Elder-Basilisk
First Post
On the other hand, the odds of you failing one save were typically pretty low by the time save or dies rolled around--with proper character construction, those odds were more typically around 5-20% than the 45% of a 4th edition save. In fourth edition, failing several saves in a row can still frequently kill you and the odds of doing so are not that much less than failing any single save in 3rd edition. (Also, typical 3rd edition strategy would have been to use spells or abilities to obviate the need to make a save at all as soon as the ability showed up. (If bodaks appear, shut your eyes or cast death ward, etc; if a charm-monster shows up cast magic circle vs evil to gain immunity to the dominate). Thus 4th edition still retains a similar amount of randomness in a different garb).
This is still true in 4th edition. In a mod I played recently, my 1st level, 35 hp dwarf ranger was charged by two greataxe wielding orcs. Both hit. A third threw a handaxe. The fourth threw a handaxe. My character was down. His init came up. Made save vs. death. Done. The cleric healed the character for some 17 points or so. Conscious again. The orcs attacked again and took him down again. Save vs. death.
And there were no crits in this situation, just an unbroken string of six or seven successes on what should have been 60% rolls. About 5% likely to happen. But that's about as likely as the greataxe crit was in 3rd edition. Sure, the DM was running all of the orcs on a single initiative which dramatically amplified the effect of the luck (had even one of the orcs gone after the cleric, the cleric could have healed me before I went down which would have enable my character to use his daily, action point, twin strike, and spend a minor for second wind, at which point, he's still up on the second round and one of the orcs might well have been dead). However, having monster initiative fall naturally in one block happens pretty frequently and it's not that unusual for DMs to run monsters all on one initiative (though I think it is poor DMing practice), so the situation is far from unique.
I tend to forget that rolling hp was core 3.x since I only played one campaign where we rolled hit points. After that, it was 50%+1 all the way.
I don't think that's quite true. The 3rd edition combats that took very few rounds still had lots of die rolls. For instance, in Age of Worms, we had a battle with a certain frost giant sorcerer. It lasted one and a half rounds. But, in that time, our archer rolled twelve attacks, a fire giant ally of ours rolled four attacks, my fighter/scout rolled three attacks (and was about to come up again when it died), our dwarven defender rolled (I think) 5 attacks, the wizard cast quickened magic missile, and at least one other offensive spell (two damage rolls and at least one saving throw for the creature), and the frost giant himself rolled five attacks and cast one spell.
That was an unusually short combat, but that's somewhere around 32 attacks back and forth.
Now, if we take a pretty basic fourth edition combat with 5 characters against 5 foes, there will be a total of ten or so attack rolls per round. So that one and a half round (which is pretty short) 3rd edition fight had as many attack rolls as a three round forth edition fight (which is also unusually short for a fourth edition fight, but not unheard of--I played an LFR mod today where the first fight was over in less than four rounds and the second was over before my character's third turn).
Thus far, at least, the number of dice rolled seems pretty similar. The big difference is that all of the probabilities in the default 4th edition environment group around 50% +/- 15% and in third edition, probabilities were frequently in the 5% and 95% ranges.
