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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elric" data-source="post: 4983560" data-attributes="member: 1139">This is a low for the monster's attack bonus.  Even a typical Brute would have +4 to hit vs. AC at level 1 (going by the 'high damage expression' table in the DMG, it would do about 9.5 damage on a hit).  If the monster is intended to represent a soldier on offense as well as defense, it should have more like a +7 vs. AC attack (DMG guidelines would say +8, but I find that soldiers are sometime below and almost never above this amount) for a bit less damage (1d8+3, maybe).  Note that soldiers are generally considered one of the hardest monster types and brutes one of the easiest; you could even try to test this.  Clearly there's no perfect metric here.  How many fights a build survives on average seems to weight durability too much.  For example, ignoring daily powers for a second, if a build had infinite healing surges and had a probability of X to lose each fight (which doesn’t change across fights because you never lose daily resources), the average number of fights it survives is (1-X)/X by a simple formula.  A build with infinite surges and a 90% chance to win each fight (X=0.1) averages surviving 9 fights.  Suppose that your day is always five fights long.  In your level +0 example, the Dwarf Fighter survives these five fights 1-0.349 ~= 65% of the time. By comparison, the infinite surge build survives five fights with probability (the chance it wins one fight)^5 = 0.9^5 ~= 59%.  So you can see that with more realistic assumptions about the number of fights in a day the dwarf fighter is slightly favored, even though the average number of fights survived metric he looks far inferior (the dwarf averages 6.8 fights survived).  This suggests that the metric ought to be more like “if the character faces a random number of fights in a day drawn from a particular distribution (e.g., even chances of 3-6 fights), what’s the chance he’ll survive the day?”This is good and interesting work so far.  Still, before you go much further with this project, seriously consider whether a Monte Carlo simulation will be able to get at actual D&D combat as experienced by a typical group.</blockquote>

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