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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrogReaver" data-source="post: 8617942" data-attributes="member: 6795602">Surely you don't believe a single play test of a single encounter/adventuring day is evidence of anything?  As you said, there are so many variables.  There's also so much randomness involved.  So let's assume we play test this encounter/adventuring day a sufficient number of times such that reasonable conclusions can be drawn (maybe that's 100 times?, probably not less due to the complexity and randomness involved in the problem).  But anyways, we've ran through enough playtests to really draw conclusions.  The problem is those conclusions aren't predictive in any way except in relation to the specific characters/encounters and the tactics used in them.  So the most we have learned is how a single encounter or single set of enocunters plays out for a particular party following particular tactics on each side.  Change the scenario, the PC's, the tactics, etc and you have to playtest that scenario another 100 times before you can draw conclusions.I'm all for actual empirical data, but a single playtest or 3 isn't that.  Even tracking 'total damage' over time at best describes how things have went in a specific campaign with specific PC's using specific tactics against specific encounters with particular die rolls, but how things went isn't actually all that predictive for how things will go.   We can eliminate the randomness of the dice by tracking long enough.  So there's that at least.  However, things like differences in enemy numbers, formation, actions, AC, resistances, etc all make a huge difference in terms of 'total damage' (which as previously mentioned isn't a great metric to begin with), but i'll reference it as it's one you seem particularly fond of.  Bottom line is that gathering data from a single campaign at best decriptively tells us how that campaign went and not predictively how that campaign, let alone another campaign will typically go.</blockquote>

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