Down With People posted:

Effectronica posted:

Well, since this is apparently the thread for stupid poo poo, I decided on a lark to take a look at the number of possible 1st-level human fighters in 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons (chosen because it was somewhat closer than my 4e book). Overall, it works out to 125 trillion possible ones using non-weapon proficiencies, but only in-class ones, and ignoring things that have zero game-mechanical effect. Reducing this to fighters that get bonus XP from having high STR only drops us to 120 trillion. Much of this comes from extraordinary STR and from weapon proficiencies. Reducing extraordinary STR to the five meaningful categories drops us down by half to 60 trillion, 58 counting only ones that get bonus XP. Cutting out NWPs, we have 8.5 billion characters, 7.8 billion of which get bonus XP. Cutting out weapon proficiencies drops us down to 15,200/14,080.

So how about leveling up? Well, for NWPs, this will vary based on the initial choices. I will do the simple case and deal with the 8.5 billion characters that picked Weaponsmithing as their NWP choice, and cut out variation in gold and items and so on. Leveling up under these conditions generates 31.4 billion possibilities, or 2.7 sextillion possible characters. At this point, I will drop NWPs entirely.

So under that constraint, there are 36 quadrillion possible level 2 fighters, 114 sextillion possible level 3 fighters, 262 octillion possible level 4 fighters...

So let's figure out where the combinatorial increase dies. It turns out to be level 15 (with two remaining that are taken at level 16), while the fighter's last hit die is gained at level 9. A little estimation tells us this will be at a minimum on the order of 10^80 total possible characters, beyond the common names for large numbers and on a similar order to the number of atoms in the universe.

But if we cut out weapon proficiencies, we end up with a simple order of magnitude increase. There are only 15 million possible level 4 fighters in that case, and 15 trillion total possible fighters.

Many of these are bizarre, or unworkable, of course, and this is neglecting other combinatorial factors that would increase matters still further.

Effectronica posted:

Stormgale posted:

I feel like this Saber is quite the cutting remark.

Ningyou posted:

I want to try Chubbo but god, as interested as I am that corebook kinda seems like distilled tl;dr

_{also i will never not call it Chubbo sorry not sorry}

Ningyou posted:

"don't like" "SHODAN"

....I'm sorry but I don't know what these words mean in that order

Ningyou posted:

_{GLaDOS best scarydommey AI though}

Wahad posted:

Unpopular opinion option #3:

Queen Fiona posted:

The problem with Samaritan is it's not a lady, it's a whiny snot-nosed kid.

Ningyou posted:

Speaking of disappointment, i guess Hannibal is starting up again and I really, really hope that doesn't somehow go bad this season? Because the first two seasons were amazing but then I didn't think PoI would feature Smarmy McChildlaborlaws, Samaritan avatar (or resolve the Dominic/Elias thing by some rando shooting both of them because ~~~~~outliers~~~~) so idek.