i cant say for certain whether the calculation is fractional or straight 1% leaps at the appropriate times. the test i played really didnt have enough opponents (lots of 2-4 creature encounters) that i could say for certain whether the ninja was getting 19% or 20% IK with the cane.
i did do a fair bit of searching on RPG for followups to that, and found a number of people praising otter's knowledge of stats for the game, but never found a post with any reasoning behind how he knows nor collating such findings.
however, i also ran across a website of a regular (lanastasia, maybe?) who has chest and monster drop item chances out to two decimal places, including variations by experience level (of your party, not the monster). putting it together, you find out some fascinating things like there are 6 ways to get the enchanted wakizashi (can anyone say 6 samurai party?)
i'll see if i can track down the link...
here it is, from the VN board...
http://www.flamestryke.com/wizardry8...trykes_w8.html
eew, i see you posted in this thread, so you must know it.
the reason i mention it is that someone must have cracked into the code to get this kind of detail - there's no way you could reverse engineer that!
so perhaps otter did something similar?
[ - EDIT - ]
this got me thinking so i started another search. i havent found anything on criticals or general stats yet. but i did find an interesting thread on testing spellcasting that you all might find interesting (particularly spellcasting fiends, like eew

)
http://www.rpgdot.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=9571
whoa, a fantatic thread on criticals, tested by someone using a game editor. pretty conclusive stuff, confirming some of our thoughts above.
http://www.rpgdot.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=9258
[ 09-03-2003, 10:56 PM: Message edited by: sultan ]