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<blockquote data-quote="Persiflage" data-source="post: 5293387" data-attributes="member: 73597">Rolling one die and multiplying by the number of dice is a very, very different proposition from rolling multiple dice, no two ways about it.Without boring you to death, I'll just illustrate that the chances of getting maximum damage on a 10d6 fireball by rolling &quot;perfectly fair&quot; dice is one-in-sixty-million-four-hundred-and-sixty-six-thousand-one-hundred-and-seventy-six, whereas with your DM's method it's... one-in-six.I'd hate the multiplying-up method: it makes damage from lots of things too &quot;swingy&quot;.&nbsp; It's not just spellcasters: characters like rogues and sniping builds would also suffer greatly from swingy damage.&nbsp; The whole idea is that as the number of dice gets greater, the deviation from the average gets smaller and less likely.&nbsp; Doing it the way you described not only breaks the random number generator, but makes other meta-mechanical abilities (such as re-rolls for minimum damage, or additional rolls for maximum damage) either a lot more or a lot less powerful depending on circumstances.Using average damage for large numbers of dice is fine - I do it all the time when running characters that are generating dice explosions - but this multiplying-up thing has far-reaching implications throughout the game that I for one wouldn't be comfortable with.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Persiflage, post: 5293387, member: 73597"] Rolling one die and multiplying by the number of dice is a very, very different proposition from rolling multiple dice, no two ways about it. Without boring you to death, I'll just illustrate that the chances of getting maximum damage on a 10d6 fireball by rolling "perfectly fair" dice is one-in-sixty-million-four-hundred-and-sixty-six-thousand-one-hundred-and-seventy-six, whereas with your DM's method it's... one-in-six. I'd hate the multiplying-up method: it makes damage from lots of things too "swingy". It's not just spellcasters: characters like rogues and sniping builds would also suffer greatly from swingy damage. The whole idea is that as the number of dice gets greater, the deviation from the average gets smaller and less likely. Doing it the way you described not only breaks the random number generator, but makes other meta-mechanical abilities (such as re-rolls for minimum damage, or additional rolls for maximum damage) either a lot more or a lot less powerful depending on circumstances. Using [I]average[/I] damage for large numbers of dice is fine - I do it all the time when running characters that are generating dice explosions - but this multiplying-up thing has far-reaching implications throughout the game that I for one wouldn't be comfortable with. [/QUOTE]

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