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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9622388" data-attributes="member: 6790260">And yet it doesn't feel like that, in actual play. I cannot tell you why people don't feel like they're advancing, but they don't! I have my theories, of course, but they aren't based on statistical evidence."Realism" is another dragon to chase--and necessarily at odds with the explicit description of the game as being about "heroic characters" per the 2014 cover. Relevant quotes from said 2014 book (emphasis added):"The Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying game is about storytelling in worlds of swords and sorcery. It shares elements with childhood games of make-believe. Like those games, D&D is driven by imagination. It's about picturing the towering castle beneath the stormy night sky and imagining how a fantasy adventurer might react to the challenges that scene presents.[...]Unlike a game of make-believe, D&D gives structure to the stories, a way of determining the consequences of the adventurers' action. Players roll dice to resolve whether their attacks hit or miss or whether their adventurers can scale a cliff, roll away from the strike of a magical lightning bolt, or pull off some other dangerous task. Anything is possible, but the dice make some outcomes more probable than others."And..."There's no winning and losing in the Dungeons & Dragons game--at least, not in the way those terms are usually understood. Together, the DM and the players create an exciting story of bold adventurers who confront deadly perils. Sometimes an adventurer might come to a grisly end, torn apart by ferocious monsters or done in by a nefarious villain. Even so, the other adventurers can search for powerful magic to revive their fallen comrade or the player might choose to create a new character to carry on."This is a fantasy. It is a story; the book itself says so, repeatedly. "Realism" is but one style among many in which stories can be told, and it is NOT the objective best or most important style, especially when telling a fantasy.The point was to have 2 attacks for ~40 HP vs a 150 HP opponent (so the attack is, in fact, actually more powerful) than to cut back all of the numbers like that. Fewer and BIGGER attacks. Which I was quite clear about.That's what you offer more diverse choices for, like having a cleave attack that doesn't hit very hard, but is very accurate and hits multiple targets, or deals a small amount of unavoidable damage just from its brutal force, or having a "twin" attack where you get to attack two targets normally, or whatever. Doesn't have to be super complicated; I recognize that it's good to have a spectrum of both level-of-engagement and level-of-complexity, which are not the same thing. (E.g., a character with many different resources to track and features to use can be complex, but each individual thing can be perfectly straightforward in actual use, while another character can have only a small set of options, but each of those options is dense with alternatives and choices to be made. Sort of the Wizard-vs-Sorcerer concept: sorcerers are higher-engagement but lower-complexity, Wizards are lower-engagement but higher-complexity.)I didn't say people don't like making attacks. I said that they don't feel that a dozen small attacks is AS MUCH GROWTH as three incredibly meaty, powerful attacks.I've seen this very specific phenomenon in action. Multiple Fighters who felt like they weren't doing enough damage compared to a Barbarian or Paladin, who could push out HUGE numbers with (far) fewer attacks.Consistency is mathematically wonderful. It is not necessarily psychologically wonderful. We must design games, at least in part, based on the psychology of real players. It's one of the reasons why I so severely dislike 5e's "just start at 3rd level if you aren't new" philosophy, because I've literally only had like two 5e DMs ever who actually followed that advice. IME, after searching for months and months, almost all (easily 90%+) 5e games start specifically at 1st level no matter what. Every single actual friend I have who has started a 5e game has chosen to start it at level 1, despite my attempts (when I have been one of the players) to persuade them that the game is more stable and reliable at 3rd level. (Note, "more", this is relative and 1st-level 5e is VERY MUCH NOT "stable and reliable.")I think the latter, while slightly more complex than the former, is the better choice. Because you are correct, players like rolling dice. But they like having the numbers be OBVIOUSLY BIG more than they like rolling many many dice, because average results feel disappointing rather than typical, even though regression to the mean indicates that if you roll 10 dice, you are VERY likely to get a result close to 10 times the average of a single die (e.g. 10d6 has mean 35, SD 5.4, so ~95% of results will be between 25 and 45 inclusive.) It's a quirk of human psychology. Average feels inadequate. (This is one of the various explanations of the Dunning-Kruger effect, or at least explaining part of why it happens.)</blockquote>

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