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<blockquote data-quote="Pyromantic" data-source="post: 5848032" data-attributes="member: 6690699">I want to take a time out here and mention one falsehood that I believe is popping up repeatedly in discussions of damage. Namely, that if you take a person's hit points and divide by the expected damage of a hit, then you get the expected number of attacks to drop them. There's a reason I used flat values in an example above rather than rolled, as it generates some very complex calculations. I'm not an expert in probability but have seen enough of it to be careful.&nbsp;Consider a simple example. A person does d2 damage per hit and wants to drop someone with 3 hit points. You might think: &quot;well, a d2 does 1.5 damage on average, so I expect it to take 2 hits to get 3 damage total.&quot; Right?&nbsp;Nope.&nbsp;You can see pretty quickly that the minimum number of hits required is 2, but it could also be 3, so the expected number must be between these values. It actually works out to be 2.25.&nbsp;Edit:&nbsp;Here's an example of what I mean. The expected number of hits required to defeat the 70 hit point opponent is actually above 6. That's because the probability of it requiring only 5 rounds is less than the probability of it requiring 7. It actually works out to about 6.02.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Pyromantic, post: 5848032, member: 6690699"] I want to take a time out here and mention one falsehood that I believe is popping up repeatedly in discussions of damage. Namely, that if you take a person's hit points and divide by the expected damage of a hit, then you get the expected number of attacks to drop them. There's a reason I used flat values in an example above rather than rolled, as it generates some very complex calculations. I'm not an expert in probability but have seen enough of it to be careful. Consider a simple example. A person does d2 damage per hit and wants to drop someone with 3 hit points. You might think: "well, a d2 does 1.5 damage on average, so I expect it to take 2 hits to get 3 damage total." Right? Nope. You can see pretty quickly that the minimum number of hits required is 2, but it could also be 3, so the expected number must be between these values. It actually works out to be 2.25. Edit: Here's an example of what I mean. The expected number of hits required to defeat the 70 hit point opponent is actually above 6. That's because the probability of it requiring only 5 rounds is less than the probability of it requiring 7. It actually works out to about 6.02. [/QUOTE]

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