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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 9349026" data-attributes="member: 12731">Know what [USER=1257]@ichabod[/USER] ? I'm not here to force you to do something you clearly don't want to.What is that? Face the facts. What you're doing is you're attempting to reduce my statements to "opinion", and that sort of anti-science stance isn't worth my time. I'm not having the "opinion" that risk is a cost, I'm telling you for a fact it is. Go check it up.For anyone else interested:No, what I'm talking about is that risk itself is a cost. I'm not just talking about the cost when the outcome is low. I'm talking about the variability itself.Very crude example.Imagine you're entering the dungeon and there's a goblin hidden. It will attack you first, for 2 points of damage. Then you attack and kill it. End of adventure.Now I give you a choice: You can either start this adventure with 3 1/2 hit points or 1d6 hit points. What do you choose?Too many people will go with the thrilling choice of possibly getting a whole six hit points, not caring about the equal possibility of getting just one.But that's not the entire story here. In this (artificial) example, having 1 or 2 hit points is entirely worthless, because you'd be dead before you get to kill the goblin.Which isn't so artificial after all, since having low hit points is much more of a disabler than having high hit points is a enabler. Perhaps not in all campaigns, but certainly in most.If you only look at the cost of the outcomes, then you'd think 1d6 and 3,5 hp is equal.But when you consider that 1d6 hp represents a 33% chance of certain doom while 3,5 hp completely avoids that, you might be able to understand what I mean: risk is a cost in itself.In order for this risk to be worthwhile, the game needs to properly compensate for it. (In the above case, offering a choice of random hp is just plain bad - returning to D&D here) A full mathematical compensation isn't what I expect (and likely impossible to calculate) but "a little something" goes a long way to show me that the game designers are aware of this fact. Which brings me back to the good and bad design of 5E: the default array giving you a slightly lower average than if you risk rolling the dice is a good design decision, since it (whether accidentally or intentionally) shows you're aware of this principle. I say "accidentally or intentionally" because if it was intentional, I don't think they'd gone with choosing "average" hit points rounding you up. It should definitely have meant rounding down. Not only do you not reward taking the risk (rolling for hp), you actively penalize it. This is straight-up, objectively, a bad design decision.And to be clear: even if you could use fractional hit points, asking the player to choose between 3,5 and 1d6 hp would still fail to understand that the 1d6 choice represents a risk, and that risk needs to be compensated for - otherwise the other choice is straight up better.I see the argument that they are convinced going for average hp leads to a better game in general, and so they want to encourage that. On the other hand, they realize they need to provide a random option. (I think 4E did away with random rolling, enough said) But that still does not excuse hanging out to dry all the people that don't care about statistics, the people that don't want to think about statistics, and the people that can't figure out statistics.Which leads me to...Thank you for so clearly showing you aren't game designer material. Because this isn't about you. This is not your or my problem, this is, or should be, the game designer's problem.Asking regular gamers to "understand the risks" is1) incredibly dismissive to gamers2) wildly underestimates how difficult the average gamer finds making proper probability calculations3) wildly underestimates how little the average gamer even want to think about statistics, instead trusting the designer to provide him or her with reasonably weighted options4) incredibly dismissive to the job that is game design. Asking gamers to do the risk calculation themselves is akin to "write your own scenario" where the writer just gives you a pitch and a rough outline, and leaves all the details to the DM to fill out. That's just not worth the money you pay to have someone write an adventure for you.I guess we're different you and I.I take it for granted that a game isn't out to fleece the unwary, the ones unable to resist thrills, and the math deficient.When I talk about good game design, I'm talking about a game whose designers understand that (very generally speaking) a more risky (and by risky I mean variable) option needs to be given some kind of bonus, to be equal to a less risky option.---Finally, just to discuss one more point:Obviously we can discuss several different examples. The more some outcomes are strictly worse than others, the more this principle applies. Conversely, when you can't easily compare the outcomes, there is much less need to compensate for risk itself. Let's leave random ability scores for another time, and instead go for something as silly as it should be clear:You can either roll for ice cream flavor randomly or you can choose vanilla. Assuming y'all don't have weird hangups against specific ice cream flavors  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /> , there is no real need to compensate for the "risky" choice here, since you're getting an ice cream either way.Perhaps this point is best carried across by contrasting random hit points (where a 1 is strictly worse than a 6) with randomly selecting your character class, as discussed previously. You can't really say playing a bard or sorcerer is "unplayable". Is paladin really better than cleric? Is ranger really better than rogue?In this case, there's no real need to compensate for the risk, since "fighter" isn't really strictly worse than "wizard" in the sense that you can't have a fun game and enjoy yourself. However, when you're at 0 hit points, most players aren't really enjoying themselves, and this is much more likely if you roll a 1 instead of a 4 or 6.With my game dev hat on, I would STILL grant the player choosing to roll for random character class a token benefit (WFRP4 was brought up earlier) but I wouldn't call it actively bad design to not do that. With something much more clearly risky, such as hit points, I definitely would. And do.</blockquote>

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