What do you want to know about probability?

[dindenver]

OK,
  So, I am looking at otherkind and it is a mechanic were no matter what you do, you keep 4 dice. You can roll up to about 8 dice in a highly charged situation. Normally, I am pretty good about calculating averages. But I am not sure if that is the correct approach here. So, if I roll 5 dice and keep the highest 4, how does that change the probabilities of any of them being over 5? How do I calculate this (preferable in Excel)? And how do I check roll 6 and keep 4, etc.?

[punkbohemian]

First, there's a book I recommend call "Statistics for the Terrified", which I believe is by John Kranzler. Most (if not all) of it is not very helpful for stats in RPG games. Nevertheless, I recommend it because I think it's one of the best stats books in terms of the writing and it's ability to educate someone about stats who is not comfortable with the subject.

I think a book like what you suggest would be interesting. I think it would be beneficial if you focused not specifically/entirely on the p-distributions of dice, but on the equations which generate these distributions. A lot of simple mechanics are pretty obvious, but there are plenty of systems out there that use exploding dice, various types of dice pools, etc. that could do with some jargon-free explanation. Whenever I tinker with a really complicated mechanic, I usually just take the lazy way out and write a little program in Python to figure things out for me, but it would be interesting to see how such things could be figured out arithmetically.