Question about testing and variables

I’ve looked into quicktest and randomtest and I think that I understand how they work, but I have a question about a function that I don’t think they have. Is it possible (either through some kind of function or a workaround) to get some sort of data on variable values? As in, is it possible to test the maximum/minimum value of variables in a playthough/the average value of this variable? Technically finding the maximum/minimum should be easy enough (by adding up the stat changes), so calculating the average in some way would be helpful. Since you can’t assume players are going to be picking the maximum every time.

(I’m trying to calculate these so that I can decide what a reasonable stat check at certain points would be)

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After my first game, I started using something basically the same as this method and I’ve found it really useful with sorting out difficulty of stat checks. With Blood Money, it took a lot of balancing once it had all been written to make the stat checks anywhere near doable! Whereas with Crème de la Crème I did the method linked, chapter by chapter, and it was a lot more manageable.

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I just gave it a quick scan at this point but it looks really really promising!

This part especially:

Represent amounts of stat change with standard change variables rather than numbers . Thus *set some_stat %+small_quirk_change rather than *set some_stat %+10. If I’m getting a distribution that’s too flat, I can lower these quantities all at once; meanwhile, the code remains readable; it always lets me see what the intent was when I added stat changes.

I’m really glad I asked this while my code was still small, that’s fantastic advice :smiley:

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Yeah, I really like using that - it’s so much more flexible than using numbers if you want to change the difficulty!

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