The Overkill Damage Fallacy

MonsterEnvy · Jun 9, 2019

FrogReaver said:
If that's your rebuttal then you don't understand the argument.

I for sure don't I have no idea what point the opening post is trying to make.

FrogReaver · Jun 9, 2019

MonsterEnvy said:
I for sure don't I have no idea what point the opening post is trying to make.

Being able to make 2 attacks instead of 1 is important because on some turns you will kill an enemy with your first attack and be able to attack another enemy with your 2nd while the comparison pc with a single attack doesn't get a chance to do damage except on the enemy you killed with your first attack.

The point I am making is that there is a similar scenario where the single attack PC is getting to do damage to another enemy while the two attack PC is still attacking the enemy the single attack PC killed the previous round.

So if you are going to mention overkill damage and fail to mention this advantage of single attack damage then you are presenting an inaccurate picture. That's where the fallacy exists. The fallacy is that no one who over talks about overkill damage ever considered that single attack characters may sometimes kill enemies a round faster and thus get to start damaging another enemy faster because of that.

MonsterEnvy · Jun 9, 2019

Nagol · Jun 9, 2019

FrogReaver said:
If that's your rebuttal then you don't understand the argument.

You're right. I was looking at it as a variation of Lancaster's Law, but you've set the situation up as a worst case comparison for PC2. PC2 has to perform just as much overkill as PC1 to drop a enemy, but suffers from reduced chance to inflict that whole amount in a single round.

Change your scenario by dropping the enemy's hp total to 4 and you'll see a large swing since that's the best case for PC2 (actually anything from 1-4 is best case because PC1 and PC2 both drop an enemy in a single hit at that point) or raise the enemy's hp to 9 so PC1 takes 2 hits to kill and PC2 takes 3.

5ekyu · Jun 9, 2019

FrogReaver said:
Right, the argument wasn't that overkill damage doesn't exist and can't allow a multi attack character to sometimes kill an enemy faster than a single attack character of equivalent DPR.

The argument I am making is that there are also mechanisms in place that allow for the single attack character to kill an enemy a round faster and apply his next rounds damage to a new enemy while the two attack character is still killing the first enemy. At this point in time no one can say with any evidence that what they refer to as overkill is more important than the factor I've brought to light. Does the factor I'm talking about completely offset overkill? Is it more important than overkill? If so then mentioning overkill in isolation without this mitigating factor definitely is a fallacy, arguing that one option is superior than another based on 1 factor that is only part of the picture.

That said, more work needs done to work out the precise details. I also called that out in my first post.

Actually I've just realized the way to account for it. He requires 2 hits to kill a 5 hp enemy. That means he needs 10 attacks to hit in total. I can easily calculate that for him. The single attack PC needs 5 attacks to hit in total. Any objections to this method?

Sure. I'm sure you realize how complex the actual calculation will be. So arguing that I should have started there instead of building up to it seems more like a way to discount the work that has been done that is going to hopefully build up to that.

My initial working theory is that in actual play such threshholds will be encountered 50-50. This will occur because variable damage hits will tend to ultimately drop monsters hp to such a range that the value will be randomly distributed between the 2 thresholds.

Of course that brings up the more important and much more complicated scenario of variable damage which I don't plan to attempt to tackle till the end.

"If so then mentioning overkill in isolation without this mitigating factor definitely is a fallacy, arguing that one option is superior than another based on 1 factor that is only part of the picture."

Actually, it's the " if so" part that beggars the use here of the term fallacy.

It's not "normal usage" to assign the term fallacy to an issue just because it **might not be true* or in some cases isnt.

I mean, if you take you at your expressed statement and apply it to the statements about DPR znd thenkmpactbof the +5/-10 feats etc thrn ine vould judt as (in )accurately call those fallacy if they did not take into account overkill, because it is a factor (one among many) they either left out or did not convludivrly show to be not significant.

So, it seems like the takeaway here is that the actual assessment of in- game effective damage done DPRbis more complex than lost of these models represents snd uou seem to feel it's fine to call some of the conclusions models that leave stuff out "fallacious."

Thsts cool for me cuz the typical white room spreasheet forum warrior DPR fu always seemed to me to just ignore too many actual play factors to be meaningful anyway.

Glad to see we may not be as far apart as I had suspected.

FrogReaver · Jun 10, 2019

5ekyu said:
"If so then mentioning overkill in isolation without this mitigating factor definitely is a fallacy, arguing that one option is superior than another based on 1 factor that is only part of the picture."

Actually, it's the " if so" part that beggars the use here of the term fallacy.

It's not "normal usage" to assign the term fallacy to an issue just because it **might not be true* or in some cases isnt.

I mean, if you take you at your expressed statement and apply it to the statements about DPR znd thenkmpactbof the +5/-10 feats etc thrn ine vould judt as (in )accurately call those fallacy if they did not take into account overkill, because it is a factor (one among many) they either left out or did not convludivrly show to be not significant.

So, it seems like the takeaway here is that the actual assessment of in- game effective damage done DPRbis more complex than lost of these models represents snd uou seem to feel it's fine to call some of the conclusions models that leave stuff out "fallacious."

Thsts cool for me cuz the typical white room spreasheet forum warrior DPR fu always seemed to me to just ignore too many actual play factors to be meaningful anyway.

Glad to see we may not be as far apart as I had suspected.

Right, the game is very complicated. Discrete things always are. That said DPR is quite meaningful. It's one of the best performance gauges we have (it's easy to calculate and typically a pretty good reflection of PC offensive capability). One of the biggest reasons for that is that it's one of the few stats that's nearly fully in control of the player. Defensive stats typically only come into play on DM whim. Skill checks rarely result in a meaningfully increased chance of death. I'm not trying to represent every game possible under the system but those are some general takeaways.

As for fallaciousness, I call overkill damage that because there's similar mechanics at play to it that are ignored. I don't see a correlation to that and DPR.

FrogReaver · Jun 10, 2019

Nagol said:
You're right. I was looking at it as a variation of Lancaster's Law, but you've set the situation up as a worst case comparison for PC2. PC2 has to perform just as much overkill as PC1 to drop a enemy, but suffers from reduced chance to inflict that whole amount in a single round.

Change your scenario by dropping the enemy's hp total to 4 and you'll see a large swing since that's the best case for PC2 (actually anything from 1-4 is best case because PC1 and PC2 both drop an enemy in a single hit at that point) or raise the enemy's hp to 9 so PC1 takes 2 hits to kill and PC2 takes 3.

1. My point remains no matter what happens in the other cases.

2. Some important info
The normal use cases are
1. When Hp of X mod 8 and Hp of X mod 4 are equivalent then PC 1 will require Y attacks and PC 2 will require 2Y attacks to defeat the enemy
2. When Hp of X mod 8 and hp of X mod 4 are not equivalent then PC 1 will require Y attacks and PC 2 will require 2Y-1 attacks.

The scenario you propose is a major outlier where Y = 2Y-1 (Y=1). So that scenario is definitely not the best use case.

It's worth noting that the larger hp something has the closer case 2 is to case 1 in results. As such, I think I picked a fairly representative case (and definitely more representative than the case you proposed).

Case 2 where Y = 2 or Y =3 would be a much better scenario. As it will have the impact you desire while being more reflective of all the all cases for scenario 2 where Y > 1.

Mistwell · Jun 10, 2019

Tony Vargas said:
Then there's no issue. I was pointing out that a lone PC whittling down a block of hp was implausible (mainly because of the lone PC) - Maybe I should have said an oversimplification?

Possibly, due to positioning or trying to occupy foes in melee so they don't focus on one PC - not that either is handled well by 5e in TotM mode.

Focus fire is just so effective under D&D style hp rules, though...

Either way a given PC dropping a given monster by inflicting exactly its remaining hp is going to be a pretty random event.

I used units of hit points, rather than hit points, for a reason. It can encompass a range. Because of course it DOES encompass ranges and it's pretty rare you roll exactly the average damage. There will be a final hit though.

Mistwell · Jun 10, 2019

FrogReaver said:
For everyone but you the block rules apparently prevent the blocked user from responding to a thread that the person blocking them has started. If you want to be special and refuse to abide by the apparent spirit of the block rules that's on you. I can't stop you and the mods don't appear interested in doing so either. But I will continue to call you out on it.

Actually my understanding is that's not the spirit of the block rule and Morrus has spoken about that in the past. It's a flaw, not a feature, that it has the unintended consequence of blocking entire threads when it's only supposed to block a single user. He intends to update the software soon and it will hopefully fix that flaw. If you insist that someone you block can't post in threads you start because you think you have some ownership rights over the thread, you're in the wrong - nobody owns threads here (except the owner of this message board). Please stop harassing me about that issue.

I am happy to respect your wish to not respond to you. However, you might want to stop responding to me if that's the case. Maybe start with this message.

FrogReaver · Jun 10, 2019

Mistwell said:
Actually my understanding is that's not the spirit of the block rule and Morrus has spoken about that in the past. It's a flaw, not a feature, that it has the unintended consequence of blocking entire threads when it's only supposed to block a single user. He intends to update the software soon and it will hopefully fix that flaw. If you insist that someone you block can't post in threads you start because you think you have some ownership rights over the thread, you're in the wrong - nobody owns threads here (except the owner of this message board). Please stop harassing me about that issue.

I am happy to respect your wish to not respond to you. However, you might want to stop responding to me if that's the case. Maybe start with this message.

Congrats on being soo special that you get away doing things the rest of us can't. Until the forum is updated the way I'm describing the block function is how it currently works. Once they fix the issue for the rest of us schmucks then you'll have a leg to stand on but as it stands blocking someone now blocks their access to your threads. So until forum is updated, please stop responding to me and to my threads.