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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 5227307" data-attributes="member: 3424">Some statistics and thoughts based on a bit of number crunching that I did:Assuming a party of PCs fights 300 combats over the course of a campaign (say, 10 fights per level for 30 levels), the PCs must have about a 99.77% chance of surviving each fight to have a 50% chance of surviving to the end of the campaign.However, assuming a party of 5 PCs, and assuming the party survives if at least one PC ends the fight with positive hit points, and each PC's chance of ending the fight with positive hit points is independent from the rest (the last is particularly questionable, but bear with me), the chance of each individual PC ending the fight with positive hit points can go as low as 70.31% in order for the party to have an overall survival chance of 99.77%.Hence, given the above set-up, even though the party as a whole will survive an encounter 99.77% of the time, and has about a 97.72% chance of surviving each level, on average, each PC will end up unconscious in 3 out of the 10 fights required to gain that level, and each fight will end with one or two PCs unconscious.On the basis of the (admittedly fairly questionable) assumptions above, I would draw the somewhat broad and obvious conclusion that a party of adventurers is more durable than its individual component PCs. A fight can thus seem challenging at the individual PC level (since each has a 30% chance of ending the fight unconscious) without a significant risk of a TPK (since the party as a whole has a 99.77% chance of survival.As a further, interesting point, decreasing the PC KO rate to 20% increases the party survival rate to 99.97% per encounter, and to 90.85% after a campaign of 300 fights. So, individual PCs can go unconscious 20% of the time (and each fight will end with an average of one PC unconscious), and the party still has a 90% chance of surviving till the end of the campaign.</blockquote>

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