I was referring to Mutants/Xmen...

mmm... Reminds me of Linde Beige talking of D&D, how your AC goes up so you get hit less often, not that you deflect the hits, which is what mobility/dexterity is actually suppose to do.

I don't know. Gotta do really simple systems even if they aren't accurate, because if you get too complicated it slows it down or makes it hard to incorporate into a NES console. And in games with magic, you aren't trying to emulate real life, you just want to hit things and get that XP and gold...

When most of your stats are in the 20's, literally convert that to 4/5 miss rate til your skills are higher. I don't think it's the high miss rate people really hate. It's the amount of time it takes and wastes. Instead of that might convert to 1/5th damage so you're always doing something. Sorta like how in Oblivion they removed miss chance and they removed spell failure, and instead it just costs more to cast and you can't get higher spells til you get those numbers ups.

But missing and it's your dice and it's your roll missing, vs not seeing the RNG, there's a disconnect there for sure. Though in 3.5 and up unless you min/max you're probably only getting a 50/50 to hit.

FF2 is actually pretty complex for an NES game, and as a result it has more bugs than FF1, but apparently about the same bug density.

Also, FF2 doesn't have XP.

Stats are relative. What about having stats in the 60s/70s? (Late game SaGa Frontier, though I note that robots can easily hit 99 in a key stat like STR for sword users.) What about stats in the triple digits? (Dragon Quest games, later in the game, also Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark) How about stats in the millions? (Disgaea series, once you're ready to consider taking down post-game bosses) 20 in a stat is huge in AD&D, but it's tiny in Disgaea (you reach that at single digit levels with low level equipment and no other stat boosts).

I read a detailed walkthrough on Disgaea and it's stats and how it levels up and... it actually worked really really well. Not sure of stats in the millions, but maybe i'm still thinking in 1&2 when i never saw anything above 30,000. Course i never played nearly to level 9999, i think the most i got to was like 2000 in the second game, and the grind was... just boring and got tiring.

Hmmm... Kinda wish you could do a MGS and send groups on missions, to get low level items or grind. For every 1/10th the main character's level your max reduces by 1, so if you're 1000th level, you could select a bunch of guys adding to 300 levels and have 3 fewer you can take on your own next set of missions. And after 10 missions they come back, if they survived and level up once per mission. Also level up items that way too maybe...

But when numbers start getting really big, well you kinda lose perspective. Like Hero Clicker. I changed it to show just the power in Scientific notation, so it would be 2.578e247 or something and you could tell who to upgrade based on if they were under N value and you upgraded anyone under 1% of your total funds.

Reminds me of Fell Seal's DLC, where you can send some units (generics and monsters only) on a mission, and after a certain amount of real time (measured by the system clock, so closing the game doesn't stop this), they'll return, receiving a reward. For example, the units might get some extra AP while away.

(In the meantime, you can't use the units that you sent away, but that doesn't affect the number you can deploy in a single battle. Also, the game is otherwise turn based.)

That makes Cooke Clicker's numbers look tiny! (And Cookie Clicker already takes you to the octillions and beyond.)

(Also, it seems the web version of Clicker Heroes requires Flash, which should be considered obsolete at this point.)

With that said, I've still seen definitions of much bigger numbers, like Moser's number (which is so huge it might as well be infinite, though it is technically finite) and Graham's number (which is much bigger than Moser's number).

Of course, I looking this up I stumbled across googology.wikia.com with its mention of Rayo's number, which might be even bigger (I say *might* because, at this point, answering the question of which number is bigger requires a formal mathematical proof), and even BIG FOOT, which is apparently ill-defined.

I don't mind Morrowind's system so much. It just fails to communicate its mechanics. Were they to tell you that

Hit Chance = ((Weapon Skill + (Agility / 5) + (Luck / 10)) * (0.75 + 0.5 * Current Fatigue / Maximum Fatigue) + Fortify Attack Magnitude) - (((Agility / 5) + (Luck / 10)) * (0.75 + 0.5 * Current Fatigue / Maximum Fatigue) + Sanctuary Magnitude + Blind Magnitude*)

or simplified: "Level up your weapon mastery and use stamina potions and you'll hit stuff!" a lot of the issues people have would be gone. Once you know how the system works, you can ramp up your hit chance very easily and on low levels, making missing attacks a rarity. It's also why redguard sword builds are regularly recommended for beginners, as those builds start with a very decent hit chance on level 1.
A redguard that just started into the game, uses Strength and Agility (50) as core attributes (luck will be at 40), has a specialization in warrior skills and longblade (weapon skill = 50) as a major skill will have a hit chance of 80%. If you really want to be hitting things right away, you can add the warrior birthsign (+10pp), luck over strength as a primary attribute (+1.25pp) and use conjuration to summon a longsword to attack with (uses up almost no stamina, increases hit chance by 12,5pp and also onehits a lot of earlygame adversaries). That would give you a base hit chance of 103.75% two minutes into the game. That's much better than what I'm used to from high-level characters in a DSA rule set. :p

Now what about the evasion part? We're talking about the earlygame here. The foes in the first "dungeon" have evasion chances of 17,5%, 15% and 16% assuming full fatigue, and their fatigue will rapidly suffer during combat. Using the 80% initial hit chance character that leaves you at 65% hit chance (and three hits = kill) and using the 103.75% initial hit chance character you'd still have 88.75% hit chance (and one hit = kill). Those three foes are dunmers who have a better agility stat than many other foes.

* Note: In unpatched Morrowind versions getting blinded increases rather than decreases your hit chance.

Dear games, just let me know how you work and I can work with you. I don't care so much whether my initial hit chance is 50% or 95% as long as I know how the accuracy is determined and how I can influence my and my opponents' hit chances. It's even fine for me that in some games my hit chance is 95% and I'll still only hit about 30% of the attacks because an opponent is so very good at blocking... games that work like this give you tools to lower or bypass (flanking) the blocking chance anyway.

I'm fine with that. A warrior's competence with weapons determines how easily (s)he hits. The damage should be roughly the same. Leveling up shouldn't inherently grant better damage. Leveling skills like critical strike or anatomical knowledge should.

Yeah, logically a float/double would never handle it, so i think you use 2 int's/long's instead, one for exponent and one for values. Think the last time i played i had over e8000 but i don't remember. It's been a while.

There's only so much numbers going up that will make you want to keep playing.

A double can handle the numbers that appear in those clicker games just fine (Cookie Clikcer uses doubles because that's all that JavaScript supports).

No general purpose numerical representation can handle the huge numbers I mention here; in fact, there are not enough particles in the universe to represent them! (Not to mention that some of the bigger ones aren't even computable (at least not from the definition), but then again sometimes they're ill-defined (in other words, the definition does not specify a unique number).

Edit: Well, maybe you need to use the different representation when you get past 10^300 or so, but it's still a floating point representation.

You don't need to handle the huge numbers. If you do addition/subtraction and the difference is bigger than say e12, you can just skip it. Multiplication would involve normal multiplication, but then you do shifts. Seeing as you get basically the first and second bits added together you just modify the total result shifting down and turning the e up until it fits again. Division will be similar, where you divide the int numbers, and then adjust the e value to determine where it actually stands.

Floating point isn't about accurately representing something, it's about giving a general size of scale.

The numbers in those clicker games can at least be approximaged with floating point representations; you can get both the number of digits and the most significant digits from the float representation. (That's really what floating point is.)

The huge numbers I mention, like Moser's number, can not. They are so big that the number of digits in the number is too big, as is the number of digits in that, and the number of digits in *that*, for quite a few iteration of that. You simply can't represent numbers that big; there's not enough room in the universe for even an approximation of such numbers. (I don't even know what the most significant digit of Moser's number is, though I have been able to figure out the least significant digit (the digit in the 1's place).) At this point, even getting a general size of scale is too much to ask for.

when doing those clicker games, the e number just becomes part of what the number is. I don't have a clue how much 2e8000 is, but it's closer to being just 2,8000 and just the rest is a fraction you mostly ignore.

Assuming the numbers get large enough you could i suppose always have 64bit main numbers and 64bit exponents, which then would take a while to max out... and easy enough to just do the same thing with.

I don't know.

I prefer the Guild Wars approach where attacks don't miss under normal circumstances.

Given that your hypothetical game uses dice for attack rolls, I'm assuming it's a d20 variant.

I'd favor something where attacks always hit by default, but the attack roll determines how well.

Attack roll at or above armor class: Handled per normal rules. Critical damage may apply on a dice roll in the upper ranges.

Attack roll below armor class: Damage roll is made with disadvantage, and effective bonus damage is halved (round down). Roll an extra damage dice and discard the highest one. Example: For an attack that does 2d6 + 8 damage under normal circumstances, roll 3d6 and discard the highest number then add 4 to the resulting total.

Certain conditions, such as blindness, invisibility, and spell effects, may cause different handling for attack rolls. For example, a temporarily blinded character would have disadvantage on all attack rolls, and an attack roll below the recipient's armor class misses (inflicting no damage).

Sure it should be a disadvantage? I am aware of two games where it can be an advantage (SaGa 1 and Morrowind), and one where it doesn't actually matter (Final Fantasy 6).

Maybe it should be scaled based on the level difference between the character and the enemy ?

For example, a level 1 fighter will have a 90% chance of hitting a level 1 target but the accuracy will decrease by 5-10% for each level difference so the same character will only have a 70% chance against a level 3 monster.