Statistics In Gaming

I've always found statistics in sports to be interesting.  The ability to step back and look at a large amount of data and draw conclusions that one might not have arrived at otherwise is interesting to me.  So it follows that I also find statistics in gaming of interest. 

I find that my interest is never so keen as when playing Hackmaster (4th or Basic).  The various weapon selections and, perhaps most of all, penetration dice, really make the statistics of the game interesting.  Recently, while making characters for our camping game,  one of the members of my group made a weapon damage spread sheet to try to figure out what type of damage he wanted to use.  He charted our the various weapons he was interested in, the types of bonuses he could expect toward damage, and also factored in the DR his foe would be receiving from the armor they were wearing.

Metagaming?  Yeah, probably.  I didn't get mad at him though, I was too interested in his findings.  One factor to consider in the various weapons was also penetration dice.  For those who don't know, any die that rolls the maximum result, such as an 8 on a d8, that die is then rolled again and the result of the die (-1) is added to the total. 

Penetration dice make for some very interesting math, and recently while on Troll and Flame (a site that is still new to me) I came across this post that takes a hard look at the math behind penetration dice.  Very interesting, and certainly worth a look. 

I'm not saying that Statistical Analysis is necessary to play Hackmaster or any other RPG for that matter, but for those who are interested, the data is there.