Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 3898931" data-attributes="member: 1645">For the people perplexed by where the complex math comes into play, I thought I'd reiterate the point that choosing how much to power attack is a well-defined math problem, and that choosing without doing the math is often quite counterproductive -- or has no real effect except to complicate things.Power attack is most useful when (a) the attacker has a high probability of hitting, and (b) the attacker does not normally do much damage.As this <a href="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pMIJd8RU9-Mq4rrIvGgY4Jg" target="_blank">damage per attack spreadsheet</a> points out -- assuming a single attack at -1 to hit for +1 to damage -- power attacking does not makes much difference once an attacker is doing serious damage.For instance, an attacker doing 1d8+4 damage and hitting his target on a natural 10 or higher averages 4.68 points of damage per attack (not hit), and power attacking by one increases that to 4.75, for 2 percent more damage.  Power attacking by one more then decreases that to 4.72.An analytical player may be tempted to spend an inordinate amount of time calculating such values at the table, and a non-analytical player may be tempted to make demonstrably terrible -- but seemingly appropriate and fun -- decisions.</blockquote>