
The Icewind Dale Problem - happy-go-lucky
http://koaning.io/the-icewind-dale-problem.html
======
dri_ft
I clocked more than my fair share of hours rerolling stats on Baldur's Gate.
But in retrospect, it seems like outrageously shoddy game design. "We're going
to have a permanent set of stats that determine how powerful your character is
for the whole game, and how good those stats are is going to depend mostly on
how much time you spend clicking 'reroll' and a little bit on luck. And we're
going to make you do this all in one go, right at the start of the game,
before you even get to have any fun."

~~~
jghn
This reminded me of how I spent multiple nights re-rolling my party on my Mac
port for Wizardry I. I eventually hit a point total that allowed me to start
one character as a ninja, which apparently must have been a bug because that
was supposed to be impossible.

My cheesiness knew no bounds however. At some point I acquired a shuriken,
which would increase your total HP by 1 every time you equipped it. I did the
righteous thing and spent a few more nights unequipping and equipping it,
which left me with some outrageously high HP.

Feeling that even this munchkin level insanity wasn't enough I fiddled around
with the save game and figured out how to clone my character. Finally my party
had a front line of 3 ninjas with unassailably high HP totals. Finally, Werdna
was mine.

~~~
beobab
And you got an enormous amount of enjoyment from it, which is what a game is
for. :)

I remember doing a similar thing with save files and the old Ragnarok game.

~~~
seanp2k2
Same but with stuff like Diablo 2 and D2Edit / Jamella. Gameshark Pro was also
fun stuff. It's honestly sad that you can't gameshark modern consoles since it
was so much fun to mod games in ridiculous ways. Mod support for PC games is
what keeps me buying PC games.

Edit: excited for the potential mod support for FFXV on PC.

~~~
swozey
I no longer have time to dedicate to games like I did as a kid so cheats are a
huge deal to me (single player only). They don't "ruin" the game for me at
all. I only play games a few times a month but my steam library contains
hundreds. So on that one random Saturday I've got the free time to dedicate to
5+ hours to gaming I want to get as far as possible in a couple of games. I've
been playing the Witcher 3 seemingly forever.

I have a Ps4 and a few big games for it, Yakuza, etc and I've played them all
once or twice because of the time investment required to get through the
story. I WANT to enjoy the story. It's really unfortunate. I'd love to speed
up my progress, instead I'm forced to watch Lets Plays of those games.

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Negative1
I was hoping this was going to talk about the problem that Beamdog ran into
'enhancing' Icewind Dale 2. They can't find the source code and doing the
reverse engineering to make improvements was deemed too costly;
[http://www.pcgamer.com/icewind-dale-2-cant-be-enhanced-
becau...](http://www.pcgamer.com/icewind-dale-2-cant-be-enhanced-because-the-
source-code-is-lost/)

As far as this article; not my cup of tea but the author seems to have put a
lot of time into it. If you like data science, dive on in.

~~~
beloch
I was a huge fan of the Baldur's Gate games back in the day, but never got
around to playing the IWD series, which were based on Bioware's infinity
engine. I played the enhanced version of IWD1 not too long ago and, of course,
had to play IWD2 to satisfy my completionist OCD, even though that meant a
little bit more fiddling to get it to work properly.

Verdict: Go play a newer RPG like Pillars of Eternity instead. While I'm sure
some people have very fond memories of the IWD series, it has not aged well.
The story isn't particularly good, and IWD2 rehashes a little too much of IWD1
for comfort. It is undoubtedly possible to give IWD2 the enhanced version
treatment. It's "too costly" because IWD2 just isn't very good, and likely
wouldn't have strong sales.

~~~
drchickensalad
I also recommend Divinity: Original Sin

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StanislavPetrov
Alternate Reality, a cult classic game from the 1980s by Philip Price featured
a character creation process similar to the one described in this article (it
also contained many other game features well ahead of its time). A rotating
series of numbers would scroll through each stat box, with the player having
to hit the space bar to freeze the numbers and select their stats. However,
the stats slowly degraded the longer the player waited and watch them scroll
past. Interesting to see this issue examined in depth over 30 years later.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Reality_(series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Reality_\(series\))

~~~
Nr7
Captive, another cult classic from early 90s used another novel method of
calculating the stats for the characters. The game used an algorithm that
determined the stats based on the name the player gave to each character. I
even remember seeing some recommended names on the cheats & tips sections of
some computer games magazines back in the day.

~~~
seanp2k2
My name is 00000000 AKA death to your algorithm :) (or: hope you hash it
first)

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erikb
It seems the article talks about anything but the topic it is trying to talk
about. What is the conclusion? When to stop? What do the axis in the diagrams
mean? I read it like 1.5 times and still don't get any result from it.

~~~
masklinn
It's sad that the plots are mostly unlabelled because that aside they're
fairly clear:

On the color maps, vertical is the score you got on your last roll (sum of all
attributes), horizontal is the index of the current roll, color is the chance
of getting a better roll.

There is no "hard line" for when to stop because it depends on how risk-averse
you are, and compounding the lack of labelling the labelling of color maps 3
and 4 is the opposite of what it shows: it's how the map changes when you
_lower_ risk averseness (increase risk seeking) by increasing probability
thresholds compared to map 2.

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awesomepantsm
I don't really get why you wouldn't approach it as a dynamic programming
question. The size of the table would only be about ~38 rows, according to the
description, and ~38 columns. If you were given the probabilities of each sum
(of which I'm sure is available) you could do it by hand, likely in an excel
sheet.

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honestoHeminway
Roleplaying in my eyes suffered from this arbitrary stats rolling. It could
have greatly gained, if for every usefull exp on level up - your character
would have to take on some psychological malus. +1 on Dexterity?
Congratulations, you are now a cleptomanic. +2 on Intelligence? Obsessive
compulsive mage. +1 Strength. Great Scotts, youre an alcoholic. +2 Wisdom?
Post Traumatic Stress Syndrom.

It would have got the game so much more interesting. People who would have to
play actual characters, instead of walking, golden statues.

~~~
batiudrami
You might find upcoming RPG No Truce With The Furies[1] interesting. From a
developer post[2]:

"For the real lowdown — instead of telling you how the Attributes help — let
me tell you how they make things worse.

INTELLECT A high Intellect makes you overly confident – a cocksure
intellectual. You’re vulnerable to flattery, and easily lose yourself in
details. (The game becomes longer). While having a low Intellect makes you dim
and superficial, prone to superstition and being plain wrong.

PSYCHE A high Psyche comes with emotional turmoil – an unstable psychophant.
Great willpower clashing with wild imagination. You may even lose your mind.
While a low Psyche makes you uninspiring, inept at influencing people.
Unsavoury things come out of your mouth.

PHYSIQUE Okay, you’re strong but so is your death drive – a mad man and a
psycho killer. A high Physique needs to be tested, needs addiction, sex and
physical confrontation. You lose your shit over small things. While being un-
physical means vulnerable, un-streetwise. Lacking in animal cool.

MOTORICS A Motoric character is too high strung – a bit of a cokehead. A
quicksilver superdetective focusing fast and then reacting (too) sharply.
While being low on Motoric means you’re locked into yourself. The world has
trouble finding you. You’re clumsy and slow."

[1] [http://zaumstudio.com/](http://zaumstudio.com/) [2]
[http://devblog.fortressoccident.com/2017/01/19/introducing-m...](http://devblog.fortressoccident.com/2017/01/19/introducing-
metric-arguably-worlds-simplest-role-playing-system/)

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baldfat
Titan Quest - Best Abilities and Stats System. Should have taken over the
whole genre system wise. You all start vanilla and when you use an ability it
ads xp to that ability. Melee then attack as a melee, or ranged pick up the
bow and shoot. If its magic learn to pull off the right skills. It was easiest
to go melee at first and magic was more difficult but then it switched mid
game.

~~~
seanp2k2
That's how Tales games work too (at least Tales of Berseria, I'm guessing the
others follow).

~~~
graphitezepp
IIRC Tales of Symphonia stats (mostly) acted like an old school FF game of
just fixed stat increase per level.

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Nr7
The article briefly mentioned that different stats are useful for different
character classes but didn't really take that into account in the model.

For example if a barbarian get really high rolls for all stats except strength
is it actually a really a good roll for that character or should you consider
re-rolling?

Edit: Oops, I completely forgot about the ability to reassign points between
stats. Thanks to batiudrami & beloch for pointing that out.

As an interesting side note: An older (A)D&D game series, Eye of the Beholder,
allowed you to modify the stats any way you wanted after rolling, which meant
you could just set all stats to max if you wished. I've read from somewhere
that this was done so players could "import" their pen & paper RPG characters
with the correct stats points into the game. Dunno if that's true though.

~~~
batiudrami
It has a "point buy" system where you can add and subtract points, so only the
total is really useful.

Different classes also have different minimum stats - so the calculation is
actually rolling 4d6, excluding the lowest, and then rounding up to the
minimum if necessary. This means multi-class characters (who might have
minimum of 13 in two stats instead of the usual 9), or odd classes such as
Paladin who have a minimum 17 charisma end up with much higher average totals
than other classes.

It's an entirely broken system, designed for pen and paper D&D where you roll
your stats and then choose your class based on what you get, adjusted for
video game players who prefer to choose their class first.

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ggggtez
There arbitrary decision that 1 reroll is worth 1 score, is not even explored.
That is a big decision, as it places a cap on rerolls at around 35. It's not
obvious at all.

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moomin
Or, you know, you could just press Ctrl-8

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cantdutchthis
hi guys, i am the guy who wrote that blogpost. glad to see you guys liked it!

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wccrawford
>Let's turn this system into a game. You are allowed to reroll, but everytime
you do the score you get will get subtracted by one. What would be the optimal
stopping strategy?

If it wasn't just a thought-exercise, the answer would be: Quit the game and
start over until you get a perfect roll the first time.

Seriously. Games are supposed to be fun, not painful. While it might be a fun
thought exercise, it's incredibly bad game design.

~~~
jrs95
If you're trying to exploit the game, you should be having less fun. I played
Baldur's Gate, and there were all sorts of things you could do to be stronger
than you ought to be. Even without the rolling, you could level up a character
several times and then restart the game with that character. I didn't do that
specifically because I wanted to enjoy the game.

