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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 3530267" data-attributes="member: 9225">Again, you're assuming that there must be some error when the orcs are too tough -- either the DM's error or the designer's error. There's no error, Buzz. None. Fudging happens all the time when nobody's made any encounter design mistakes at all.Sometimes orcs are tough because chance defies trends over enough instances to encompass an encounter.This is very important:Statistical trends and expected outcomes are not the same as what actually happens in a game.Please read this again. And again. No really. I say this because this is one of those things that really does require a great deal of thought to absorb without appealing to the biases of the subculture, which, when they come to this sort of thing, are almost uniformly wrong. People tend to confuse a trend with individual instances. The fact that the orcs you designs have a BAB of +5 does not in fact mean the encounter will proceed as if the orcs always roll 15. maybe the orcs keep scoring 20+ in the encounter, even though they have a +5 bonus. The chance of them *not* getting a 15 is very good. The chance of you or I predicting whether it will be higher or lower and how this plus into PC tactics is not good. It's terrible. In essence, you are asking a game design to adhere to systems whose outcomes only look relaible. They aren't, though people like to hear otherwise because gamer culture is fond of crude hubris. There is simply no reason to expect that a game will provide optimal results all the time, and in fact, it is doubtful that, strictly speaking, they do so even some of the time. But gamers apply various narrative fallacies to rehabilitate results they don't care for, while disguising actual, contentious results from systems they want to defend.But to be crude myself, I'll say that a lot of gaming consists of people justofying crappy results post hoc and bragging about it, and that there's nothing whatsoever you can efver, ever do, no matter how hot you think a game is, to do any better. This is the dismal, necessary truth, and when people talk about designing minimum-fault systems they are essentially discussinghow to best enable self-deception. Sorry.</blockquote>

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