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do CRs seem a bit arbitrary?
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<blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6574438" data-attributes="member: 6787650"><p>In the interests of not quibbling about how you run your game ("In Scenario #1, when the Banshees failed to find the wizard, did they not find <em>anyone</em> at all?"/"Banshees didn't break the Silence or fall back to wait for it to run out?") I'll focus on the element common to all three of your scenarios: if the cleric goes down without casting Silence, the party loses. Rather than analyzing an anecdote, let's just examine the numbers. I don't have stats for your test parties so I've generated a little table (using exhaustive simulation) that you can simply use to look up your cleric's odds of getting off a Silence spell successfully before one of the Banshees wails him to death. Stats in parentheses are for 3 banshees, unparenthesized are for two banshees. </p><p></p><p>Dex 10 Con 10 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.439249 (0.319372)</p><p>Dex 10 Con 12 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.473660 (0.350690)</p><p>Dex 10 Con 14 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.510311 (0.385692)</p><p>Dex 10 Con 16 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.549201 (0.424659)</p><p>Dex 12 Con 10 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.479432 (0.363342)</p><p>Dex 12 Con 12 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.511940 (0.393717)</p><p>Dex 12 Con 14 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.546425 (0.427419)</p><p>Dex 12 Con 16 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.582887 (0.464686)</p><p>Dex 14 Con 10 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.523158 (0.412632)</p><p>Dex 14 Con 12 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.553487 (0.441678)</p><p>Dex 14 Con 14 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.585526 (0.473684)</p><p>Dex 14 Con 16 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.619276 (0.508849)</p><p>Dex 16 Con 10 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.567494 (0.463891)</p><p>Dex 16 Con 12 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.595547 (0.491352)</p><p>Dex 16 Con 14 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.625052 (0.521415)</p><p>Dex 16 Con 16 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.656009 (0.554238)</p><p></p><p>I was surprised to find that increasing the number of banshees only increase the deadliness by a small fraction, 15 to 30%-ish, as long as the cleric casts Silence immediately. In any case, if you have a middling cleric with Dx 12 and Con 14, adding a third Banshee increases the odds of immediate disaster (dead cleric) by 26%. In order to claim parity, the party needs offsetting advantages at 8th level which decrease the risk of disaster by a corresponding percentage (21%).</p><p></p><p><strong>Edit:</strong> By the way, this table is a nice illustration of bounded accuracy and illustrate the "robust system" principle mentioned earlier. You can see that boosted stats are nice on the margins, but an extra +4 points of stats doesn't fundamentally alter the difficulty of an encounter. A 47% chance of TPK and a 55% chance of TPK aren't all that dissimilar from a experiential perspective: the banshee encounter will "feel like" about the same difficulty to this party whether the cleric is Dex 16 Con 16 or Dex 14 Con 14. Clearly 16 is objectively better, but if you need to use math to detect the advantage, you can probably still have lots of fun at 14.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="FormerlyHemlock, post: 6574438, member: 6787650"] In the interests of not quibbling about how you run your game ("In Scenario #1, when the Banshees failed to find the wizard, did they not find [I]anyone[/I] at all?"/"Banshees didn't break the Silence or fall back to wait for it to run out?") I'll focus on the element common to all three of your scenarios: if the cleric goes down without casting Silence, the party loses. Rather than analyzing an anecdote, let's just examine the numbers. I don't have stats for your test parties so I've generated a little table (using exhaustive simulation) that you can simply use to look up your cleric's odds of getting off a Silence spell successfully before one of the Banshees wails him to death. Stats in parentheses are for 3 banshees, unparenthesized are for two banshees. Dex 10 Con 10 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.439249 (0.319372) Dex 10 Con 12 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.473660 (0.350690) Dex 10 Con 14 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.510311 (0.385692) Dex 10 Con 16 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.549201 (0.424659) Dex 12 Con 10 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.479432 (0.363342) Dex 12 Con 12 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.511940 (0.393717) Dex 12 Con 14 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.546425 (0.427419) Dex 12 Con 16 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.582887 (0.464686) Dex 14 Con 10 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.523158 (0.412632) Dex 14 Con 12 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.553487 (0.441678) Dex 14 Con 14 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.585526 (0.473684) Dex 14 Con 16 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.619276 (0.508849) Dex 16 Con 10 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.567494 (0.463891) Dex 16 Con 12 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.595547 (0.491352) Dex 16 Con 14 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.625052 (0.521415) Dex 16 Con 16 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.656009 (0.554238) I was surprised to find that increasing the number of banshees only increase the deadliness by a small fraction, 15 to 30%-ish, as long as the cleric casts Silence immediately. In any case, if you have a middling cleric with Dx 12 and Con 14, adding a third Banshee increases the odds of immediate disaster (dead cleric) by 26%. In order to claim parity, the party needs offsetting advantages at 8th level which decrease the risk of disaster by a corresponding percentage (21%). [B]Edit:[/B] By the way, this table is a nice illustration of bounded accuracy and illustrate the "robust system" principle mentioned earlier. You can see that boosted stats are nice on the margins, but an extra +4 points of stats doesn't fundamentally alter the difficulty of an encounter. A 47% chance of TPK and a 55% chance of TPK aren't all that dissimilar from a experiential perspective: the banshee encounter will "feel like" about the same difficulty to this party whether the cleric is Dex 16 Con 16 or Dex 14 Con 14. Clearly 16 is objectively better, but if you need to use math to detect the advantage, you can probably still have lots of fun at 14. [/QUOTE]
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