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*Pathfinder & Starfinder
"Accident of Math"???
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3770101" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>When hundreds of people have noted the same thing about something as objective as math, it would behoove you to be very certain of your argument before calling thier collective reasoning nonsense.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Which is fine and true, but stops the reasoning several steps short of where you should be, Vizzini. As others have said, not all modifiers and DCs scale equally. If all modifers were equal to character level, then your reasoning would be perfectly valid. But in fact, a modifer like to hit is based on character level for fighters and on 50% of character level for thieves. So, 'turned up to 2000', an AC of 2000 would be alright for fighters with thier +2000 attack bonuses, but would completely overwhelm the range of the d20 for a wizard with his +1000 attack bonus. Consider saving throws. They don't scale up evenly either. Your good saving throws are better than 1/2 character level, while your bad saving throws are about 1/3 character level. This typically results in a situation at high levels where the size of the modifier and the DC overwhelms the randomness in the d20 throw. Characters with good saves practically cannot fail a typical DC, while characters with bad saves fail about half the time. Consider skill checks. Typically either you have the skill or you don't. At low levels, to challenge a character with skill, the DC must be quite high. But this means that characters without the skill have no real chance of success at all. A challenge of this sort has become binary. Instead of being 20% or 40% more likely to succeed than this unskilled comrades, the skilled character is 2000% more likely to succeed than his unskilled comrades. Instead of being 20% or 40% more likely to hit than the wizard, the fighter is 2000% more likely to hit than the wizard.</p><p></p><p>In brief, the larger the modifier we are applying, the larger the expected deviation in the modifier between the strong and weak cases we should expect. As the modifier gets larger, the deviation in outcome expected from a random roll of the dice is completely overwhelmed by the deviation in the size of the modifier.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 3770101, member: 4937"] When hundreds of people have noted the same thing about something as objective as math, it would behoove you to be very certain of your argument before calling thier collective reasoning nonsense. Which is fine and true, but stops the reasoning several steps short of where you should be, Vizzini. As others have said, not all modifiers and DCs scale equally. If all modifers were equal to character level, then your reasoning would be perfectly valid. But in fact, a modifer like to hit is based on character level for fighters and on 50% of character level for thieves. So, 'turned up to 2000', an AC of 2000 would be alright for fighters with thier +2000 attack bonuses, but would completely overwhelm the range of the d20 for a wizard with his +1000 attack bonus. Consider saving throws. They don't scale up evenly either. Your good saving throws are better than 1/2 character level, while your bad saving throws are about 1/3 character level. This typically results in a situation at high levels where the size of the modifier and the DC overwhelms the randomness in the d20 throw. Characters with good saves practically cannot fail a typical DC, while characters with bad saves fail about half the time. Consider skill checks. Typically either you have the skill or you don't. At low levels, to challenge a character with skill, the DC must be quite high. But this means that characters without the skill have no real chance of success at all. A challenge of this sort has become binary. Instead of being 20% or 40% more likely to succeed than this unskilled comrades, the skilled character is 2000% more likely to succeed than his unskilled comrades. Instead of being 20% or 40% more likely to hit than the wizard, the fighter is 2000% more likely to hit than the wizard. In brief, the larger the modifier we are applying, the larger the expected deviation in the modifier between the strong and weak cases we should expect. As the modifier gets larger, the deviation in outcome expected from a random roll of the dice is completely overwhelmed by the deviation in the size of the modifier. [/QUOTE]
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"Accident of Math"???
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