Spreadsheet nightmare

[Aleolus]

OK, this is probably not the board to post this in, but it is related (at least tangentially), and I don't know where to look for this, so here we go. I am trying to come up with ranges for percentile rolls in a chart I wrote out in LibreOffice Calc. All I want is to have the program determine the most even distribution for it, but I can't figure out how to get it to do that. Does anyone on here know the program well enough to be able to help?

[KillianHawkeye]

I'm sure someone in the Mad Science and Grumpy Technology subforum will be able to help you.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Anybody else see that title and think this was going to be someone either asking advice for or complaining about playing an artificer?

[nedz]

In Excel I would use VB (via a macro) but I don't know if Libra supports this.

[liquidformat]

I normally like playing around with Any Dice for dice distributions, it works pretty well.

[AvatarVecna]

Anybody else see that title and think this was going to be someone either asking advice for or complaining about playing an artificer?

*raises hand*

[Nifft]

OK, this is probably not the board to post this in, but it is related (at least tangentially), and I don't know where to look for this, so here we go. I am trying to come up with ranges for percentile rolls in a chart I wrote out in LibreOffice Calc. All I want is to have the program determine the most even distribution for it, but I can't figure out how to get it to do that. Does anyone on here know the program well enough to be able to help?

If it's a matter of formatting I could probably help, but what do you mean by "determine the most even distribution for it"?

Do you want the program to take non-percentile fractions and turn them into a percent table? A spreadsheet might not be the best tool for that, but if it's simple enough you may be able to work it out anyway with an extra step or two.

Post some sample data and the sort of thing you want to get as a result.

[Gruftzwerg]

OK, this is probably not the board to post this in, but it is related (at least tangentially), and I don't know where to look for this, so here we go. I am trying to come up with ranges for percentile rolls in a chart I wrote out in LibreOffice Calc. All I want is to have the program determine the most even distribution for it, but I can't figure out how to get it to do that. Does anyone on here know the program well enough to be able to help?

I don't get the need for a programmed calculation? Are you intending to alter the length of the table or why you need to "program" it?
I mean, i would just calculate it (with a calculator if needed) and fill in the results into the table/sheet.

1) 100 / amount of possible outcomes rounded down

2) assign the remaining rest either as:
a) "re-roll"
b) to one of the possible outcomes
c) create a tiny possibility for something special (e.g. roll twice, death or whatsoever..)

[Eldan]

Can you give a more detailed description of what you're trying to do? I'm not entirely clear what you want distributed.

[Aleolus]

I am prepping to run a D&D 3.5 campaign in which all of the PCs are children of a god and a mortal, but none of the characters know it. I am going to have each of the players roll a die to determine which god is their parent, and I have 21 possibilities. This is important because they are going to be getting benefits from their divine parent as they go up in level, along the same lines as the Bloodlines from Unearthed Arcana. At the moment I just dropped one of the gods I was using (making it an even 20, flat 5% for each), but I wouldn't mind adding that one and possibly one or two more back in. So what I was trying to do was to simply input the range (1-100), and draw it out over the number of possible outcomes, and have the program divide up the range into that many possibilities

[Lord Torath]

Is there intended to be an even chance of having each deity for a parent? In that case, it's just a simple 100 divided by the number of gods.

21 is the product of 3 and 7, neither of which go evenly into 100, so you're going to have a slightly uneven distribution if you are only going to roll 1d100.

If you want an even distribution, you're going to want a number of gods that will divide 100 with no remainders: 2,4,5,10,20,25 and 50.

If you can get 33 gods, you can evenly divide it into 3% chances, with any results of 100 resulting in a reroll until you get a result in the range of 1-99.

You could do a similar thing with any number of gods, and reroll the 'extra' numbers.

If you have 23 gods, for example, each god gets a 4% chance, and there's a 8% chance of a reroll.

Is that what you are looking for?

Use =randbetween(1,<number of gods>), as Eldan recommends below.

[Aleolus]

Basically, though I did consider weighting it in favor of certain gods. I have decided against that though, as it is difficult to decide which gods would be more/less likely to sire offspring

[Eldan]

Don't roll a d100? Go to random.org or the wizards dice roller and roll 1dx where X is number of gods.

Alternatily in Excel, use the command

=randbetween(1,X)

where X=number of gods.

[jayem]

I am prepping to run a D&D 3.5 campaign in which all of the PCs are children of a god and a mortal, but none of the characters know it. I am going to have each of the players roll a die to determine which god is their parent, and I have 21 possibilities. This is important because they are going to be getting benefits from their divine parent as they go up in level, along the same lines as the Bloodlines from Unearthed Arcana. At the moment I just dropped one of the gods I was using (making it an even 20, flat 5% for each), but I wouldn't mind adding that one and possibly one or two more back in. So what I was trying to do was to simply input the range (1-100), and draw it out over the number of possible outcomes, and have the program divide up the range into that many possibilities

As given, if you are using the spreadsheet to make the choices, get it to use the "right sized die"
Or write it once.

If however you want to produce a dynamic lookup table, you could use something like the following

ID	Gods	Start	Stop
1	name 1	0	=int(A2/max(100*A$2:A$102))
A2+1	name 2	=D2+1	=int(100*A2/max(A$2:A$102))

(and then should be able to click and drag up to 100, note that this version uses all the numbers and is uneven weighting)
A2*int(100/max....) will make each bin the same size with a re-roll space at the end

It doesn't have any column dependency so it would be quite easy to Copy/Paste to do a collection of tables, and might even break even over just doing it by hand.

Instead of max, you could use counta which would (arguably) be a lot more sensible.
The advantage of max, is that you can skip ID's to have an outcome weighted more than the rest (I'd then have a column for the weighting and then a calculated column for the cumulative weighting).

[Trafalgar]

Spreadsheet nightmare..... Sounds like my job.