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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gantros" data-source="post: 4632916" data-attributes="member: 15836">True, one consequence of rolling less dice is that the results are always swingier.  This is why I recommend ignoring the fixes I threw out there and sticking with the original level of success rule.The problem with any rule that requires a lot of dice rolls is that the more you roll, the lower the probability of getting an extreme result.  For example, if a 20th level mage casts a fireball, they could either roll 20d6 for damage, or 4d6x5.  Both have the same damage expectation, while the latter is obviously swingier.  However, even though the odds of an extreme result (i.e. 120 damage) improve from 1 in 3.6 quadrillion to a mere 1 in 1300, results like that are still rare enough to justify the time savings of rolling and adding 4 dice each time vs. 20.Applying this logic to the level of success method, you can see that even though it can theoretically reduce the expected damage by up to 15% vs. the RAW against high AC opponents, this number is being skewed by those very rare cases where you roll natural 20s on multiple iterative attacks in a single round.  If you look at the math, it will actually result in an identical amount of damage at least 96% of the time, and that's for the worst case where you need to roll a 16 or higher to hit.  In most other cases, level of success gives you the same expected damage as the RAW closer to 100% of the time.Add in the fact that high-level fighters are not going to encounter too many situations where they need such high rolls to hit with their primary attack, and you can see that the difference becomes largely irrelevant in practice.Incidentally, this reminds me of an attempt I made a while back to estimate how many rolls are made in a typical game session.  The goal was to figure out how frequently you could expect to see a highly unlikely result over a given period of time.  I don't remember all the assumptions I used, but here's roughly what I came up with:1 in 10 - at least once per encounter1 in 100 - at least once per adventure1 in 1,000 - at least once per campaign1 in 10,000 - at least once in a lifetimeIn other words, if you're rolling more than 5 d6s/d8s, 4 d10s/d12s, or 3 d20s to determine any outcome, you're likely never going to see an extreme result in a lifetime of gaming.  This helped put in perspective how many dice get rolled in a typical game that have no meaningful bearing on the outcome.</blockquote>

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