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Fixing Challenge Rating
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<blockquote data-quote="tomedunn" data-source="post: 9285186" data-attributes="member: 7040979"><p>Increasing the number of dice rolled (specifically attack rolls and saving throws) will make the results more consistent, not less. You might be more likely to roll a critical hit or a high damage roll, but those make up a smaller portion of the overall result than a single critical hit or high damage roll from an encounter where fewer dice are rolled. </p><p></p><p>Here's an example illustrating this effect from my article on the <a href="https://tomedunn.github.io/the-finished-book/theory/variability-attacks/#fig:cd-distribution-example" target="_blank">damage variability from attacks</a>, it shows how the distribution of damage looks for 8d6 total damage distributed across 1, 2, and 8 attacks that each have a 60% chance to hit and a 5% chance to critically hit.</p><p></p><p>[ATTACH=full]350482[/ATTACH]</p><p></p><p>All deal the same average damage overall, but the damage variability decreases as the number of attacks increases. </p><p></p><p>If we think of this in the context of balancing combat, if these represent the damage a single PC with 30 HP would take in an encounter with each of these monsters, the monster that attacks once for 8d6 would be significantly deadlier than the one that attacks 8 times for 1d6 each.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="tomedunn, post: 9285186, member: 7040979"] Increasing the number of dice rolled (specifically attack rolls and saving throws) will make the results more consistent, not less. You might be more likely to roll a critical hit or a high damage roll, but those make up a smaller portion of the overall result than a single critical hit or high damage roll from an encounter where fewer dice are rolled. Here's an example illustrating this effect from my article on the [URL='https://tomedunn.github.io/the-finished-book/theory/variability-attacks/#fig:cd-distribution-example']damage variability from attacks[/URL], it shows how the distribution of damage looks for 8d6 total damage distributed across 1, 2, and 8 attacks that each have a 60% chance to hit and a 5% chance to critically hit. [ATTACH type="full" width="557px"]350482[/ATTACH] All deal the same average damage overall, but the damage variability decreases as the number of attacks increases. If we think of this in the context of balancing combat, if these represent the damage a single PC with 30 HP would take in an encounter with each of these monsters, the monster that attacks once for 8d6 would be significantly deadlier than the one that attacks 8 times for 1d6 each. [/QUOTE]
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