I want you to know that it is quite hard for me to write his entry and not riddle it with profanity. Over the course of several months a hobby project of mine, something as geeky as a character sheet for the roleplaying system Silhouette, had me spending quite a bit of time with Adobe Acrobat’s built-in scripting engine, and I feel compelled to make sure you don’t repeat my mistake.
PDF’s are a staple of the digital pen and paper world, and yeah, the idea of a PDF character sheet makes a lot of sense over other more flexible solutions, such as an HTML file; most importantly because of the layout of course. To a larger degree however, I chose to experiment with Acrobats scripting because it seemed like a fun thing to do.
Dice aren’t just dice. And you don’t need to consciously cheat to have dice that are quite a bit less than random; which Colonel Zocchi ain’t afraid to tell you:
For a more scientific study of the imprecision of dice, check out this paper, not to mention the Dice-o-Matic. Now if you’ll excuse me, I just checked my own dice, and they’re… questionable, so I’m off to find a place to buy casino-grade dice in Copenhagen; if not, Game Science it is.
PS: If you, like me, like playing around with various dice probabilities for use in for instance a roleplaying system, AnyDice Calculator is your best friend in the whole world. And if you need insta-dice on-the-go, check out Mach Dice for the iPhone.
Whenever my head hasn’t been flatlined in whatever spare time I’ve had over the last few days, and when I haven’t been playing Modern Warfare 2, which by the way is overhyped for what it is, I’ve been updating SilProb.
I’ve got a longer entry in the works on what I’ve learned about the Silhouette RPG system from doing SilProb and how that’ll help me write my own system, but until then I figured the least I could do was to let everyone know that yes, the rumors are true, as seen on CNN; I’ve updated the code.
First of all it’s a lot faster. Like, a lot faster. Secondly I’ve added various points of interest, like how much each level of skill is costing you in relation to how much you’re getting back. Cost Per Average Point Increase is in a sense an upgrade effectiveness meter, where lower is better. Also I’ve tweaked the graph to remain value consistent within each dietype, so that the comparison can be made between the various Reality Distortion Levels.
Again, if you’ve made it to this line, I have to wonder why, but I thank you for your interest…
I’m really not a particularly good programmer. I really like programming — or scripting as it were — but my strength is in how I apply it, not my deft code juggling, nor my mathematical prowess. In fact, my brain often locks up when trying to figure out even fairly simple problems, such as how to write a dice probability calculator, and in the long run it often keeps me from actually coding simply because I know how long it takes me to suss out how to do the more ‘complex’ stuff.
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