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Message: <blockquote data-quote="orsal" data-source="post: 2497042" data-attributes="member: 16016"> When I respond to a long post, I quote only the specific points to which I am responding. It makes it easier to identify the issues under contention. When I want more context than is included in a quote, I scroll up. I can read the entire thread if I want the context; it is unnecessary to see every little bit repeated in the responses.  That line was responding to your mention of a bell curve. Are you still maintaining that attack rolls have a bell curve? Or did I misinterpret   You referred to 20 rolls of your die having a bell curve distribution. I contradicted you. You then wrote: If that line of yours was not intended as a reply to my contradiction of your assertion about the distribution, I don't understand why you quoted that line (and only that line!)  I thought the whole basis for this subthread is a disagreement about which particular features of the distribution of random damage variable to focus on. I focus on expected value (aka mean average). Since I expect to take many attacks to finish off a challenging monster, I can justify this choice the following way: By the Central Limit Theorem, when many independent identically distributed random variables are combined, their average will almost certainly be close to the expected value of each one. In this case, the damage from each individual attack is a random variable, and I am concerned with their sum -- after all, the monster dies when that sum reaches a particular total. Since sum is (average)*(number of terms added), I maximize the sum by maximizing the average. This is why I think it is important to recognize that multiple attacks are typically involved.  You made a statement which, if I understood correctly, demonstrated an appalling misunderstanding of probability. I wished to correct this mistake. However, I recongized that I might have misunderstood you, so I asked you to clarify. What random variable is it that you keep asserting has a bell-shaped distribution?  That depends on how those random events are combined. If lots of independent random variables are added together, or averaged, then you will indeed get a bell curve. But your first reference to a bell curve was in the context of attack rolls or critical confirmation rolls, and I can't see why you'd want to add or average them. If you had made the same remark in the context of damage (which is a random variable), I would have let it go by uncontested.</blockquote>

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