D&D General DPR Calculations Wut?

[TwoSix]

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.

Exactly.

Anyone suggesting a DPR measure is an exact measure of efficacy is obviously making a large mistake. There are plenty of times when invisibility or suggestion or hypnotic pattern has much greater efficacy than fireball.

DPR (and also eHP calculations for damage taken) do have a correlation with efficacy, assuming situations will often arise in which encountered NPCs are fighting back and need to be taken down, usually through depletion of HPs. So DPR is a useful metric as part of a more holistic consideration of character efficacy. Assertions that it's the most important consideration, or that it's a meaningless consideration, are overly broad assertions.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

Then trying to use DPR to compare a barbarian 6 and say a fighter 3/bard 3 in general combat(not DPR) effectiveness would also be a misuse?

 

[FrogReaver]

Then trying to use DPR to compare a barbarian 6 and say a fighter 3/bard 3 in general combat(not DPR) effectiveness would also be a misuse?

Yes - unless you’re using DPR as just one piece of the comparison instead of the whole conclusion.

But more importantly, why propagate that single discussion across multiple threads?

 

[Clint_L]

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 really depends on the style of campaign. My games seldom have multiple fights, at least not big ones, in a session or between long rests, and I think that has been the general trend of D&D for a long time. So aside from the occasional dungeon crawl, I have to count on players going all out. DPR is VERY important in my planning - I have to know that a Big Bad can survive long enough to pose a serious threat, and when the three frontline fighters alone are capable of delivering 100+ damage per round, that's a challenge I have to consider.

That's before taking into account the battlesmith artificer, rogue/warlock, ranger, and bard.

 

[FrogReaver]

Exactly.

Anyone suggesting a DPR measure is an exact measure of efficacy is obviously making a large mistake. There are plenty of times when invisibility or suggestion or hypnotic pattern has much greater efficacy than fireball.

Yes, and that can be true even in the context of combat, but not for that reason. DPR is a long-term average across many rounds, not a measure of impact in a single encounter.

Pointing out that something else can matter more in a given situation doesn’t really address DPR’s usefulness as a major component of combat efficiency comparisons as an average across many combats.

DPR (and also eHP calculations for damage taken) do have a correlation with efficacy, assuming situations will often arise in which encountered NPCs are fighting back and need to be taken down, usually through depletion of HPs.

Exactly.

So DPR is a useful metric as part of a more holistic consideration of character efficacy. Assertions that it's the most important consideration, or that it's a meaningless consideration, are overly broad assertions.

Yes, though I don’t think it’s very useful to generally collapse in combat and out of combat abilities into a single measure of efficacy (given specific parameters it can make sense). How much each matters is highly dependent on campaign structure, and out of combat usefulness varies even more by DM and campaign than combat effectiveness does.

 

[Zardnaar]

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.

Thats pretty much it.

Most efficient way of dealing with 5.5 monsters is disable/restrict them and beat them up.

If you focus fire high damage you'll kill 1 maybe 2 opponents but the other 3 or 4+ all rain crap on you.

At most levels youre a crit and decent roll or 2 follow up away from being dropped.

We had things go tits up lvl 2 vs hobgoblins.

At lvl 6 3 CR 5 or 6 dropped half the party.

At 10 a deathknight dropped 2/5 opening salvo.

At 12 a Marilith dropped a fighter in 1 broadside.

They were high encounters but still.

 

[Zardnaar]

Then trying to use DPR to compare a barbarian 6 and say a fighter 3/bard 3 in general combat(not DPR) effectiveness would also be a misuse?

That build will be meh because you're a bad fighter and bard.

You want to be good at something vaguely relevant. Damage, healing, support, control etc. Bards being bad at damage and barbarians being bad at control doesnt really matter.

 

[FrogReaver]

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:

I’d actually argue that DPR, control, eHP, and support can all be mapped onto a single axis of impact, using something like “enemy turns affected” as a shared currency relative to a baseline.

• DPR → future enemy turns removed
• Control → enemy turns removed immediately
• eHP → enemy turns absorbed
• Support → a multiplier on whichever category it enhances

The challenge is that these conversions are highly sensitive to assumptions and encounter state, which makes them hard to apply cleanly in practice.

As you pointed out, each metric also has diminishing returns at the party level:

• Damage caps out as you approach ending fights in one round
• Control becomes less valuable once key targets are already handled
• eHP may behave differently here (worth examining more closely)
• Support depends entirely on what it’s amplifying

Also as you suggested in your post, the main implication is that contribution isn’t fixed. If a party already has high damage, adding more damage may be less impactful than adding control, even if the raw numbers look better in isolation.

So even if you normalize everything into a shared framework and model representative encounters, the value of a given character still depends heavily on party composition.