D&D 5E Looking for inspiration for D&D data projects

[Guest 6801328]

See, that's a bloody useful bit of info. So it scales by about 2:1 on the d20 as you approach the high/low ends. I can work with that. Thanks.

Not quite sure what you mean by that.

 

[Fenris-77]

Not quite sure what you mean by that.

That roughly speaking for every 2 pips the target # moves away from 10.5 on the d20 scale the A/D number changes by about 1. That's what I understood from you post.

 

[Guest 6801328]

That roughly speaking for every 2 pips the target # moves away from 10.5 on the d20 scale the A/D number changes by about 1. That's what I understood from you post.

Ah, no, not exactly. It's not linear. The fall-off starts slow and accelerates.

Here's the breakdown:
DC: 2 +/- 0.9
DC: 3 +/- 1.8
DC: 4 +/- 2.6
DC: 5 +/- 3.2
DC: 6 +/- 3.8
DC: 7 +/- 4.2
DC: 8 +/- 4.5
DC: 9 +/- 4.8
DC: 10 +/- 5.0
DC: 11 +/- 5.0
DC: 12 +/- 5.0
DC: 13 +/- 4.8
DC: 14 +/- 4.5
DC: 15 +/- 4.2
DC: 16 +/- 3.8
DC: 17 +/- 3.2
DC: 18 +/- 2.6
DC: 19 +/- 1.8
DC: 20 +/- 1.0

EDIT: But you know what? If you just go with the 2:1 you're not so far off. Even though it may torture @Ovinomancer. Or even because it will torture him.

 

[Fenris-77]

Interesting. I can see why people might 'average' that off at +/- 4. That is a useful chart though. Might it be worth starting a thread or something to collect useful stats related things about the game in? Like this one, but without all the intervening requests, kvetching, and my gormless generalizations...

 

[Esker]

Just to make things even more complicated, sometimes what you care about isn't how the success chance differs, but rather something like how many rolls it takes to get a failure (or a success).

Take AC, for example. You might think based on the preceding discussion that imposing disadvantage to hit you would be worth the most if the enemy would normally need a nat 11 or higher to hit you, because disadvantage makes that 25/75, which is like a +5 to your AC -- huge! But arguably the more important number is that you've gone from being able to take two attacks per hit to taking four attacks per hit; your longevity has doubled. If you're already hard to hit (say they need a 17, for a 20% chance), then disadvantage makes that 4% --- only like a +3 to your AC now, but you've gone from being able to take five attacks per hit to being able to take twenty-five, so your longevity has quintupled!

 

[FrogReaver]

Just to make things even more complicated, sometimes what you care about isn't how the success chance differs, but rather something like how many rolls it takes to get a failure (or a success).

Take AC, for example. You might think based on the preceding discussion that imposing disadvantage to hit you would be worth the most if the enemy would normally need a nat 11 or higher to hit you, because disadvantage makes that 25/75, which is like a +5 to your AC -- huge! But arguably the more important number is that you've gone from being able to take two attacks per hit to taking four attacks per hit; your longevity has doubled. If you're already hard to hit (say they need a 17, for a 20% chance), then disadvantage makes that 4% --- only like a +3 to your AC now, but you've gone from being able to take five attacks per hit to being able to take twenty-five, so your longevity has quintupled!

Yes. But there's some important caveats.

1. Surviving in some sense is binary. You either survive encounter or you don't. You either survive the adventuring day or you don't. That is, there is no effective difference in being able to take 1,000,000 Damage or 1,000 damage because in either case you are surviving whatever is thrown at you. So if a character is already at a point where they survive most everything then adding a lot more survivability doesn't really matter. I mean, it sounds great to say you quintupled your survivability but such a measure isn't all that important when you get to pushing it to an extreme.

2. Also, there is the tendency that the more impenetrable your individual defenses the more likely enemies ignore you and focus on your allies who likely have penetrable defenses. Basically too much focus on individual defense can harm the party.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think the way this thread has progressed rather makes my point -- @Fenris-77, an intelligent poster, was badly mislead by the quick comparison and it took multiple additional posts to explain how ad/disad actually works. This was my point: the simplistic (and technically incorrect) comparison of advantage to a +5 at a need roll of 11 hides important information and introduces confusion about how advantage actually works. Sure, @Elfcrusher was able to create a larger scale that did a better job, but, here there, it hides the impact of of the system on crits and/or fumbles (for attack rolls) or for any interaction with 'fail by' or 'succeed by' that may be in play (granted, limited examples in core 5e rules, but they exist, and win/lose by thresholds are a common houserule).

My problem is that the +/-5 comparision is made by people who fully understand the complexity of the system as an easy way to explain it to people who don't get it, but that it actually does no favors and is more likely to introduce confusion and error. Sure, if you already get it, it won't lead you astray, but there's been countless examples on these very boards in similar thread where people have taken the shortcut and made the same error @Fenris-77 did.

 

[Fenris-77]

To be fair to folks in this thread, the +5/-5 is something I brought to the thread. It's a pretty common generalization and it seemed right enough that I didn't really question the received wisdom there. I wasn't told that in this thread. I actually have a better handle on the system's impact on crit fishing than I do the basic math. Weird, I know, but 30 years of GW play have left me with a pretty strong sense of the math and value behind rerolling dice.

I do agree that communicating fussy maths to the plebs can be tricky. I teach middle school, and even that math has its pitfalls and perils when it comes to explanation to the uninitiated.