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As to Aria; now people that grok math can crunch the numbers for me, and I can focus more on my story and campaign. Their number crunching helps me understand the underlying math of the system, its logic, its common sense as it were. That way when I need to make that "common sense" rule on the fly I grok the game well enough to make good rulings. If math isn't your thing, that's ok, plenty of us like math though.
To those who are interested, how does this analysis stack up with the table on page 184?
Any serious discrepancies?
(It looked like a good match to me, but...)
You don't need to grok the math to make an interesting story. The math is balanced behind the scenes already and you just have to follow the xp budgets and guidelines. The only math required is simple addition. Everything else is worthless and takes away from the game.
From all of us that like writing encounters using more than what's in the DMG/MM, and from all of us trying to write for 4e and contribute meaningful additions to the game, and from all of us that really enjoy seeing arrays of statistics so we know if our own homebrew creatures are really balanced or not when we come up with something a little exotic and therefore not covered by the DMG, I offer a hearty THANK YOU.
To all of the hatemongering for stats and math; please stop.
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Great statistics! Kind of nifty to see how things parse out behind the scenes.
I'm kind of curious now though. No monster is vulnerable to cold damage. What, then, is the point of the Wintertouched feat? I'm sure they'll eventually have creatures vulnerable to cold, but right now it seems nothing short of useless.
Great statistics! Kind of nifty to see how things parse out behind the scenes.
I'm kind of curious now though. No monster is vulnerable to cold damage. What, then, is the point of the Wintertouched feat? I'm sure they'll eventually have creatures vulnerable to cold, but right now it seems nothing short of useless.
It's mostly useful in combination with the Paragon feat Lasting Frost. With those two and a Frost weapon or a wand of an Ice spell you're in business.
Propaganda by power gamers. Nothing more and not relevant at all.
The only value this has is for power gaming number crunchers who have no interest in play cooperatively, rather than competitively. Thus ruining the game for others that just want to have fun as is and not agonize over every single number.
The DMG already has guidelines and plenty of tables to insure what you create using the system is balanced.
These tables are valuable for understanding the design behind the game, helping Dms build interesting monsters or monsters that are intentionally not balanced or are balanced and understand the game mechanic effects they have on the players.
DMs can more accurately plan encounters for their players with these tables if they choose too.
For some people, doing this math or seeing the inner workings, is fun and there is nothign wrong with that. You do not have to be a power gamer to take want to take something apart and see how it ticks inside.
Honestly, your being rude to the OP and those interested in what he is doing. Please take a step back and relax and do your best to understand other people's perspectives instead of putting your own on them.
2. You'd have to explain how inflated salaries are, especially in light of the increased revenue, to decline phases, and on the availability of a cheaper player with similar talent.
The fact that reflex is the most used defence is quite interesting. If it is an intentional design choice it needs to be taken into consideration when considering and designing new races (using eladrin as a starting point and merely swapping the bonus over to reflex will make a stronger race, which might not be immediately obvious, for example), classes' defense bonuses and special abilities (hi2u shape the dream, radiant censure). Arguably it should have been made explicit in the books as well ("making the system assumptions transparent" is a design goal, after all).
It makes a fair bit of sense to be intentional since the defenders, the ones in the core anyway, carry shields which give 10% better mitigation against those attacks. After all, what's the point of a defender if it's not actually beneficial for the party to have him/her targeted?
Again, thanks for the data, good food for rambling thought.
It makes a fair bit of sense to be intentional since the defenders, the ones in the core anyway, carry shields which give 10% better mitigation against those attacks.
Yeah, our Fighter has been a lot happier since he dropped his Maul and picked up a Heavy Shield.
The "great weapon" path is more than a little deceptive.
Cheers, -- N
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All right, allow me to settle this debate once and for all.
There is our shared consensus of how the world should be. Fighters should stab things effectively, wizards should harness the powers of magic, evil rotty magic doesn't work well against undead and shiny divine magic does, and so forth. We each have a set of these perceptions, and most of them are pretty well aligned.
Now, there are also the set of numbers used to describe the world. And most of these numbers line up with the majority of our perceptions.
Now, let us take the view that the numbers are fundamentally important, and the only thing that matters is our perceptions. In this view, the numbers exist so we can play with dice; if numbers come up that disagree with our perceptions, we throw them out and make up new ones. In this view, looking at the numbers distracts us from the simple expression of shared consensus.
However, another view is that numbers and shared consensus are both important, and that when they are misaligned, one or the other should be shifted around. If we perceive a hit from a longsword and a hit from a longbow as being pretty much equivalent in terms of human squishing potential, but one does 2d6 and the other does 1d4, we will see our expectation of the world violated in actual play. We need to either adjust our perception, or adjust the numbers, and in order to know which to do, it helps to have a lot of data in one place.
Wonderful bit of Math! Thanks -- these numbers really make me happy!
Here is a bit of statistics I'd love to see:
(% of creatures on which this Defense is their lowest Defense) (Mean difference from (level+12), and Variance from (level+12), for which this defense is their lowest defense) (Mean differences from AC, and variance from AC, for which this defense is their lowest defense).
That will help tell us how useful having a good attack against a given defense is, rather than against AC.
...
Did you factor out Elite/Solos or not? That is important, as Elites shouldn't be averaged in with normal monsters.
...
Another good bit of information? The average damage output of monsters by level and role, say on a 5 round horizon.
(One of each encounter power, starting with refresh ones. Refresh ones have a N/6 chance of activating each round after the first -- and then 5 - ((1+N*4/6) recharge powers + Standard action Encounter Powers) at-will power usage).
Having information about the enemy "damage budget" would be exceedingly useful!
How exactly does one rationalize a creature having a higher reflex defense than his AC? For instance, how is it that he would be able to dodge an attack targeting his reflex, yet fail to block the attack targeting his AC even though they both share the same attack roll?
How exactly does one rationalize a creature having a higher reflex defense than his AC? For instance, how is it that he would be able to dodge an attack targeting his reflex, yet fail to block the attack targeting his AC even though they both share the same attack roll?
"Best block: no be there."-- Mr. Miyagi.
Or "Does catching a football mean you can stop a crossover?"
As a side note: Since there is that argument about how bad wizards are on the WotC forums, I have just made a short analysis comparing AC to the weakest defense of a monster.
I only did the first 152, but it seems that the average difference is about 4.4, which favors flexible casters over casters which mainly attack the same defense.
Also there are quite a few creatures who have a really amazing gap between AC and their weakest defense.
You don't need to grok the math to make an interesting story. The math is balanced behind the scenes already and you just have to follow the xp budgets and guidelines. The only math required is simple addition. Everything else is worthless and takes away from the game.
OK, this was 6 days ago and only just been noticed.
Normally I'd let it pass after this length of time, but since Rel explicitly warned you about this kind of post in this thread, it is a seven day ban for you.
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