makes a good point about damage penalties, I never properly tested them because they are nearly impossible to get in 4E so in all of my tested scenarios it never happened.

    Hmm... very inconvenient. If I get back to working on this in the future I'll have to make some major changes. It is after all my first real program, and DnD has some rather intricate rules.

    Maybe I'll scrap this one altogether and make another one in a more expandable format. Not knowing exactly what I was doing the first time resulted in some interesting methods I used to design it, with flaws such as the ones that are pointed out here.
    Thanks for the valid criticisms, and thanks for the appreciation!

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  6. Awesome work, really saves a lot of time and confusion!

    If you ever get around to making changes, there's one thing I'm surprised no one has pointed out yet -- 4e has no critical failures. If you roll a 1 but your attack bonus is high enough to hit, you still hit! The program assumes a 5% miss chance no matter what, but that's no longer the case in 4e.

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  7. Awesome programm ! Would like to see a "effect" added to each attack.

    Example: if attack 1 hits (70% chance) then you will get CA until end of next turn. So future attacks will have a 0,7x2 to hit bonus. Same can be done with defense penalties, to hit bonuses or damage bonuses.

    Cheers
    J

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  8. Have you every considered making a web application or a mobile app? I'm sure that would be really helpful for smartphone users

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