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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Stalker0" data-source="post: 6334263" data-attributes="member: 5889">I personally don't care for math when I'm in the game, and do not want players sitting with calculators (oh 3.0 Power Attack optimizers!)But to me, effective math should mirror the narrative. If the story encourages the player to act in a way that the math shows to be very unoptimal, the system is not working correctly.The best example I have is the original 4e Skill Challenge System. The original system....was broken. By broken, I mean that a team of reasonably skilled party members encountering a reasonably leveled skill challenge for their level....would fail the vast majority of the time. The math only work if the DM took some serious steps to curb the challenge...but nowhere in the narrative was that intuitive. In other words MATH FAIL!!Another example was the 3.0 monk's flurry of blows. The narrative was that the monk was a martial arts fighter who used blinding attack speed to destroy their enemies. What the math showed was the "flurry of misses" that soon became their mantra. For all of their attacks, monks just didn't perform well against comparable opponent's.Both of these systems were eventually fixed, but both of them had big warning flags with some math analysis that could have been caught. This is where I think such analysis are most useful.</blockquote>