Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pming" data-source="post: 6769833" data-attributes="member: 45197">Hiya!Thats kind of the point. You have to guess. The guy with the Mace vs. the guy with the Warhammer, or the guy with the Longsword vs. the guy with the Shortsword? They are guessing that their weapon is best. They don't have "the numbers". They barely have anything even resembling scientific experimentation. They have Old Pennet, the warrior who told them Well, I've mostly seen folks using the Short Sword, and being it's kinda my countrymens favored sword, I learned it as well. I've seen some easteners using those long-swords though. All fine and good, but they seem unwieldy to me, swinging to and fro, hopping to connect, making big arching sweeps. Any defender worth his ale could see it coming! Now, a good, well placed thrust from a short sword? That, my boy, that's hard to see coming!.I thought you were all up about "the numbers"? A guy with a d6 weapon versus a d8 weapon was "foolish" and a player choosing the lower over the higher was being a "jerk". Now it's not about the numbers? What gives?Besides, if you don't have "the numbers" how do you know what will or will not increase your risk of death? Obvious things are obvious; wait until there is a red light and cross at the crosswalk. But non-obvious things...aren't. Do you cross at crosswalk A, or walk down a bit to crosswalk B? Maybe crosswalk B is more open, but maybe there is an alleyway between A and B, increasing your chance of getting struck before you even get there...or maybe that alley isn't even usable, or any number of other non-obvious things you have no real way of "guesstimating" with any accuracy. You don't have these numbers, and neither do the inhabitants in the world of D&D.I get where you're trying to go, but I don't think you're going to get there. In D&D, there are simply FAR too many variables that will vastly mitigate that d6 vs. d8 damage die. There's an old saying...The whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. If you just look at d6 versus d8, with nothing else at ALL.... d8 is 'obviously' better. But when you even add in a single little bit of chance above that...like the d6 guy having +1 to hit better than the d8 guy (or hell, even the d20 roll to hit by it's self), things start to change. When you toss in the myriad of choices that have nothing to do with "the numbers" into the mix, well, d6 versus d8 damage is totally and utterly pointless to differentiate.Saelorn, nobody is arguing that 6 points of damage is less than 8 points of damage. What I, at least, am trying to explain to you is that you would never even get to the point where that 2-hp damage difference would be noticeable in any way. It's like putting a drop of pure water into the ocean; yes, it did, technically, just increase the purity of the ocean. And if you do that a billion times, it might be noticeable for a few seconds directly around where you added it...but wait 60 seconds and you're back to "no difference". There are simply FAR TOO MANY UNKNOWNS going on in an RPG for that 2-point difference to even add up to a fraction of a fraction of a percentage. And, to top it all off, there is no way in H-E-double-hockey-sticks that an adventurer in D&D would be able to even hazzard a guess as to which weapon is "better". They don't have the numbers, just like you don't have the numbers for your chances of getting hit by a vehicle. They can guess, and be completely off, you can guess, and be completely off. Niether them nor you will ever know if your guess was correct...even if they can't kill things as fast as the guy with the warhammer or if you don't get hit by a car. Maybe they were unlucky? Maybe you were? Maybe what they were hitting had more HP's? Maybe you were extra cautious and alert that day? Who knows?^_^Paul L. Ming</blockquote>

Verification