D&D General DPR Calculations Wut?

[FrogReaver]

To be fair, the people you should be listening to about evaluations of various character strength ARE the people interested in optimization and power gaming.

I would tend to agree, but optimizers and power gamers often let fairly minor differences in capability define their opinions and often view the game in radically different lenses even from each other.

 

[Maxperson]

Its a bad build by any conventional metric. You've missed out on a second attack and 3rd level spells. And its MAD (may be less if stats are rolled)

Its objectively bad in terms of mechanics. It may not be bad for RP but that all essentially irrelevant if youre rating effectness.

And you cant really rate role playing its DM, player, group dependent.

It will outperform the barbarian 6, because combat is not the only pillar. The barbarian gets to be better in combat, but loses out to the fighter 3/bard 3 in exploration and social. Your "objectively" bad in terms of mechanics is wrong, unless you are ONLY looking at DPR.

Internet over rates damage imho. But you kinda want to be good at something that matters.

Social not only matters, but it's far more powerful than combat abilities. A combat ginsu machine might be able to solo kill something 123 CRs above his level, but the social PC can move armies and nations.

 

[Maxperson]

To be fair, the people you should be listening to about evaluations of various character strength ARE the people interested in optimization and power gaming.

I don't agree. They tend to look for the absolute best thing for combat, and then poo poo on everything less than the best, even when it's still very good. An optimizer/power gamer is the last person I would listen to for combat or anything else. I'm not interested in only the best thing.

If your game is focused on character presentation and thespianism, then obviously character efficacy is of relatively little importance.

There's a lot of ground in-between char-op and thespianism.

 

[Zardnaar]

It will outperform the barbarian 6, because combat is not the only pillar. The barbarian gets to be better in combat, but loses out to the fighter 3/bard 3 in exploration and social. Your "objectively" bad in terms of mechanics is wrong, unless you are ONLY looking at DPR.

Social not only matters, but it's far more powerful than combat abilities. A combat ginsu machine might be able to solo kill something 123 CRs above his level, but the social PC can move armies and nations.

Its also worse than bard 6

 

[FrogReaver]

I don't agree. They tend to look for the absolute best thing for combat, and then poo poo on everything less than the best, even when it's still very good. An optimizer/power gamer is the last person I would listen to for combat or anything else. I'm not interested in only the best thing.

There's a lot of ground in-between char-op and thespianism.

I’m not a powergamer I just roleplay one

 

[Kinematics]

On the issue of average hit rate/target AC:

I've built several iterations of spreadsheets to analyze DPR. It started with comparing 2014 rules with the playtest rules, and then transitioned to 2024 rules.

I started with a flat target hit rate (eg: 65%), but found it was easier to use target AC vs player attributes. By default it just uses a gradually increasing target AC (approximating typical ACs at various CRs), but I can also just plug in a specific target AC to see what it looks like. That's easier than asking, "What is the hit rate for this character with this Str score vs this enemy with this AC?" The entire point of using the spreadsheet was to let the spreadsheet do all the tedious calculations, after all.

It also helped examine the impact of trying to get 18+ in a stat by level 4 (or even level 1), vs the 'expected' rate of hitting 18 by level 8.

If you're just working out the numbers by hand, either way could work, but if you're doing more elaborate comparisons then you want to pick a mode that minimizes the extra work you have to do.

/

Anyway, on the broader issue of what DPR sets look like, any given graph for a given job will look very similar to any other graph for the same job, just shifted up or down some. There are a few major changes for each job (eg: Extra Attack at level 5 for most melee jobs), but most features are subtle shifts.

That means that when I turn on the flag to give the character advantage, the entire DPR line shifts up some, but otherwise looks basically the same. If I swap from a glaive with Graze to a halberd with Cleave, there's just small shifts here and there, mostly dependent on how often Cleave can proc. Etc, etc.

Likewise, different jobs have differently shaped curves, but generally aren't that different. There are times where you can see that a job does indeed suck (eg: ranger after level ~12), but in general you're just looking at the larger shapes.

Essentially, once you have the main features of a job in place, everything else is just, "How much different is this build from that build?" There's a margin within which differences don't really matter in practice. An extra 1 or 2 DPR is almost never going to reduce the number of attacks you need to make to kill an enemy.

And that's the real comparison that needs to be made. DPR is just the basic info you need to even begin making such a model, but modeling things at that level is enormously complicated, so people stop at the DPR level and hope that it provides enough of a guesstimate to be workable.

 

[Maxperson]

Its also worse than bard 6

In some areas, but it makes up for a lot of that with fighter 3 abilities that bards do not get. You're still looking at it through the lens of the optimizer, and the game doesn't need anywhere near the level of optimization you go for in order for characters to be good in combat, socializing, and/or exploration. You are essentially an over achiever and rating simply good as "bad" when in actuality, it's not bad at all.

 

[Zardnaar]

In some areas, but it makes up for a lot of that with fighter 3 abilities that bards do not get. You're still looking at it through the lens of the optimizer, and the game doesn't need anywhere near the level of optimization you go for in order for characters to be good in combat. You are essentially an over achiever and rating simply good as "bad" when in actuality, it's not bad at all.

Its very below par and if youre rsting classes on power (including usefulness) thats the context of it.

Its easy to mess up multi classing as well. And class guides usually dont do multiclassing as theres to many variables.

 

[Clint_L]

I struggle with insomnia compounded by tinnitus (thanks, ageing!) and doing math in my head is my trick for quieting my overly busy brain getting back. Specifically, I calculate the the number of rounds it should, on average, take my character to kill specific creatures, versus the number of rounds it should typically take them to kill her. This works surprisingly well. It also means I'm probably too DPR focused.

It has also made me aware that, with the 2024 rules, martial classes are so strong at DPR that it almost never makes sense for full spellcasters to use damage spells, barring certain AOE situations. Control, support, environmental, and utility spells will be far more impactful uses of spellcaster resources; their DPR is almost always going to be comparatively weak.

 

[Maxperson]

Its very below par and if youre rsting classes on power (including usefulness) thats the context of it.

Its easy to mess up multi classing as well. And class guides usually dont do multiclassing as theres to many variables.

Versatility is also power. It's just a different kind of power.