I agree that Damage Now > Damage later,
Then please act like it.
but having no arena for the rest of the day's attacks closes you and followers of this thread from these "many players" Just as players that have 8 encounters per day with 3 short rests may be in a minority due to the large variation from table to table, this equally extends to 1 encounter days.
No such arena will provide an accurate enough picture to be useful as all arenas leave out too many players typical situations. And then we come right back to the damage now vs damage later issue.
As an extreme example: consider a character doing 100 dmg in round 1 and 0 dmg each subsequent round till round 4. Now consider a character doing 100 damage on round 4 but 0 damage on each round preceding that. Both characters have done 100 damage over 4 rounds. Yet 1 is clearly superior. But what if the 100 damage on round 4 was replaced by 120 damage. Which is the better option? What if it was replaced by 200? Which is the better option.
In short looking at total damage dealt over X rounds is a naïve way of looking at things because it doesn't just matter the total, but also the distribution over those rounds - and the simple fact is - at this juncture we have no direct way of comparing damage on this round to damage on a subsequent round.
The thing you have going for you is that everybody has a first round of the day with varying degrees of risk on the character's health. This may well be the largest minority you can safely determine standards for. On the other hand there have been plenty of threads polling people for the number of rounds they have. Have you considered extending the time limits to be the average from that poll?
And that proposal just isn't going to be accurate. I think the biggest problem is that you've missed most of the optimization discussion over the years. So maybe a recap.
We started out looking heavily at at-will damage.
Then we started extended that out to near at-will damage.
Then we modified that a bit and started trying to define a standard adventuring day and make evaluations based on that.
The problem we find is that adventuring days, and ratios of short rests to long rests to combat encounters to length of combat encounters all greatly varies from DM to DM and campaign to campaign.
So if you really want something similar to what you are suggesting you are probably 1-2 years late. Those analysises while moving us forward still failed to give a full picture and that's because of the varied ways in which 5e is played. So instead of trying to make something so complex to account for everything - which usually ends up being worthless as it doesn't actually correspond to anyones actual game - instead I'm looking at something a bit simpler that can apply to all games.
Nova damage in 5e is one of those things that really hasn't been explored much till now.
Candidates would need to provide what they do for the remaining rounds. You would then have 2 lists: round 1 kings, and 5 round average kings. I'd wager to say that you'll get quite different orderings. This increases tedium for you and authors of builds, but provides readers with information that is more applicable to them.
Not just tedium. It goes back to the damage now vs damage later issue. We have no mechanism to compare damages between different rounds. Which is why in this thread I'm looking at the Nova aspects. Because they can all be done on the first round by any character. Because the at-will, semi at-will, daily damage stuff has already been explored and still didn't take us where we needed to be.
Fighters, and Variant Humans, don't contribute much to usefulness outside of their niche (fighters get 1 skill outside the optimal Perception, Human's extra feat is almost always used for their 1 trick w/o concern for usefulness past their target level). This puts tons of pressure on their background to carry the load of use outside combat. Thankfully fighter's Archetype means they'll be useful for each encounter but not as much if they are using a weak weapon.
It's hard to fault a build for something that extends to all builds of a given class.
Guided Strike is literally 2x per day. War Preist makes him MAD (Str, Con, Wis) so the extra attacks mean 2-3 extra single attacks per day. These become worthless at higher levels.
And yet, after you've used that ability you are still a cleric which is one of the more versatile classes in the game.
Lucky Smiting Paladin blows spells and dice in round 1. Due to using Short Swords his damage drops off after expending his slots on smites.
And after that he's still a paladin with spell slots he can use, with lay on hands, with a channel divinity, etc. Not really a 1 trick pony, right?
Catapult Wizard has epitomized glass cannon. Thankfully wizard spellbook makes him less of a 1 trick pony, but he can pull this off only once then has to wait till he's in a city to buy some more acid.
And there you have it. Wizard's aren't 1 trick ponies.
Magic Initiate (Magic Missile), that is what I call overfitting for level 2.
I could go on.
So far you've not listed any build here that is actually anywhere near being a 1 trick pony. The closest was the fighter - but sting is taken away because all fighters are essentially the same in that respect.
It comes with the terrain of Damage Kings that you'll get glass cannons as the monsters they fight are a block of tofu. The fact that it doesn't have HP means you'll get candidates that frequently do overkill damage. KPR does a little bit to help people see that "he'd dead jim" when the KPR > 1. But as you pointed out, the variance in 5e means that the party could face a higher CR rating, but just fewer total monsters. Thus there is a place for these glass cannons.
Well that and damage gets split up a lot more than it did in 4e - meaning even a KPR of 2 doesn't mean you are wasting a bunch since it typically means you will kill 2 enemies instead of 1 in 5e, which didn't happen so much in 4e.
From the looks of it, you've got as many candidates as I had when I was about 10% through the span of the DPR King Candidates lifetime. I didn't have that many things that DMs would call cheese at that milestone.
I expect as higher level builds are explored we will see more as there's just more workable combinations.
The Sorlock being similar to the frost cheese in 4e as both were in the PHB from the start, which optimizes for the opposite of the 1 encounter day. Biasing towards this end and accounting for more than 1 target you'd see more of these builds instead.
In case this grows as large as mine did, I bet you'll see more arguments about the fine points with no good consensus. On the other hand tweets from the devs seem to quiet people down, which I didn't have when working with the DPR Kings.
Good points
Then please be clear about this in your first post. It would be nice if you had a FAQ where you state why you're not accounting for area damage, multiple rounds, multiple short rests, encounter 2, HP, secondary enemy proximity to the first and so forth. Area damage is just one thing that abides by the rules you posted yet I don't see any build that shoots for area damage arguing that there is bound to be 3 enemies somewhere on the map that a burning hands would capture. It doesn't matter if I have to wade through 5 opportunity attacks to get there, this is about the damage, and the rules don't distinguish between the first and secondary targets, therefore I add their damage up.
Typically stating why just leads people to argue about the why.
I agree that accounting for Lucky, and "if you miss then" is beyond the scope of a beginner's guide. At least a note that lets people know that DPR accounts for to-hit chance by multiplying the chance to hit by the average damage on a hit. You're probably right that most people would intuitivly understand this, but I've seen enough people fall into the trap of average damage = DPR = expected damage. I've seen aDPR but don't know if it is universally understood to take hit chance into account. Your rules imply but could do with a few more words to be explicit.
I have faith that if someone calculates something wrong someone here will check it at some point and it will get corrected and them educated.
