[DL] die percentages

["Jeff Shoffner" <shoffner@esper.com>]

> The Engineer (Mad Scientist) in me wanted to know about the percentages
for
> hitting different Target numbers with different dice roles.  For example,
> which has a better change of hitting a target number or 7, 3d4 or 1d8?  I
> had written a small utility to analyze Shadowrun dice rolls sometime back,
> and quickly modified it to work with more that just d6 dice.

[snip]

Well, I'll tell ya, long before I got into this game, someone had posted
percentages with rolling dice.  I found a few errors, and curiousity beating
out apathy, started figuring out the algorhythyms for 1D10, 2D10, 3D10, etc.
Figure once I got it for D10, working for all other die would be easy.

Now, my math education limited.  I got as far as college calc, barely
passed, and found no useful reason to know it.  Hence, I was trying my best
to GRAPH all of this.  (heh-heh) About a week later with brainburn (ie:
hitting 4D10) I gave up.  Best I could determine is vaguely, the higher the
number, the easier it is to roll with multiple dice, up until you hit an
Ace.  The percentage for the next number drops dramatically, then the curve
repeats.  That's about it.  Plus, if you're going to do this, you'd best be
a math or engineer major.

Jeff S