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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rystil Arden" data-source="post: 2059286" data-attributes="member: 29014">Derrick is hardly a juggernaut, that was my whole point in making him, he uses the lowest point buy, doesn't spend all his feats or abilities, etc, but that aside:  Could the dragon win if he attacked Derrick while Derrick was asleep?  Absolutely (assuming he could pull this off).  But originally you said:"Here is an example CR 13 Dragon. This Dragon can probably take any 20th level character in a 1 on 1 fight. So, short of an epic character or a deity, this Dragon is not going to be afraid of any single PC."I completely agree that dragons don't live to be ancient by fighting to the death, that's why I mentioned that it should run.  The point of this thread is that dragons should have interesting tactics (like turning the tables on the PC by sneaking up when they are asleep as you suggested), as brute force only goes so far.  As such, my post has proved its point.  That you agreed that the dragon would run means that it is indeed afraid of Derrick (it would never admit that this is why it ran though)Now to your assertion that you never said magic items:  Magic items are absoutely 100% a part of any character, let alone a 20th-level character.  The game is balanced around the base money table 5-1, and I didn't even use all of that money to equip Derrick.  If you take away all of the items, monks and other classes who have Ki Strike abilities will be the only melee class capable of toe-to-toeing even wimpy high-DR monsters without some serious criticals (and some monsters are immune to those).  Without access to an adamantine weapon, a rogue isn't going to be able to hurt an iron golem (it was an easier-to-find +3 requirement back in the longer-playtested 3.0) .  Having appropriate items is thus not only a necessary, but an intrinsic part of any combat character.  It would be like saying that I said a level 20 wizard couldn't beat a level 15 aristocrat, and then later mentioning that you never said the wizard got spells.  Now the fun part:  The probability.  All rolls will be assumed to do average damage because this is the expected value, so any deviance of damage will not affect the dragon's chance of winning, as they will tend to cancel out.  Thus I will compute the probability that the dragon will hit enough times to take Derrick out before Derrick kills the dragon.  I will first do this assuming the dragon uses all its attacks, then I will do it again with the dragon True Striking on the defensive and attacking the next round.  Four sneak attacks will kill the dragon, so I'll start by calculating the chance that Derrick will have done that by the fifth round.  This is (19/20)^4=81.45%.  Now the chance that the dragon kills Derrick before this is as follows: the dragon needs to hit seven times with a combination of melee attacks and breath attacks to kill Derrick.  The chance of that happening in those five rounds, wherein he gets 25 chances, is a summation of nCr(25,x)*(1/20)^x(19/20)^(25-x) for all x>7, roughly = to 1.69e-4 (roughly 3/20000).  Next round: Now Derrick has a 97.7% chance to have won, whereas dragon has a (7/10000) chance to kill by then, which when multiplied by the chance it even goes this far (which is .1855 from Derrick above) becomes about (1/30000) which is lower than before.  Derrick has a 99.7% chance to win after the next round, so the dragon has a .00213, roughly 1/500 chance to win if it makes it this long, but when I multiply in the chance to reach this round, which is 2.3%, I get 1/20000.  The chance that Derrick wins by this next round is 99.98%, which is more than 999/1000 (its actually only a 2/10000 chance that he doesnt win by this round!), so we can stop if the dragon hasn't won at least 1/1000 by now, so I'll make that last calculation: the dragon will have won with a 1/200 chance if it comes to this round, which when multiplied by the .3% chance to make it to this round becomes 3/100000!  Now by the Additivity Axiom of Probability, if I add up the dragon's chances in all these rounds, I will get an overestimate of the actual probability that the dragon wins, as the events are non-disjoint (see Introduction to Probability by Dimitri Bertsekas and John Tsitsiklis for a good overview).  The sum of these numbers, rounded up to a clean number is 3/10000, so the actual value will be significantly less than my broad overestimate.  As you can see, it is well under 1/1000.  As it turns out, I don't need to do the numbers on True Strike (even though True Strike does damage more quickly on average) because the True Strike is too slow to kill Derrick before he reaches that 99.98% win chance, no matter what.  Gotta love 6.041 (its a probability class, but we number them here).</blockquote>

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