There are spell that bypass hp. Why didn't your Wizard use them? and it really sounds like you got extremely lucky. The chance of doing what you describe is less than 1% (see my above post).
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D&D 5E Rule of Three: 7 Feb. 2014
- Thread starter tuxgeo
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There are spell that bypass hp. Why didn't your Wizard use them? and it really sounds like you got extremely lucky. The chance of doing what you describe is less than 1% (see my above post).
A 13th level fighter with 16 CON needs to roll 8 to succeed on a DC 15 CON save (+3 stat, +4 prof). With advantage (from Indomitable) that makes the chance of failure (7/20)^2 = 49/400, or a little more than 10%. Which means that the chance of success is 351/400, or a little less than 90% (87.75% to be exact). Over three consecutive attacks that's still better than a 2 in 3 chance of staying up at 1 hp.
As for Blight: that's a 4th level spell, so at least 7th level. Let's assume a 20 INT and proficiency. At 7th level that's a DC of 16; at 13th that's a DC of 17.
A 7th level fighter has a CON save of +6 (assuming 16 CON); that's therefore 10 to save, so a 55% chance; and 67 hp (10 + 6*6 +21). Average damage from 8d8 is 36, so expected damage is .55*18 + .45*36 = 9.9 + 16.2 = 26.1. So somewhat less than half hit points.
The fighter at that level gets two attacks at +8 (assuming 20 CON) for 9.5 average damage before crits (assuming a longsword). Assuming the mage has an AC around 13, that's 5 to hit, with 3/14 hits being crits. So expected damage is 2*0.8*9.5 + 2*8/14 = 15.2 +16/14. Which is just over 16 and a third hp of damage. A mage at that level (assuming 14 CON) has 6 + 6*4 + 12 = 42 hp. This is the same proportion of the mage's hp in damage as the mage's attack on the fighter (around 40%).
Now at 13th level:
At 13th the fighter has +7 to CON saves, plus advantage; that's therefore 9 or less twice to fail, or 81/400, so 319/400 to save; hit points for a fighter at that level = 121 (10 + 6*12 + 39). Average damage for Blight in a 7th level slot is 11d8 = 49.5. So expected damage is 81*49.5/400 + 319*49.5/800 = 29.761875. So just a smidgeon less than one quarter hit points. (The 7th level attack spell Finger of Death does 12d8 rather than 11d8. That lifts the expected damage to 31.86, or just a smidgeon over one quarter of the fighter's hp.)
Now the fighter's attacks vs the mage: assuming an AC of 14 for the mage, that's still a 5 to hit. With three attacks. So expected damage is half as much again as 7th level, or just over 24.5. The mage's hp are 6 + 12*4 + 26 = 80 hp. So the fighter is doing somewhat over 30% of the mage's hit points.
Is this balanced? It seems to me that the fighter is pretty capable in combat relative to the mage. The balance issues, if they're there, would be in the scope of the mage's capabilities, I think. Or Polymorph: the fighter's chance of making a Will save of DC 16 is probably not much better than 1 in 4. (Plane Shift is a 7th level save-or-suck spell, but gives that target two saves, DEX and CHA. An Indomitable fighter therefore gets 4 rolls. That's probably in the neighbourhood of a 2/3 chance of success. If I were a mage I'd stick with Polymorph as my go-to save-or-suck.)
As for Blight: that's a 4th level spell, so at least 7th level. Let's assume a 20 INT and proficiency. At 7th level that's a DC of 16; at 13th that's a DC of 17.
A 7th level fighter has a CON save of +6 (assuming 16 CON); that's therefore 10 to save, so a 55% chance; and 67 hp (10 + 6*6 +21). Average damage from 8d8 is 36, so expected damage is .55*18 + .45*36 = 9.9 + 16.2 = 26.1. So somewhat less than half hit points.
The fighter at that level gets two attacks at +8 (assuming 20 CON) for 9.5 average damage before crits (assuming a longsword). Assuming the mage has an AC around 13, that's 5 to hit, with 3/14 hits being crits. So expected damage is 2*0.8*9.5 + 2*8/14 = 15.2 +16/14. Which is just over 16 and a third hp of damage. A mage at that level (assuming 14 CON) has 6 + 6*4 + 12 = 42 hp. This is the same proportion of the mage's hp in damage as the mage's attack on the fighter (around 40%).
Now at 13th level:
At 13th the fighter has +7 to CON saves, plus advantage; that's therefore 9 or less twice to fail, or 81/400, so 319/400 to save; hit points for a fighter at that level = 121 (10 + 6*12 + 39). Average damage for Blight in a 7th level slot is 11d8 = 49.5. So expected damage is 81*49.5/400 + 319*49.5/800 = 29.761875. So just a smidgeon less than one quarter hit points. (The 7th level attack spell Finger of Death does 12d8 rather than 11d8. That lifts the expected damage to 31.86, or just a smidgeon over one quarter of the fighter's hp.)
Now the fighter's attacks vs the mage: assuming an AC of 14 for the mage, that's still a 5 to hit. With three attacks. So expected damage is half as much again as 7th level, or just over 24.5. The mage's hp are 6 + 12*4 + 26 = 80 hp. So the fighter is doing somewhat over 30% of the mage's hit points.
Is this balanced? It seems to me that the fighter is pretty capable in combat relative to the mage. The balance issues, if they're there, would be in the scope of the mage's capabilities, I think. Or Polymorph: the fighter's chance of making a Will save of DC 16 is probably not much better than 1 in 4. (Plane Shift is a 7th level save-or-suck spell, but gives that target two saves, DEX and CHA. An Indomitable fighter therefore gets 4 rolls. That's probably in the neighbourhood of a 2/3 chance of success. If I were a mage I'd stick with Polymorph as my go-to save-or-suck.)
[MENTION=83996]Lokiare[/MENTION], something is wrong with your maths. See my post above this one for 13th level Defy Death.
I think a mage trying to take down a fighter should use save-or-suck rather than hp damage. Polymorph looks pretty broken to me: a better than 50% chance of taking out a pretty wide range of combatants. Dominate Person is good too, but less flexible in its targetting. Hold Monster doesn't look that good against a fighter, once s/he gets Indomitable: the fighter has 4 chances to save by the time the spell is cast and one turn has been lost - so we're talking one turn used by mage to cast spell, one turn spent by fighter doing nothing. I think the fighter comes out better out of that exchange.
Hopefully they're looking into the brokenness of those WIS save spells.
That seems consistent with my maths in the post above this one.
I think a mage trying to take down a fighter should use save-or-suck rather than hp damage. Polymorph looks pretty broken to me: a better than 50% chance of taking out a pretty wide range of combatants. Dominate Person is good too, but less flexible in its targetting. Hold Monster doesn't look that good against a fighter, once s/he gets Indomitable: the fighter has 4 chances to save by the time the spell is cast and one turn has been lost - so we're talking one turn used by mage to cast spell, one turn spent by fighter doing nothing. I think the fighter comes out better out of that exchange.
Hopefully they're looking into the brokenness of those WIS save spells.
The wizard was forced to concentrate on flying to force the fighter to shoot him with arrows instead of cleaving his head off with his saxe. This limited his offensive ability. Plus his spells wefe not optimized as it was just an NPC and not even the Big Bad..
But that is the thing. Between self healing paladins and fighters and barbarians with 2-4 bonus lives, the warrior classes very good at combat in the paragon and epic tier that they could take the lead and focus in such. Casters are no slouches but their benefit is in utilty in Next.
I used to like that idea, but having observed it in practice I've concluded that I want the opposite. Combat, social interaction, and exploration are fundamentally different, and my experience is that a conflict resolution system which attempts to handle all of them ends up doing none of them very well.
IMO, elegance in game design is vastly overrated. Elegance usually depends on emergent effects, which only emerge if the whole system is used as written; this often leads to opaque mechanics whose full purpose is not immediately apparent to the user. In an elegant system, changing or misinterpreting one rule is apt to break a lot of stuff. I would prefer a robust system where you can tinker with one part and the rest keeps on ticking.
Assuming your numbers are correct multiple hits would work like this:
http://anydice.com/program/2c8a click "at least" and look at 15, its an 87.75% chance.
Hit Chance of dying
1 12.25%
2 22.999375%
3 40.70903749609375%
4 64.84581765360383%
5 87.64183463556328%
6 98.47275748825237%
So it only adds a few more hits. Imagine if the DM was putting the Fighter against a couple Glabrezu (a level 13 creature from the bestiary). It gets 4 attacks or 2 attacks and a spell. So every round it has a relatively good chance of dropping a Fighter. You should note that even with the new math surviving 6 rounds is a 1.53% chance. So the other poster's Fighter was extremely lucky.
Sure, but its still a very large chunk of hit points for a single action and it doesn't require concentration or break concentration. So they can cast it along with Hold Person or another spell like Evard's Tentacles.
Unfortunately the Mage has spells that increase their effective hit points which they can spam at any point such as Stoneskin, Etherealness, False Life, Blink (which means the Fighter has to ready an action to even hit them, thus losing extra attacks). The Fighter has no such option. As I said the gap is much closer than 3.5E, but no where near 4E.
If you are going for single target damage the best spell at that level is Scorching Ray Memorized in a 7th level slot which means 8 rays at 2d6 per damage per ray for a total of 16d6 fire damage (average 56). Which is a good chunk of the maximum HP a Fighter can have at level 13. The HP total maximum is 13d10 + 65 or 195 average 136.5 assuming a 20 Con score. More likely the Con score is closer to 16 for 13d10 + 39 for a max of 169 and an average of 110.5. Its over half the HP of an average Fighter.
This assumes the Mage didn't neuter the Fighter with a spell like slow that drops their number of attacks to 1 and disallows a move on the same round. Its also assuming the Mage isn't a Dwarf with a heavy armor master feat which means AC 19. I'll grant that is a small subset, but even just Mage Armor would be AC 16 (13 + Dex mod). With a duration of 8 hours and being a level 1 spell slot its unlikely they wouldn't have that up at all times.
Well if the Mages DC is 17 as you used above then that means the Fighters chance of making a will save is 20%. So after 2 castings the Fighter is a squirrel. The chance of a Fighter making the Dex and Cha saves (assuming their mods are +0 to both) is 59.04% So much better than the other one, but if the Mage can grant disadvantage to cancel that out it jumps to a much lower 36%.
Overall, I think its still very unbalanced, especially seeing as even saving half of the lower level spell slots for utility, the 13th level Mage can cast 2-3 daily spells per combat.
My bad, I expressed myself poorly; I was supposed to say "in my opinion" in that first sentence, but could have chosen my words better. Also, you're absolutely correct about the final rules; we haven't seen them yet.
You might feel differently, but IMO flexibility in 5E seems to come at a cost:
1) the 'basic' version of the core rules looks simple and streamlined, but lacks both depth and options. It might be a good thing for some, but for experienced players might be too bland (again, depends on what you prefer). And seems to require a lot of on-the-fly decisions, adjudication and improvisation on the DM's part.
2) the 'advanced' version of the core rules seems be that you plug a few modules into the 'basic' version to achieve more options and complexity (e.g. skills, feats and tactical grid-based combat). Probably requires group effort to vote on which optional rules the players want to use, which might naturally mean that each group uses a slightly different and/or house-ruled version of Next. I personally hated this back in AD&D, but I guess some people love to tinker with the system.
3) they opted to go with "natural language" and got rid of 4E's elegant power format and keywords. I've seen some really heated arguments (and some of them lasted for hours!) when players have debated with DMs about grammar and poorly-written spell descriptions. IIRC the most serious fight was about 18th level druid using Shapechange (3.0) to polymorph into a dragon he had only scried, but never seen in action. Another argument took place in PF, when there was a serious discussion about what "attack action" and "attack" mean in relation to certain feats. And I can't deny that it's far easier for everyone to understand how a feat works if it says "Add +[W] to damage whenever you use a spell with the keywords Fire and Weapon", instead of "You may add an additional weapon damage die to damage rolls when you're wielding a burning or flaming weapon." (which reminds me that there have been long discussions online about what constitutes as "wielding"
)4) and also there seem to be quite, eh, loose guidelines for DMs on creating their own magical items. I guess they wanted to break the mold so that people could "go wild" and "make magic wondrous again". I feel a bit leery about this; there were lots of hits and misses with magical items back in AD&D; some worked, some didn't. Occasionally it was liberating, but most often I felt frustrated by the lack of better instructions. And there were times when an item unexpectedly turned out to be simply too good to let the PCs keep it.
Of course, it's way too early to tell how the finalized rules will turn out to be. They might be surprisingly different in parts, although I doubt it. If I were a betting man, I'd put some money on the last playtest version being very similar to the printed book. Whatever flaws or bugs they have recently found will likely be addressed via dials, switches and modules (e.g. "If you find saving throws in the game to be too brutal, add +2 to everyone's saves"). Naturally, I could be wrong, but that's what I think.
Wow, that is actually a really good question! Honestly, I don't know; to me it looks like Next is a step backwards is design philosophy, with a lot of influences from AD&D and 3E. I hate the whole idea of bounded accuracy, because I don't think the math is as solid as it appears to be -- certainly not as strong as it is in 4E. That is also a subjective view, but IMO the whole "Ghoul Saving Throw Fiasco" was quite revealing about how much effort they've put into it.
I prefer PP/ED-style (and hybrid classes) to 3E multiclassing and prestige classes. And I don't think these "super feats" are the best way to deal with "traps" or add depth to bland class features. Plus if you ask me, IMO the racial abilities/features have been a real mess.
There have been some aspects I liked in the playtest rules; (dis)advantage is a nice mechanic, and I really hoped they had kept skill dice in the game (too bad they apparently didn't).
It may be that it's just too different from 4E and Pathfinder for me to like Next. I wouldn't go as far as saying that I won't ever play it, but if it's anything like the last playtest version, most likely I won't buy the books. However, I love FR, so I'll likely purchase at least some of the regional books, maybe even adventures.
My bad, I expressed myself poorly; I was supposed to say "in my opinion" in that first sentence, but could have chosen my words better. Also, you're absolutely correct about the final rules; we haven't seen them yet.
You might feel differently, but IMO flexibility in 5E seems to come at a cost:
1) the 'basic' version of the core rules looks simple and streamlined, but lacks both depth and options. It might be a good thing for some, but for experienced players might be too bland (again, depends on what you prefer). And seems to require a lot of on-the-fly decisions, adjudication and improvisation on the DM's part.
2) the 'advanced' version of the core rules seems be that you plug a few modules into the 'basic' version to achieve more options and complexity (e.g. skills, feats and tactical grid-based combat). Probably requires group effort to vote on which optional rules the players want to use, which might naturally mean that each group uses a slightly different and/or house-ruled version of Next. I personally hated this back in AD&D, but I guess some people love to tinker with the system.
3) they opted to go with "natural language" and got rid of 4E's elegant power format and keywords. I've seen some really heated arguments (and some of them lasted for hours!) when players have debated with DMs about grammar and poorly-written spell descriptions. IIRC the most serious fight was about 18th level druid using Shapechange (3.0) to polymorph into a dragon he had only scried, but never seen in action. Another argument took place in PF, when there was a serious discussion about what "attack action" and "attack" mean in relation to certain feats. And I can't deny that it's far easier for everyone to understand how a feat works if it says "Add +[W] to damage whenever you use a spell with the keywords Fire and Weapon", instead of "You may add an additional weapon damage die to damage rolls when you're wielding a burning or flaming weapon." (which reminds me that there have been long discussions online about what constitutes as "wielding"
4) and also there seem to be quite, eh, loose guidelines for DMs on creating their own magical items. I guess they wanted to break the mold so that people could "go wild" and "make magic wondrous again". I feel a bit leery about this; there were lots of hits and misses with magical items back in AD&D; some worked, some didn't. Occasionally it was liberating, but most often I felt frustrated by the lack of better instructions. And there were times when an item unexpectedly turned out to be simply too good to let the PCs keep it.
Of course, it's way too early to tell how the finalized rules will turn out to be. They might be surprisingly different in parts, although I doubt it. If I were a betting man, I'd put some money on the last playtest version being very similar to the printed book. Whatever flaws or bugs they have recently found will likely be addressed via dials, switches and modules (e.g. "If you find saving throws in the game to be too brutal, add +2 to everyone's saves"). Naturally, I could be wrong, but that's what I think.
Wow, that is actually a really good question! Honestly, I don't know; to me it looks like Next is a step backwards is design philosophy, with a lot of influences from AD&D and 3E. I hate the whole idea of bounded accuracy, because I don't think the math is as solid as it appears to be -- certainly not as strong as it is in 4E. That is also a subjective view, but IMO the whole "Ghoul Saving Throw Fiasco" was quite revealing about how much effort they've put into it.
I prefer PP/ED-style (and hybrid classes) to 3E multiclassing and prestige classes. And I don't think these "super feats" are the best way to deal with "traps" or add depth to bland class features. Plus if you ask me, IMO the racial abilities/features have been a real mess.
There have been some aspects I liked in the playtest rules; (dis)advantage is a nice mechanic, and I really hoped they had kept skill dice in the game (too bad they apparently didn't).
It may be that it's just too different from 4E and Pathfinder for me to like Next. I wouldn't go as far as saying that I won't ever play it, but if it's anything like the last playtest version, most likely I won't buy the books. However, I love FR, so I'll likely purchase at least some of the regional books, maybe even adventures.
I feel the same way. I won't buy the books or actively seek out a game of it over other editions (I'd play 3.5E before 5E if its anything like the packets), but if someone else offered to DM and I didn't have anything else to do I might sit down and play it in the hopes I would have fun because of the people playing rather than any hope of the game system amusing me. I don't know though it might be entertaining to laugh at the imbalance and weird situations that come up.)
I.E. "I don't understand, I've given up Advantage to back stab every round, but the other Rogue is still out damaging me and they aren't using back stab, just taking normal attacks with advantage and this is after 12 sessions..."
But the damage only matters if it hits. The mage's to hit bonus is +9. Suppose the fighter's AC is 18. Then the mage hits on 9+ which is 3/5 chance to hit. Making the expected damage 33.6: better than Finger of Death, but not by much.
Something has gone wrong with your maths.
The percent chance of dying = 1 - (.8775)^N, where N = the number of hits.
Code:
1 12.25
2 22.999375
3 32.43195156
4 40.7090375
5 47.9721804
6 54.3455883Thus, as I said, better than a two-thirds chance to withstand 3 hits.
I think in your calculations you have squared each earlier result as you move down the table (ie to work out the number of rounds, you have to raise 2 to the N-1, where N is the number in your lefthand column). To get the 98%+ chance of being dead, you have to be forced to make 32 saves (2 ^ (6-1) = 2^5 = 32).
Yes, but Finger of death is a single save. Scorching Ray is one attack roll per ray for 8 rays, which means you are more likely to do some damage than no damage.
You might be right. I wasn't reusing the original chance I was using the last calculated chance and squaring it. This looks much better.
Code:
1 12.25%
2 22.999375%
3 32.4319515625%
4 40.70903749609375%
...
10 72.931059879635284935935973167419%
...
20 92.672724807601094851398447705677%So with the new numbers that looks like a decent chance to survive around 5-6 hits. Meaning the Glabrezu would take 2-3 rounds to kill the Fighter. Still in my opinon that's not that great a trade off since the Wizard can cast a single spell and end up with greater odds of survival (Etherealness, Blink, etc...etc...) and then still proceed to outdo the Fighter in combat with the other 1-2 spells they can cast per encounter at that level (assuming they save half their low level slots for utility or out of combat spells).
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