Gaming Calculator

It’s similar to when you’re looking at two items which, on paper, appear identical. One has more haste; the other has a greater critical strike rating. Which do you choose? Chances are you’ll be tempted to grab the one with bigger number, but it’s rarely that easy in gaming math. Will additional points help you … Read more

When you sit across from your opponent’s board, unsure if your necessary card is sitting on top of your deck or buried deep inside, you might feel as though you’re just rolling the dice. But math exist behind the shuffling curtain of your library. Because you are drawing from a finite pool, each card drawn … Read more

Your character takes a shot to the face. Your character falls over dead. The screen turns red. What happened? On paper, you have 60% damage reduction. So what was that about? How did this work? Armor doesn’t simply “add” to block chance or resistance. They doesn’t “stack.” Rather, they stack in ways that tend to … Read more

Why? Because you just spent hours farming for that sweet gear set that turns out to be totally useless against this one boss who seem immune to your defenses. It’s infuriating. The answer usually lies in not understanding how resistance actualy stacks in the math engine behind the graphics. You just spent hours farming for … Read more

We’ve all had it happen: You draw seven cards, look down and your stomach drop. The situation doesn’t seem right. Maybe there’s a wall of lands when you want spells. Or maybe there isn’t quite enough raw power to go off immediate. In many ways, the opening hand dictates the rhythm before the first turn … Read more

When you’re forty pulls short of your goal and there’s only three days left on a limited banner, that panic set in. Any player who has spent longer than a month playing a gacha game will know what I’m talking about. You need that character, and you likely have enough currency to get them. Or … Read more

You shuffle a sixty-card deck and get twenty-four lands into it. When you draw seven cards to begin your game, however, you find just one mana source among them. Bad luck? Not really; it’s math. Math that works precisely how it should of. These instances is subject to what mathematicians call the hypergeometric distribution. Essentially, when … Read more

Here’s another missed attack. Your armor class is fifteen. You have a plus five modifier. By those numbers, that’s a fifty-five percent chance of hitting. Roll with advantage? That chance increase to eighty percent. At first glance, that seems magical. But it isn’t, it’s math disguised as magic. And understanding that jump, in this case, … Read more

The sound of plastic against wood means it is left to chance. You hold a twenty-sided die between your fingers. What happens over the next half-minute will determine whether your character climbs the cliff or plummets into the abyss below. It’s exhilarating: there’s no way to know what’ll happen. But for all its randomness, there’s … Read more

For forty consecutive nights, you’ve beaten this damn raid boss and now you’re desperate for mount with the one percent drop rate on paper. You’re running out of patience. Your inventory contain nothing. Maybe the game is rigged against you? Maybe you’re just on some sort of bad luck streak? It’s something all gamers feel, … Read more

Enchanting systems turn resource management into a psychological thriller. Tension arise when you have hovered over the upgrade button for the twelfth time; it’s valuable but the odds is typically against you. It’s no longer just currency being spent; it’s the management of risk as your heart rate spikes or go flat, deciding what happens … Read more

People generally picture shiny hunting as a matter of luck. In practice however, planning your time makes that view wrong. Each encounter is an independent probability event; the odds reset with every single encounter. Instead of thinking about shiny hunting as a slot machine, approach it as a project with variables. That shift transform what … Read more