(Thanks to
@Chthon for giving some pointers, though there was still a bunch of trial and error to figure out that there's a TL2 quirk behind this.)
For anyone curious:
SET STAT with different MIN and MAX
can generate random numbers, between MIN and MAX-1 (inclusive).
But with one caveat:
It must be called from an inline EFFECTS block. Calling it from an affix will cause TL2/GUTS to only ever choose MIN!
? Well, this is good to know!
It's rather counterintuitive, given that stat stuff is sometimes buggy with inline EFFECT blocks, and that affixes are preferred for that.
But it looks like this is one exception where it's reversed!
Topic for further investigation:
Several of the item affixes exhibit similar buggy behavior. As best I can tell, what's happening is that there's an extra division by 100 where there shouldn't be, so you end up with "min + random_roll(0, max - min)/100" (or at least that's my best guess), which the item tooltip display usually rounds up to min+1. Someone -- I think it was RnF -- figured out that you could fix them by overriding the graph with a custom graph that maps all inputs to 100. I wonder if the same bug -- or a similar bug -- might be at play here, and whether it could be fixed in the same way?
Using SET STAT in an affix and setting the MAX to something really large (and also making sure the stat's max is also really large) still doesn't change the result - it still always chooses MIN. So looks like there's no obvious divisor in this case...
Seems like TL2 has two independent sets of logic/code for inline effects vs. affixes, which really makes little sense to me.