A
amerigoV
Guest
In my groups, the next PC to hit and finish off the 1hp critter is called a mopper.
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"1 Hp remaining.... again"
- Thread starter Wik
- Start date
A few years ago I was playing in a game where one PC, despite rarely doing much damage in combat, had an uncanny ability to finish enemies off with a charge from a 1st level wand of magic missile.
StreamOfTheSky
Adventurer
Happens all the time in my group. Probably the best example was during a fight at sea where a whole pirate crew was boarding their transport ship in droves. The leader, Dread Pirate Roberta, was a Scarlet Corsair and was holding her own rather well. Got knocked down to just 3 hp, then went on to fight for 2 rounds without getting hit at all, despite being completely surrounded. Then one of the party members (gestalt sorcerer/ dragonfire adept of all people, though he did have dragon claw attacks and tons of melee-ranged fear abilities, so I guess it made sense...) challenged her to a duel. One round went by with her injuring him badly and him missing her and failing to terrify her. Far as I could tell, she probably could have taken him, until another party member most dishonorably walked up behind her and cut her down in spite of the duel. Granted, the PCs were evil, but the backstabbing PC was a LAWFUL evil character (and really, more emphasis on the lawful part up until then). The rest of the party actually started yelling at him for it. 
Tequila Sunrise
Adventurer
Monsters get minionized in my group quite a bit too. I guess it's one of those things that makes sense statistically even though it seems completely un/lucky. (Like how the light blue properties in Monopoly get landed on the most, while the greens always seem to be the last unsold before Boardwalk and the slums.)
Jeff Wilder
First Post
During our last 3.5 campaign, my dwarf cleric had the highest AC in the group and the highest HP in the group ... and took at least three times as many crits as anyone else. (Understand that this isn't hyperbole. I don't believe in "being unlucky," but luck (good and bad) does exist in the past ... and I was damned unlikely, to the tune of triple-frequent crits).
During the Pathfinder game I ran, the warlock/mind bender had absolutely dismal luck in charming or dominating giants during the final 10 or so sessions of the game. The average giant enemy had a Will save somewhere around +6, the mind bender had save DCs between 22 and 25, and he ended up successful about 20 percent of the time.
We roll in the open for just about everything, so in both of these cases it became cause for hilarity. But hey ... if streaks of weirdness don't happen, what you think is random actually isn't.
BTW, a monster ending up with 1 HP in a battle is gonna be fairly common. For example, if a monster has 10 HP left, and an attack does, say, 2d6+4 damage, the monster is going to end up with 1 HP about 11 percent of the time. (And if you add in 2 HP remaining, it becomes about 19 percent.) And if you multiply that by all the monsters in an encounter and all the encounters in a session, and it's routine, not odd.
During the Pathfinder game I ran, the warlock/mind bender had absolutely dismal luck in charming or dominating giants during the final 10 or so sessions of the game. The average giant enemy had a Will save somewhere around +6, the mind bender had save DCs between 22 and 25, and he ended up successful about 20 percent of the time.
We roll in the open for just about everything, so in both of these cases it became cause for hilarity. But hey ... if streaks of weirdness don't happen, what you think is random actually isn't.
BTW, a monster ending up with 1 HP in a battle is gonna be fairly common. For example, if a monster has 10 HP left, and an attack does, say, 2d6+4 damage, the monster is going to end up with 1 HP about 11 percent of the time. (And if you add in 2 HP remaining, it becomes about 19 percent.) And if you multiply that by all the monsters in an encounter and all the encounters in a session, and it's routine, not odd.
Jeff Wilder
First Post
Actually the gold properties get landed on the most (statistically true) due to the presence of Jail six, eight, and nine spaces away. (Someone in Jail will unwillingly get released and land on one of those properties one roll in 18. And if you're on the Jail space (and don't need doubles to move), you'll hit those properties 39 percent of the time.
Asmor
First Post
I think there are 2 factors at work here.
First, a monster being left at 1 hp is quite memorable, so selective memory probably skews things a bit.
Second, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a statistical basis for this being common, and it only becomes more common if you increase the 'threshold' (e.g. if you count not just being left at 1 hp, but at 2 or even 3).
Consider this. Let's say I'm using an at-will that does 1d10+6 damage, and I'm fighting something with anywhere from 9 to 16 HP left. In other words, depending on what I roll I might drop the monster or I might leave it at 1 or 2 hp.
In fact, regardless of what the monster's hp is, as long as it's in that range I have a 10% chance of leaving it with 1 hp and and a 20% chance of leaving it with 1 or 2 hp.
From every 5 such monsters, I have a roughly 2/3 chance of leaving at least one of them with 1 or 2 hp left (1-[.2]^5)=~.67.
Of course, this is a very simple example. Once you start getting into larger pools of dice, the odds skew and become more difficult to calculate. The range of hp values where you're capable of leaving the monster at 1 or 2 hp also increases, though.
Just did the math for 2d10. Assuming I did it correctly, and assuming it's equally likely that a monster's HP is anywhere in the range where it can leave 1 or 2 hp left (e.g. 3-22 for 2d10+0), there's an 11% chance of leaving the monster at 1.
Now the real x-factor here is how likely a given monster is to be in an attack's "minionizing range" at some point before it's killed. This probability probably goes up as attacks do more dice of damage and thus get a larger range, but consequently the actual probability of the attack minionizing the monster goes down...
But one thing I didn't account for is that an attack that does very little damage against a monster at the high end of the minionizing range will leave the monster in the minionizing range. If my curiosity gets the better of me I might program something to calculate that later. This is what really matters, since the question here isn't the likelihood of a given attack minionizing a monster, but of a given monster ever being minionized by ANY attack.
First, a monster being left at 1 hp is quite memorable, so selective memory probably skews things a bit.
Second, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a statistical basis for this being common, and it only becomes more common if you increase the 'threshold' (e.g. if you count not just being left at 1 hp, but at 2 or even 3).
Consider this. Let's say I'm using an at-will that does 1d10+6 damage, and I'm fighting something with anywhere from 9 to 16 HP left. In other words, depending on what I roll I might drop the monster or I might leave it at 1 or 2 hp.
In fact, regardless of what the monster's hp is, as long as it's in that range I have a 10% chance of leaving it with 1 hp and and a 20% chance of leaving it with 1 or 2 hp.
From every 5 such monsters, I have a roughly 2/3 chance of leaving at least one of them with 1 or 2 hp left (1-[.2]^5)=~.67.
Of course, this is a very simple example. Once you start getting into larger pools of dice, the odds skew and become more difficult to calculate. The range of hp values where you're capable of leaving the monster at 1 or 2 hp also increases, though.
Just did the math for 2d10. Assuming I did it correctly, and assuming it's equally likely that a monster's HP is anywhere in the range where it can leave 1 or 2 hp left (e.g. 3-22 for 2d10+0), there's an 11% chance of leaving the monster at 1.
Now the real x-factor here is how likely a given monster is to be in an attack's "minionizing range" at some point before it's killed. This probability probably goes up as attacks do more dice of damage and thus get a larger range, but consequently the actual probability of the attack minionizing the monster goes down...
But one thing I didn't account for is that an attack that does very little damage against a monster at the high end of the minionizing range will leave the monster in the minionizing range. If my curiosity gets the better of me I might program something to calculate that later. This is what really matters, since the question here isn't the likelihood of a given attack minionizing a monster, but of a given monster ever being minionized by ANY attack.
Asmor
First Post
So my curiosity got the better of me, and I wrote up something quick and dirty.
So it's worth noting that the static bonus of the attack really does make a significant difference.
Code:
Trials: 1000000
Monster HP:40
Dealing 1d10+0
Monster HP before death:
HP Total % Running Total:
1 181795 (18.18 %) (18.18 %)
2 163170 (16.32 %) (34.50 %)
3 146367 (14.64 %) (49.13 %)
4 127521 (12.75 %) (61.89 %)
5 109093 (10.91 %) (72.79 %)
6 90422 (9.04 %) (81.84 %)
7 72333 (7.23 %) (89.07 %)
8 54821 (5.48 %) (94.55 %)
9 36158 (3.62 %) (98.17 %)
10 18320 (1.83 %) (100.00 %)
Code:
Trials: 1000000
Monster HP:40
Dealing 1d10+6
Monster HP before death:
HP Total % Running Total:
1 90684 (9.07 %) (9.07 %)
2 91812 (9.18 %) (18.25 %)
3 91271 (9.13 %) (27.38 %)
4 89583 (8.96 %) (36.34 %)
5 86829 (8.68 %) (45.02 %)
6 83739 (8.37 %) (53.39 %)
7 77772 (7.78 %) (61.17 %)
8 74043 (7.40 %) (68.57 %)
9 67976 (6.80 %) (75.37 %)
10 60198 (6.02 %) (81.39 %)
11 51070 (5.11 %) (86.50 %)
12 43161 (4.32 %) (90.81 %)
13 35449 (3.54 %) (94.36 %)
14 27316 (2.73 %) (97.09 %)
15 19021 (1.90 %) (98.99 %)
16 10076 (1.01 %) (100.00 %)
Code:
Trials: 1000000
Monster HP:40
Dealing 1d10+10
Monster HP before death:
HP Total % Running Total:
1 47901 (4.79 %) (4.79 %)
2 50839 (5.08 %) (9.87 %)
3 55344 (5.53 %) (15.41 %)
4 60527 (6.05 %) (21.46 %)
5 65653 (6.57 %) (28.03 %)
6 72824 (7.28 %) (35.31 %)
7 81366 (8.14 %) (43.45 %)
8 90308 (9.03 %) (52.48 %)
9 99811 (9.98 %) (62.46 %)
10 89514 (8.95 %) (71.41 %)
11 80293 (8.03 %) (79.44 %)
12 62953 (6.30 %) (85.73 %)
13 47728 (4.77 %) (90.51 %)
14 35026 (3.50 %) (94.01 %)
15 23844 (2.38 %) (96.39 %)
16 15162 (1.52 %) (97.91 %)
17 7979 (0.80 %) (98.71 %)
18 2957 (0.30 %) (99.00 %)
19 0 (0.00 %) (99.00 %)*
20 9971 (1.00 %) (100.00 %)
*Note that it's impossible, doing 1d10+10 against a monster with 40 hp, to ever get it down to exactly 19 hpSo it's worth noting that the static bonus of the attack really does make a significant difference.
blargney the second
blargney the minute's son
Must spread XP around before giving it to Asmor again.
As a player in the OP's campaign, I'd be curious to see if the apparently high minionizing frequency is due to our specific characters.
Asmor, is your app portable enough that I could try it with our party?
-blarg
As a player in the OP's campaign, I'd be curious to see if the apparently high minionizing frequency is due to our specific characters.
Asmor, is your app portable enough that I could try it with our party?
-blarg
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