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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6177319" data-attributes="member: 5143">I agree.The thing is, it's easy for fiction to have these types of characters that "seem" unsuited for adventuring but eventually prove their worth.  The reason fiction can do this is because it's perfectly valid to write a story where one character hides in the back of the party cowering because they are afraid of the monsters for 90% of a book only to slip on a magic ring and save the day at the end.It's easy to write this story because there's no player who has a vested interest in that character being useful more often.  No one's feelings are hurt that that character didn't get enough "screen time".  The battles didn't get harder because there were more people in the group.  The battles were always just as hard as the author needed them to be to make the plot interesting and the result of the combat was always certain because the author can write anything he/she wants.  It's easy in a book or movie to write in such a way that the combat inept character never faces a challenge too powerful for him or has an amazing amount of luck that saves him whenever he gets in over his head.In a D&D game, each attack has a die roll associated with it.  Each hit has an amount of damage that everyone in the game can see.  The results of the combat are likely weighted by the DM to get the results he'd like to see...however, they aren't guaranteed.  The weighting works only as well as the math in the game and the experience of the DM.  The die rolls are still random and a string of bad luck can turn even a battle that the PCs were nearly guaranteed to win into a TPK.In fact, it's this weighting that is almost precisely the issue at hand.  If a DM has to write an adventure and all he knows is there will be 5 people playing.  A balanced game is fairly easy to weight for.  Let's assume all the PCs will be doing between 4 and 16 points of damage each round(whether that's with spells, swords, songs, backstabs, or whatever...we don't care).  Then we can say the average damage of a PC is 10.  During an average round, 5 PCs do 50 damage.  A monster with 100 hitpoints will survive 2 rounds and, let's say, does 20 damage a round.So, if everyone in the party has more than 40 hitpoints, we can say that all of them are likely to survive this combat.Of course, if one of them is a class that can't do any damage and another one spends his round smoking his pipe because he refuses to fight until he's smoked and another one comically slips and falls unconscious then the remaining 2 are up against an enemy that it now takes 5 rounds to defeat.  Now, unless the PCs have more than 100 hitpoints, they are likely to die.In fiction, it's really easy to resolve this situation.  It turns out the 2 characters who are fighting as simply good enough to defeat the challenge.  Monsters in fiction can die in one hit if the story demands it.  In a D&D game, it doesn't work that way.  The combat rule only factor in actual skill.  Which means that Ogre isn't going to magically trip and fall onto the sword of the Hobbit who accidentally skewers it in a D&D game.  Instead, the Hobbit will be pounded into the ground and die.</blockquote>

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