D&D General DPR Calculations Wut?

[Maxperson]

65% is what the designers aim for the typical fight being. Naturally, you cannot perfectly predict AC, and thus AC will vary up and down--some things will be fragile, other things hella sturdy.

If you are going to reject the idea that we can estimate typical long-run behavior, then you're fundamentally rejecting the concept of mathematical analysis in the first place. The game cannot be designed, then, because there's no way for us to analyze it; all we can do is present totally individual experiences and hope we can glean something from them...which is going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

I'm not saying qualitative data has no place, it absolutely does; nor am I saying that DPR is the only metric, it isn't. Hell, it isn't even the best metric in a lot of ways. But in order to do mathematical analysis of things, that is, in order to know that the designs we make are effective in addition to being evocative and compelling, we have to be able to do some degree of benchmarking.

If you know what your DPR is against an expected "average" AC, then you are at least better-prepared to predict what your damage output will be when reality diverges from those assumptions. That's why we do safety drills, right? We practice when there is no problem, so that we are prepared to deal with the times that there are problems.

DPR analysis won't let you design the game, though. It will only let you design other damage dealing affects. The game is far more than damage. For example, your DPR analysis won't be helpful to a DM wanting to design a non-damage dealing spell of 3rd level.

 

[Maxperson]

If your doctor tells you that someone with your symptoms, medical history, and test results has a 90% chance of death within two years unless you get treatment, do you tell your doctor, "Okay but those statistics don't ALWAYS reflect reality!"? Or would you, y'know, listen to them? Because, even though statistics cannot give guaranteed results, they really really do actually work most of the time and if you have a 90% chance of death without treatment FOR GOD'S SAKE SEEK TREATMENT.

As a complete tangent, I've always disliked that phrase. How does it help God for you to seek treatment? It doesn't.

 

[Maxperson]

I’d actually argue that DPR, control, eHP, and support can all be mapped onto a single axis of impact, using something like “enemy turns affected” as a shared currency relative to a baseline.

• DPR → future enemy turns removed
• Control → enemy turns removed immediately
• eHP → enemy turns absorbed
• Support → a multiplier on whichever category it enhances

Some of those are incomplete.

Control is often going to be DPR, because the type of control also allows others hit more accurately and/or crit automatically, allowing greater DPR to occur. In those situations, it also becomes future enemy turns removed.

Healing, which increases eHP also becomes DPR if it keeps the big damage dealing in the group conscious when he would go unconscious, or revives him after he is reduced to 0. At that point 100% of the damage dealt by the big damage dealer belongs to the healer, since the big damage dealer would be doing 0 DPR without the healing spell(s). In those situations, it also becomes future enemy turns removed

 

[TwoSix]

Some of those are incomplete.

Control is often going to be DPR, because the type of control also allows others hit more accurately and/or crit automatically, allowing greater DPR to occur. In those situations, it also becomes future enemy turns removed.

Healing, which increases eHP also becomes DPR if it keeps the big damage dealing in the group conscious when he would go unconscious, or revives him after he is reduced to 0. At that point 100% of the damage dealt by the big damage dealer belongs to the healer, since the big damage dealer would be doing 0 DPR without the healing spell(s). In those situations, it also becomes future enemy turns removed

So in other words, everything IS just a DPR calculation!

 

[Maxperson]

So in other words, everything IS just a DPR calculation!

Um, no.

Note that I said SOME control spells are ALSO DPR. That leave the rest of those "some" spells as not DPR, as well as those control spells that have no DPR. Control abilities are similar.

What's more, the healing aspect changes the DPR to the fighter/bard and takes it away from the barbarian 6, messing up those nice neat white room calculations.

 

[TwoSix]

Um, no.

Note that I said SOME control spells are ALSO DPR. That leave the rest of those "some" spells as not DPR, as well as those control spells that have no DPR. Control abilities are similar.

What's more, the healing aspect changes the DPR to the fighter/bard and takes it away from the barbarian 6.

Sure, but a control spell is just a spell that prevents or hinders enemy actions, which means its mathematical expression is an increase in eHP. And eHP is just a different way to express enemy DPR factoring in PCs' defenses.

 

[Maxperson]

Sure, but a control spell is just a spell that prevents or hinders enemy actions, which means its mathematical expression is an increase in eHP. And eHP is just a different way to express enemy DPR factoring in PCs' defenses.

Some can take the enemy completely out of the fight. Suggestion for example. That's neither DPR, nor eHP. It's elimination with a single spell, while doing no damage.

 

[Blue]

Ahh, and advantage is close to equivalent to +5 to hit

With a 50% chance to succeed, advantage turns it into a 75% ( 50% + (50% * 50%)) chance to succeed so +5. But how much of an improvement advantage is for any particular check is dependent on your chance of failure for that check. So if we're averaging a 65% chance of success instead of a 50% chance, it's different. Basically it's 65% + ( 35% * 65% ) = 87.75% or +4.5. 10% less -- not a big change but important when doing calculations.

But really that's not all of it. You see a single 65% chance to hit, assuming not a Champion or anything like that, is really 35% fail / 60% hit / 5% crit. And advantage changes the crit chance even more since both a miss and a hit-no-crit can become a crit.

 

[SkidAce]

But how can this be?!

I was assured that white rooming was a sin invented by WotC and/or The Edition That Must Not Be Named!

I was promised that players only ever considered the world around them, never even glancing at a character sheet if they could avoid it!

I was told over and over again how horrible-awful-terrible modern D&D is because it's so full of rollplaying not roleplaying, of stale perfect-uniformity challenges where victory is always assured, while classic D&D was exclusively roleplaying, with real challenges and variable outcomes and the need to exploit every possible advantage!

How...how could this possibly be real? It can't. I refuse to believe it. Fake news! No, they're all actors pretending to be D&D players! No...it must be the competitors of D&D paying people to pretend to be actors pretending to be D&D players, that's it. That must be it. There's no way the shining golden utopia of absolute roleplaying and War and "playing at the world" could have been a deception. It just couldn't be!

For the record, thank you, very much, for posting this. Because it really has been the case that folks have argued to me that this sort of thing genuinely never happened prior to 2000. That it was genuinely invented by WotC D&D, and that players are somehow fundamentally different now compared to what they were in the TSR era. Clearly, those arguments have been concealing their similarity to swiss cheese....

You should have asked me...I agree we have been doing calculations since the beginning of time.

Its why I know that a d6 is 3.5, not 3 or 4.

The math assumptions change per edition, but statistics is statistics.

 

[SkidAce]

With a 50% chance to succeed, advantage turns it into a 75% ( 50% + (50% * 50%)) chance to succeed so +5. But how much of an improvement advantage is for any particular check is dependent on your chance of failure for that check. So if we're averaging a 65% chance of success instead of a 50% chance, it's different. Basically it's 65% + ( 35% * 65% ) = 87.75% or +4.5. 10% less -- not a big change but important when doing calculations.

But really that's not all of it. You see a single 65% chance to hit, assuming not a Champion or anything like that, is really 35% fail / 60% hit / 5% crit. And advantage changes the crit chance even more since both a miss and a hit-no-crit can become a crit.

I actually understood that.