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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5694585" data-attributes="member: 54877">Very much this.  For the majority of the players at our table, can they compare their chance to hit with the ballpark of the monsters' defense, get a rough percentage, and make informed choices on which attack to use?  Why yes, they can.  Can they do that quickly, while concentrating on the parts of the game they find enjoyable.  No, most of the time, they cannot.   Yet, translate those odds into words, and they can rapidly make informed decisions:  "You've got a solid but not great chance of pulling X off, and it will hurt the monster medium hard, and also give you Y.  You've got a bit lesser chance to hit with Z, to hit the monster hard, but it is all or nothing."  I see a player get paralyzed, I ask them what they are considering.  Then I translate it into those kind of terms, as fairly as I can.  They nearly always make the decision within five seconds. And D&D, being ususally linear in the odds calculations, is a fairly benign form of this.  You should see the same people working with Fantasy Hero, when the value of +1 to +3 shifts radically based on the location of the 3d6 roll.  Oy! I've studied this a lot.  And one thing I've noticed is that people who are wired this way don't get much better at the ordinal calculations, even with practice.  Given practice with a given game, what they do is internalize the math into rules of thumb. "Hey, I know that this at will attack works pretty well in these situations, because if I work the math out, or someone does it for me, that's what I'll find."  Then they run off of instinct and experience.  So you get people who, to the casual observer, seem to be doing the ordinal calculations very rapidly.  They make the same exact decisions that you would make, 95%+ of the time.  The outliers can be rationalized away as choices made for other reasons.  However, switch them to a different system, and they have to build up again from scratch their rules of thumb. Given the relative ease of learning odds on a linear scale with a d20, I don't think D&D versions should do things radically different to compensate for this kind of thinking.  But given that there are a lot of people who do so think, it would be rather, well, blind, for the designers of the game to blow off the issue entirely.  There are a lot more people who don't readily do ordinal calculations, than there are people who are, say, color-blind, or highly offended by certain borderline content, or any number of such issues that get at least modest attention.</blockquote>

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