Dwarf vs Zombies: A Series of Contrived Fights (Now with orcs!)

[Stacie GmrGrl]

I have a feeling all the off the wall numbers we are seeing is WotC's way of seeing which complaints of the different parts of the system are the most common. You can bet that the majority who do the survey will say "Your monster stats and XP values need Help badly."

 

[B.T.]

Perhaps the intent of zombies is that they're easy one-on-one (what with being slow and all) but more dangerous in swarms.

EDIT: Welp, guess they're not.

 

[FireLance]

At 4th level, the dwarf gets more hit points and and an increase to his attack roll bonus, which sadly does not help him against the zombies as he is already hitting on a natural 2:
Str 17, Dex 14, Con 15, Int 8, Wis 12, Cha 10.
AC 16, HP 50, Hit Dice 4d12 + 2d8
Greataxe: +7 vs. AC, Damage 2d6+1d8+3 or 2d6+3 and Cleave

This time, both the zombies and the dwarf had somewhat more "normal" luck, hitting and Cleaving closer to the expected frequencies. The dwarf still managed to beat all 21 zombies (four fights against four zombies plus one fight against five zombies) without the need to take an extended rest. He did take short rests to replenish hit points between fights, but as it turned out, he did not actually need to do so (but it was close).

The dwarf was luckiest in the first fight, as he managed to take down all the zombies without being hit once. He killed one zombie in the first round, two in the next round with Cleave, and the fourth zombie in the third round.

The second and third fights were similar to the first, except that the zombies managed to hit him twice in the second fight and once in the third fight, dealing a total of 9 and 6 points of damage respectively.

The dwarf's luck took a turn for the worse in the fourth fight. Although he killed one zombie in the first round, two out of the three remaining zombies managed to hit him on their turn, dealing a total of 9 points of damage. He managed to kill one zombie in the second round, but his second attack from Cleave failed to kill the zombie he hit. The two remaining zombies attacked him and one hit, dealing 6 points of damage. The dwarf managed to kill another zombie on this third round, but again failed to kill the last one with Cleave. The last zombie made one more attack before it was killed in the last round, but it missed. All in all, the zombies did 15 points of damage to the dwarf in this fight.

In the final fight againt five zombies, the dwarf suffered an initial run of bad luck. After killing one zombie, he was attacked by the remaining four and was hit three times for the maximum of 18 points of damage (one critical hit and two maximum damage rolls). In the second round, he did not even manage to kill one zombie due to a low damage roll, so his Cleave ability was not triggered. After that, the dwarf's luck returned, and the zombies kept missing him. He killed off two zombies with Cleave in the third round, and the last two in the fourth.

All in all, the dwarf sustained 48 points of damage in the course of fighting the 21 zombies, 2 points less than his full normal hit points. Of course, being able to take short rests to recover hit points ensured that he went into every fight at close to full hit points, so even in the final fight, the hit point loss wasn't particularly worrying. Although this series of fights seemed relatively tougher than the previous ones, they still seemed easier than what I would expect for an above "average" to slightly under "tough" difficulty range.

 

[Dragoslav]

Maybe this is acceptable. The Fighter is supposed to be the "best at fighting," so if it's just a heavily-optimized fighter fighting a bunch of encounters scaled down to be around a generic "average" level of difficulty for one person, then I think it makes sense that he will be dominating these fights.

 

[FireLance]

I'm done with zombies, since zombies are worth half the encounter budget for a 5th-level dwarf, and I'm not too keen on running "average" fights of seven zombies against one dwarf.

As previously suggested, I'll move on to some other monsters instead, and I choose orcs. The standard orc is a 3rd-level monster and is worth 460 XP, over the 325 XP budget for a "Tough" fight for a 1st-level character.

So, before I started rolling the dice, I did some math.

First off, I determined that the orc's Rage trait is actually a poor option against the dwarf due to his high AC. The damage bonus is simply not worth the reduction in accuracy. The orcs will thus make normal attacks.

Next, I broke out my trusty spreadsheet and determined that the dwarf actually has a 96.27% chance of winning the fight against the orc. This may sound really high, but remember that the monsters will only need to get lucky once to bring a PC's adventuring career to a screeching halt. At that probability, and assuming two fights are needed to gain a level, the PC has a 92.68% chance of reaching level 2, a 73.78% chance of reaching level 5, a 50.45% chance of reaching level 10, and a 23.58% chance of reaching level 20. So, if you are hoping to reach high levels, those are not good odds.

So, yeah. At 460 XP per orc, the dwarf (or one very similar to him who is 1st level and has decided to go after orcs instead of zombies) only needs to defeat two to reach 2nd level, and as mentioned, he has a pretty good chance of doing so.

Well, after I broke out the dice, the two fights played out very similarly. Despite having the edge when it came to rolling initiative, the dwarf lost initiative both times due to bad rolls. The orc attacked the dwarf but missed, and the dwarf attacked the orc, hit it, and killed it.

Well, that was fast. And perhaps not too surprising, given that the dwarf is supposed to win 96.27% of the time, and to win without losing a single hit point 69.87% of the time. Going from 2nd level to 3rd should be equally fast and even less risky, since the dwarf will have more hit points, and also only needs to defeat another two orcs to do so.

However, since it's late in my part of the world, that will have to wait until tomorrow.

 

[FireLance]

The dwarf goes up two levels today, because I got distracted yesterday homebrewing a 5e Warlord class based on the dragon sorcerer.

At 460 XP, a single orc is about halfway between an "average" encounter and a "tough" encounter for a 2nd-level character. My trusty spreadsheet also indicates that the 2nd-level dwarf will beat an orc about 98.98% of the time, and he will only need to beat two orcs to gain a level.

Once again, both the fights pretty much ran along similar lines. There were quite a few low rolls for both the orcs and the dwarf. The dwarf basically lost initative both times, missed on his first attack, and killed the orc on his second attack. As for the orcs, they managed to attack the dwarf four times over the two fights, but only hit once, dealing the minmum of 3 points of damage.

After taking a long rest and and reaching 3rd level, the dwarf goes back to fighting orcs. He needs to defeat four orcs to reach 4th level, but instead of taking them on one at a time (which would be close to the "average" budget of 425 XP for a 4th-level character) he will take them on two at a time, which would exceed the "tough" budget of 850 XP.

This time round, the orcs had a run of terrible luck, while the dwarf's luck was more average. The orcs won initative in the first fight, but kept missing the dwarf. On the other hand, the dwarf killed one orc with his first attack but failed to kill the second orc with Cleave. He missed the orc in the second round, but killed it on the third.

In the second fight, the dwarf won initiative and killed one orc with his first attack. The orc missed the dwarf in the first round, but hit him in the second. However, as the dwarf had also missed the orc in the second round, he was able to use his Expertise Dice to parry the orc's attack, reducing the damage by 6 points from 9 to 3. The dwarf then killed the second orc in the third round.

Overall, it seemed that the orcs were far less dangerous than the zombies, as they only managed to inflict 3 points of damage to the dwarf between level 2 and level 3, and between level 3 and level 4. However, this might have been because the orc were less lucky than the zombies. If the orcs had been hitting at about the same rate as the zombies, they would have dealt about 17 points of damage between level 2 and level 3, and 25 points of damage between level 3 and level 4. This would be close to the 14 and 26 points of damage that the zombies dealt to the dwarf. However, the balance still seems a little off as the zombies were closer to "average" encounters while the orcs were closer to "tough".

To get to 5th level, the dwarf needs to defeat ten orcs. However, instead of having five fights of two orcs (which would be between "average" and "tough" for a 4th-level character), I will run two fights with two orcs and two fights with three orcs (which would be harder than "tough". Let's see how that pans out.

 

[kerleth]

Interesting

I found a similarly built fighter to be equally devastating. 2 things though.
1) This seems to be the "Krog Smash" and "I don't die!" build of the fighter, which in my opinion SHOULD dominate one on one and small group battles, cause he's the FIGHTer. Against more tactically diverse situations another build may shine while this one is lacking.
2)The experience values to level up are way less than the first playtest packet. I have a suspicion they reduced them so they could get feedback on a wider range of levels on the nest survey.

That said I think it's great you took the time to do this and post it. Thanks for the info.

 

[Blackwarder]

I also think that the xp values are extremely low for the sole purpose of getting feedback on all five levels, seriously 650xp for 2nd level is too low.

Warder

 

[slobo777]

I also think that the xp values are extremely low for the sole purpose of getting feedback on all five levels, seriously 650xp for 2nd level is too low.

Warder

We could probably calculate an "expected XP / number of encounters before losing 50% health" for a fighter build that kept getting into fights without an extended rest. I'd pick 50% health, as that's a safe margin, and a realistic resource drain level where a group can be allowed to take a rest (remember this is expected, so just by chance a low-level group could get unlucky and lose far more). The dwarf build versus zombies used in this thread could probably hit some high numbers even with the 50% cutoff.

I'm also interested in seeing what a "typical" mixed party of 4 or 5 could do in this regard, but that involves setting up so much more, including fair decisions about movement, choice about when to use spells etc.

 

[FireLance]

We could probably calculate an "expected XP / number of encounters before losing 50% health" for a fighter build that kept getting into fights without an extended rest. I'd pick 50% health, as that's a safe margin, and a realistic resource drain level where a group can be allowed to take a rest (remember this is expected, so just by chance a low-level group could get unlucky and lose far more). The dwarf build versus zombies used in this thread could probably hit some high numbers even with the 50% cutoff.

I think my preference would be for the expected number of XP worth of fights for a fighter to get to 50% hit points after expending all his Hit Dice to be about half the XP needed for the fighter to gain a level. That way, most PCs would need to take at least one or two long rests between levels.