I can't agree with you more. WHen I read that post, I knew it was
flawed... (I was waiting for someone else to say something, figured
maybe I was just imagining it).
As both my main char (cleric, 112 wis, skills all maxed) and bard (104
dex, 118 cha, skills maxed in the songs I use), whenever I level it is
fizzle city... I miss notes and fizz spells I have been casting
(singing) for a long time.

Great example happened last THurs (I play my cleric on THurs only, so
actually my bard may soon pass him). Clerics uses the same heal spell
from lvl 4 to lvl 14 (light healing). I was at lvl 12 (alteration
obviously maxed), fizzles were so rare I never even factoered them into
a fight (I assume this means 5%). DING, Welcome to lvl 13. 5 fizzles
in two fights (6 succeful heals, so it was 5 fizz in 11 tries). I would
pass it off as random chance, except for it seems to happen every single
level. I had similar results trying to run from a dervish at lvl 11
with my bard, I missed notes 5 out of 7 tries (I lost the song once I
got it going from stun).

On a second but maybe related note, I believe the random number genrator
may be flawed in the game. I see too many long runs of unlikly events
(both good and bad). This would be far from unheard of, as random
number generators are eseentially impossible to code. (People just
write code that approximates random number generartion). I did a study
of the random number generator built into the 8088 (basically the
original IBM PC) processor. (I used a few different languages to try to
eliminate any effect they had on it). I basically graphed a "random" x
and y cooordinate, drawing a line from point 1 to 2 to 3, etc... The
plots always followed similar patterns... Weird, eh?
--
We now return to the non-stop rock.

Matt DeBarger