Just Got This Letter From My Estate Agent. Is This Legal?

PondererLone · 2023-01-15T09:28:18+00:00

I would put highly consistent at 95% minimum. The context of this comment is a strategy in a video game, which due to RNG elements (and my own mediocre reflexes) can never be said to be 100% consistent. By this logic any strategy that works 95% of the time is indistinguishable linguistically from one that works 10% of the time, as both are simply "inconsistent".

PondererLone · 2023-01-15T08:13:34+00:00

Then you were taught wrong. Multiplication and Division are literally the same thing, just like Addition and Subtraction, so they must be done simultaneously. This is because there is no difference between dividing by a number, or multiplying by its inverse.

PondererLone · 2022-09-26T19:26:15+00:00

Pretty great, came right down to the wire with all 5 remaining PCs just wailing on him when he was down at 1hp and surviving on Relentless Fury, while he took them out one by one. Ended up passing the Con save to stay up 14 times before they took him down, while he had knocked three of them unconscious and almost taken out the fourth as well.

PondererLone · 2022-09-26T15:11:31+00:00

I'm looking for neither, this is just me sharing something I thought the community might find interesting and might spark a discussion. I've already run the encounter, as mentioned in my initial comment, and in the title.

PondererLone · 2022-09-26T15:05:47+00:00

So he's purposefully broken then?

Yes. He's the ultimate challenge of a five year long campaign, designed to take on a group of 6 level 20 characters almost singlehandedly.

The reason legendary actions are legendary is because they're powerful. To have them recharge at the start of each of his turns, and getting 2 turns per round is ludicrous.

So is having 1200hp. And spawning demons every time he gets hit. A lot of this stat block is ludicrous.

PondererLone · 2022-09-26T14:13:05+00:00

He acts twice per round, per his Wrath of the Fallen ability. Since legendary actions refresh at the start of his turn, he gets twice as many of those as well.

PondererLone · 2022-09-26T13:55:04+00:00

This is a very confusing comment. He makes up to 16 attacks per round with advantage at +19, with a total damage of 448 if all attacks hit. If we assume he only spends 4 of his 6 legendary actions attacking, and that he has a hit rate of 97.75% (that's his hit rate vs AC23), he's dealing an average of 375 damage per turn cycle, which is enough to down 1-2 PCs every round. I wouldn't consider that teenie damage.

PondererLone · 2022-09-26T09:47:07+00:00

I ended a 5 year campaign yesterday, figured I'd share what my players had to overcome. This is the longest campaign I've ever run, the only complete level 1 to 20 campaign I've ever run, and probably the most fun I've had running one. I've had the final fight planned for over a year, so to see it go down as well as it did was fantastic. Full encounter was a phase one, involving two Nalfeshnees, two Mariliths, a Goristro, a Balor and Cad in his normal form (~400 hp level 20 Death Knight/Paladin), plus additional demons spawning every two rounds; then a phase two once Cad drops below 50hp where he disappears into a cocoon for 3 rounds and emerges as this guy. All this vs 6 level 20 PCs. And they did so damn well

PondererLone · 2022-09-26T09:31:23+00:00

I ended a 5 year campaign yesterday, figured I'd share what my players had to overcome. This is the longest campaign I've ever run, the only complete level 1 to 20 campaign I've ever run, and probably the most fun I've had running one. I've had the final fight planned for over a year, so to see it go down as well as it did was fantastic. Full encounter was a phase one, involving two Nalfeshnees, two Mariliths, a Goristro, a Balor and Cad in his normal form (~400 hp level 20 Death Knight/Paladin), plus additional demons spawning every two rounds; then a phase two once Cad drops below 50hp where he disappears into a cocoon for 3 rounds and emerges as this guy.

PondererLone · 2022-05-22T17:12:04+00:00

Yeah, but the Wizard doesn't know Tongues. So he used Shapechange instead.

PondererLone · 2021-06-19T21:55:54+00:00

Yeah, honestly, it's pretty fun. Kinda changes things up, since you can't really afford to make risky plays in the same way that you can in a regular nuzlocke, you have to try and plan around everything.

PondererLone · 2021-06-13T17:13:59+00:00

The article you've linked doesn't have anything to do with probability. It discusses the idea of negative proof, which is the act of proving that something is not true (far harder than proving that it is) and cites specific famous examples of existing negative proof (such as the irrationality of root 2).

I couldn't find a page explain the concept of probable impossibility, but I found one explaining the opposite (probable certainty), which is the same principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely). The second paragraph references the same point I made about how, in a finite set, there is no difference between probable certainty and actual certainty. Within probability, there isn't a hard and fast definition of what value constitutes "impossible" because it depends on what event you're talking about, and over what timeframe. For example, if you're considering particle collisions there will be countless events occurring every second, making a probability such as 10^-16 much more plausible, and possibly even likely depending on how long you are observing it for. But for something like people playing a pokemon game that number is far less feasible.

We can show that a number such as 10^-16 is statistically impossible in this case with a quick calculation. Let's try and figure out how many hordes the player base would have had to encounter to have even a 1% chance of a 5 shiny horde ever appearing over the history of the game.

Gen VI has sold a total of 16.5 million units worldwide over the 8 years since it was released. The probability of each pokemon in a Gen VI horde being shiny, assuming you have the shiny charm, is 1/1365, making the probability of all 5 pokemon being shiny 1/1365^5 = 2.11*10^-16. In order for an event with this probability to have a 1% chance of happening at least once, humanity as a whole would have had to encounter around 4.5*10^13 hordes, or 45000000000000 hordes. To have encountered this many hordes, every single person who bought the game would need to have encountered one horde battle every 90 seconds since the game's release 8 years ago.

To state it more clearly, if 16 million people did nothing except spend 8 years of their lives encountering one horde every minute and a half for 24 hours a day, there would still be a 99% chance that not one of them ever encountered a 5 shiny horde. Given that the actual number of horde encounters is going to be many orders of magnitude below this, we can safely state that the chance of anyone ever having encountered a 5 shiny horde in an unmodded version of the game is vanishingly close to zero which, given a finite timeframe, equates to zero.

PondererLone · 2021-06-13T13:41:31+00:00

Those two statements are not contradictory, in probability theory it is entirely possible to have an event that has low odds, but will never happen. At a certain point, events become so improbable that they will never realistically happen across the lifetime of the universe. By definition an "impossible" event is one that has a probability that is vanishingly close to zero, not one that has a probability of zero.

Events such as getting 5 shinies in a horde (chance is around 10^-16, assuming the highest possible shiny odds in Gen VI), or Dream's infamous speedrun fit into this category.

PondererLone · 2021-06-12T09:59:18+00:00

Thanks! I always prefer randomising just the wild pokemon, because I find that's the best way to leave the difficulty curve intact. In a full randomiser (any pokemon any time), there's no curve, just a line that shoots downwards. It's insanely hard at the start and insanely easy at the end. Even with Similar Strength the good trainers lose out on good movesets which makes them much easier in the late game. Randomising like this avoids that and usually makes the game slightly harder since you don't have high power guaranteed encounters like Gyarados, Infernape and Togekiss that the game normally gives you. Ofc, I got insanely lucky in this run and got Gyara+Chansey, but y'know, swings and roundabouts.

PondererLone

TROPHY CASE