• Meron35@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Actually, a d4 only had an expected value of 2.5, so the expected damage output from the senate should be 2.5600.55 = 82.5.

    Sounds impressive, but more interesting is the actual chance of success of killing Caesar. Each senator has a 0.45 chance to miss and a 0.55/4 chance of doing 1-4 damage respectively, for an expected value of 1.375 and variance of ~2.23. Formally modelling the distribution of the sum of 60 of these variables requires a 60 fold convolution which is too difficult. Instead, we can approximate the sum of total damage as a normal variable with an expected value of 601.375 = 82.5 and variance 602.23 = 134.06.

    The probability that this is less than 60 is around ~0.43, so Brutus’ plan had a less than 60% chance of succeeding. That’s… rather terrible for an assassination plan. The addition of sneak attack rolls wouldn’t help much, given that the variance of dice rolls is just so high.