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I pulled the 20-to-1 odds number out of my bag of holding. It's supposed to be a ridiculously high number. I then calculated the probability of winning over and over at those odds. With 20-to-1 odds, each fight, by definition, has just over a 95-percent chance (20/21 = 95.2%) of going the...

I agree that there's more than one way to handle the situations that currently trigger an Attack of Opportunity. Many of the "not fighting back" triggers -- casting a spell, drinking a potion, shooting a bow -- should probably drop AC significantly, as you suggest -- but those action should...

A level-30 archer is presumably the greatest archer to have ever lived, putting Robin Hood and Legolas to shame. He shouldn't miss. Ever. To model that properly, I would think he'd need a +20 bonus, at least, so that anything an ordinary archer can hit (with a natural 20), he will hit (except...

You make an excellent point that with 4E's powers a hit can trigger an effect that effectively bypasses hit points -- and those effects become more useful the higher the opponent's hit points. (Thus, hit points become intangible protection from killing blows, but nothing else.) By the way, I'm...

D&D doesn't have "dodge an attack" chits, but it does have "it's just a flesh wound" chits. Hit points could easily expand to fill both roles -- and to provide protection against save-or-die effects, too -- if we allowed them to provide a bonus to defense rolls, after the fact.

While I agree with the sentiment, we have to face facts. If you're going to face dozens of lethal encounters, you're either going to get really, really consistently lucky or die. If every encounter is 20-to-1, in the party's favor, they only have 50-50 odds of winning a dozen fights in a row...

A delta of four means something different between 1 and 5 than it means between 15 and 19. That's the point I was trying to make earlier. On one end, it means hitting (or getting hit) five times as often; on the other, 1.27 times as often.

I think we need to examine the consequences of some of these numbers, because, really, hitting 80 percent of the time isn't overpowering. It means dealing 1.4 times as much damage as hitting 50 percent of time. In fact, hitting 95 percent of the time means dealing less than double the damage...

If low-level PCs can take roughly three hits from level-appropriate enemies, and high-level PCs can take six, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Do we want the ratio to remain constant? Or do we need relative damage to decline, because we want to give high-level characters more attacks per...

I suppose it depends on what we think hewing close to old-school D&D means. For instance, we could treat an Nth-level Fighter just like N 1st-level Fighters, with N attacks attached to N hit dice; each time he loses one hit die's hit points, he loses one of his attacks. That's not where AD&D...

The question is, how much of a hit-point buffer do we want? (And, what kind of buffer do we want?) I think most people want a high-level Fighter to be much, much tougher than typical orcs or city guards, and they don't want him to die from one unlucky roll, but they don't like the image of a...

I think that qualifies as a feature.

Yes, a system where defense (AC) progresses rather than toughness (hp) is much, much more plausible and avoids a lot of contentious discussions about "what's really happening" in the game world. The concern is over how this scales. For characters who are hitting half the time, a one-point...

The game needs some kind of mechanic for the problem addressed by attacks of opportunity: real combatants aren't taking turns, and not threatening your opponents means not really defending yourself. As others have pointed out attacks of opportunity were formalized by 3E, but simpler rules go...

Is it metagaming for the DM to create challenges that will engage the whole party?

This is a great question, but doing the math reveals just how important Lanchester's Square Law can be, if we don't grant the high-level Fighter special powers over and above his general lethality. If our high-level Fighter always hits and always does enough damage to kill one low-level...

I was assuming that both hit points and damage were proportional to level, the way hit points are now, via hit dice. Right, we have any number of ways to increase hit points and damage. The tried and true D&D way is to increase hit points by giving one hit die per level. We could mimic that...

How so? As I understand the proposal, it's to increase damage and hit points, rather than to-hit and AC, with level, so that everyone retains the same to-hit probabilities throughout their progression. So, the Fighter typically hits, say, 75 percent of the time, and gets hit, say, 25 percent...

Well, readily available birth control would change everything! I suppose the gods of the Forgotten Realms also welcome such a thing? I find it grimly amusing that, in a Malthusian setting, monsters culling the population would also raise its standard of living. I thought it would be...

I'm squarely in the not-so-metagame-heavy-please camp, but I don't see skill challenges as necessarily metagamey at all. They require plenty of adjudication, certainly, but why would you say they're especially metagamey?