D&D General DPR Calculations Wut?

[Sword of Spirit]

Ahh, and advantage is close to equivalent to +5 to hit

The 5.0 DMG treats it as worth +4. You can drive that from the table of monster features in the monster creation section.

The 65% hit chance also is the assumed saving throw failure chance. That can be derived from instructions in the spell creation rules.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Its meant as an abstraction of how fast you kill an enemy.

This is another reason why I'm dubious of relying on DPR math. It's always framed in "offense is always better, so DPR is always better." And that's not true in an RPG. Only if your resources refresh after every battle. And since we know it doesn't in most groups, sometimes a higher DPR isn't better than a better defense. Often, yes, but not always, and thus not an accurate blanket approach.

That is, if you end a battle after 3 rounds but lose 5 HP, that's not better than taking 5 rounds but only losing 3 HP by the end of it. Not if you have more battles to face before resting up.

 

[Pedantic]

This is another reason why I'm dubious of relying on DPR math. It's always framed in "offense is always better, so DPR is always better." And that's not true in an RPG. Only if your resources refresh after every battle. And since we know it doesn't in most groups, sometimes a higher DPR isn't better than a better defense. Often, yes, but not always, and thus not an accurate blanket approach.

That is, if you end a battle after 3 rounds but lose 5 HP, that's not better than taking 5 rounds but only losing 3 HP by the end of it. Not if you have more battles to face before resting up.

That's really not relevant, unless you've got an extremely high AC or you're dealing with a weird outlier penalty to enemy damage rolls. The impact of giving the enemy more actions to hit you with is going to cause more total damage in nearly every case.

 

[Sacrosanct]

That's really not relevant, unless you've got an extremely high AC or you're dealing with a weird outlier penalty to enemy damage rolls. The impact of giving the enemy more actions to hit you with is going to cause more total damage in nearly every case.

Ending a battle, regardless of how many rounds it lasts, with more resources is absolutely relevant. And there are more ways to do that other than extremely high ACs.

 

[Pedantic]

Ending a battle, regardless of how many rounds it lasts, with more resources is absolutely relevant. And there are more ways to do that other than extremely high ACs.

How, precisely? Maybe you're proposing kiting as a solution, some method by which you can deal slow damage to an opponent, but they can't take effective actions against you?

There's maybe an inflection point with sufficient debuffing it works out, but actions available are the single biggest multiplier to damage.

 

[Tigris]

This is another reason why I'm dubious of relying on DPR math. It's always framed in "offense is always better, so DPR is always better." And that's not true in an RPG. Only if your resources refresh after every battle. And since we know it doesn't in most groups, sometimes a higher DPR isn't better than a better defense. Often, yes, but not always, and thus not an accurate blanket approach.

That is, if you end a battle after 3 rounds but lose 5 HP, that's not better than taking 5 rounds but only losing 3 HP by the end of it. Not if you have more battles to face before resting up.

This is something which still today annoys me soo often in D&D 4e striker discussions.

As an example there is a warlock subclass which has as a subclass feature a reaction which does some damage when attackef and halfs incoming damage. And the subclass is regarded as useless because it does slightly lower damage.


And 4e is even more extreme. There daily healing is limited. So taking half damage is huge.

 

[Maxperson]

This is another reason why I'm dubious of relying on DPR math. It's always framed in "offense is always better, so DPR is always better." And that's not true in an RPG. Only if your resources refresh after every battle. And since we know it doesn't in most groups, sometimes a higher DPR isn't better than a better defense. Often, yes, but not always, and thus not an accurate blanket approach.

That is, if you end a battle after 3 rounds but lose 5 HP, that's not better than taking 5 rounds but only losing 3 HP by the end of it. Not if you have more battles to face before resting up.

My big issue is.... How much DPR is a well worded suggestion spell? How much DPR is charm person worth? How much DPR does hideous laughter do? How much DPR is disarming an enemy with a command spell? How much DPR is bring the barbarian back to consciousness with a healing spell?

There are far too many non-damaging variables in play for DPR to be anything more than an interesting white room exercise that doesn't really reflect actual game play.

 

[Sacrosanct]

How, precisely? Maybe you're proposing kiting as a solution, some method by which you can deal slow damage to an opponent, but they can't take effective actions against you?

There's maybe an inflection point with sufficient debuffing it works out, but actions available are the single biggest multiplier to damage.

If DPR were truly the optimal choice all the time, then no one would be wielding long swords (sap mastery). No one would cast Hypnotic Pattern over Fireball. No one would choose protection or defense fighting styles.

There are lots of ways where reducing the damage coming at you per round is better than increasing the damage you put out every round. Again, unless you refresh hit points after every battle, DPR is not always the best choice. Last time this came up, I actually illustrated the math. I'll try to find that post, but it's really not necessary; the math seems pretty obvious. If it takes you 3 rounds to kill an opponent but you take 3 damage per round yourself, then it's better to end up taking 5 rounds to kill the opponent if you reduce that incoming damage to 1 point per round.

 

[Sacrosanct]

My big issue is.... How much DPR is a well worded suggestion spell? How much DPR is charm person worth? How much DPR does hideous laughter do? How much DPR is disarming an enemy with a command spell? How much DPR is bring the barbarian back to consciousness with a healing spell?

There are far too many non-damaging variables in play for DPR to be anything more than an interesting white room exercise that doesn't really reflect actual game play.

Exactly, and what I was getting at above re: my belief DPR math is just a suggestion, and shouldn't be taken as gospel or the "true right way" to approach the game.

 

[Tigris]

My big issue is.... How much DPR is a well worded suggestion spell? How much DPR is charm person worth? How much DPR does hideous laughter do? How much DPR is disarming an enemy with a command spell? How much DPR is bring the barbarian back to consciousness with a healing spell?

There are far too many non-damaging variables in play for DPR to be anything more than an interesting white room exercise that doesn't really reflect actual game play.

This is not an issue with DPR. This is an issue with not understanding where/how to use DPR.

DPR is a pure damage comparison, assumed for cases where doing damage is the correct/best choice like:


- You are out of ressources / do not want to spend ressources

- you sre a martial and cant do other than damage

- you have an enemy immune to all effects but damage

- in 3 turns ritual is succeeding we need to kill them before that.

- we already have 2 casters doing crowd control and almost no damage so your job is to kill enemies as fast as possible before our crowd control breaks.


Therefore suggestion etc. Is worth 0 dpr, because it is not fulfilling the job of doing damage.