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[Ryan1711]

I'm having a problem with personality modding, which I thought I'd share to both spread the word and maybe receive possible solutions.

Lately; I've been trying to build an ultimate fortress that runs incredibly smoothly. I'm cheating though, so have decided to make it very easy on myself (basically, I use super-dwarfs that don't eat, drink, sleep, get angry e.t.c).
One key part of being a superdwarf though, is having the right personality (for the fringe benefits they give).

Because of this, I have the personality parameters often set at things things such (2:4:6) or (92:94:96). I do this because in my understanding, the first number is always the minimum and last number is the maximum- with the actual value for each Dwarf having a 50% chance of being somewhere within the range of minimum to middle or middle to maximum.

However, it doesn't work 100% of the time. Most of the time, one or two dwarfs will go the complete opposite of what I intend and rigged the numbers to create. I can have 6 highly industrious dwarfs for example, and then a lone dwarf who is extremely lazy.

Is this a bug? Can anybody explain why this happens? Is there anything I can do to fix it?

It's rather aggravating (as alot of this game is for somebody with mild OCD about perfectionism); so I'd like a fix if one is possible.

[Sir Reginald Bathwater]

It could be that it follows some kind of distribution function, rather than an even spread between min-max, which would result in a few anomolies.

[NW_Kohaku]

I tend to get a suspicion that Toady uses normal curve functions for some things, like combat...

If you're getting something outside the "absolute minimum", then it's obviously not an absolute.  Either the game gets mad at you for making a really small target spread, there is a slim hard-coded chance for "freak" personalities that can be any kind of extreme, so that an otherwise very dull race can have one or two freak artists, or Toady just places some sort of normal distribution, with those first and last numbers somehow defining the standard deviations, and you just rolled up that million-to-one chance for a -10 standard deviations.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

Its on a bell curve and the two points define the average area to fall into but no matter what you always have some freak who manages to fall outside the norm. for instance in most games if you could set a range of personality's for your characters and you got results outside of the norm its a glitch but in DF people will ponder whether it was meant to be this way and if Toady happened to program in the dwarven equivalent of deviants (Which he might have done!).