Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 4982019" data-attributes="member: 51942">The basis of the analysis is the observation that life expectancy is a useful metric for comparing situations (for instance, it also permits comparing <a href="http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/19748522/?pg=last" target="_blank">outgoing DPR with defenses quantitively</a>).All worthwhile combat effects I can think of impact this; and generally the results are the same as for straight damage: the difference between having a 90% or 95% chance of being effected is trivial, but the difference between having a 5% or 10% chance is not.  The absolute difference for one round is the same - but of course, you don't play combat for one round, you play it for several rounds, and in particular, if you're almost always hit, you'll die faster and thus the same absolute difference adds up fewer times.D&D combat, in extremely abstracted form, resembles a negative binomial distribution.  Whether you're pushing someone over a cliff, dealing damage, reducing his defenses to later have more impact, or dazing him to give yourself more time to kill him; effectively you're in a race against the clock: can you kill them before they kill you?Effects matter, but they don't change the fundamental principles underlying the defenses: small changes to low defenses have less impact than small changes to high defenses.</blockquote>