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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 8400184" data-attributes="member: 75787">I’m pretty confident that I know how math works, actually. Let me help you out here. The two factors that I am considering affecting the outcome of an encounter with a trap are (a) how effective the party is at dealing with traps, and (b) how lucky they are at rolling. The other obvious factor is the effectiveness of the trap at dealing with the party, but we have established that we want to deal with a standard trap as defined by the book.Now, trying to analyze over two combinations of effectiveness x luck is tricky. It’s actually the sort of thing I do every day because I’m a professional research statistician, but it’s tedious and would take forever to write out, so I elected a simpler plan — use a slightly less competent than average party for (a) and average out (b). My comment on “worst case” was within a subsection of my argument; if that confused you, let me state it more clearly — where not otherwise stated, I am modeling an average or slightly less good than average party dealing with a standard trap , estimating average effect.I’m pretty sure that it’s not contentious to assume that heroes work together. Especially when dealing with a situation that is defined to be scaled for 4 heroes working together. As several others have pointed out, a single hero working on a trap scaled for a singled hero is a completely different aanalysis.Although if it is standard for players in your games not to work together, then maybe that might explain why you find a lot of PF2 hard? Or maybe all your groups are full of fighters warily raising their shield and falling into pit traps? I can see the latter especially if you don’t have anyone with any form of perception In the party.But again, I’m dealing with a normal or slightly sub-par party, assuming that players cooperate with each other. The above appears just to be a general ”I hate Paizo” rant. It’s also inaccurate, as 40% failure for a single action is quite common in the game; in fact in most game systems 50% failure is probably the norm for a single action. It’s no different from other actions, like convincing the guard to let you go through a gate, or sneaking past a sentry, or whatever,.I am curious though: what success rate do you expect to get for a level 9 character who’s is trained but has no other relevant feats when attempting a skill check against level 11 opposition?I’m not making any form of moral argument here! I’m just responding to the “traps are deadly” comment. So I think it’s completely relevant to say “half the time they are trivial”, because, you know ’trivial’ != ‘deadly’If you are really interested in understanding this situation, I have a suggestion — why don’t you do the analysis for a trained, high dex level 9 character getting a +1 or +2 bonus disabling a level 11 trap that they have discovered and not triggered. It’s a pretty easy analysis — all you have to do is, for the N successes needed, work out the chances they will roll a crit fail before the N successes. For a real-world analysis, assume they have a hero point that they’d really like not to spend, but will if necessary.Ummm .. what? Honestly, I find it hard to believe that you don’t know how averages work. I don’t really want to have to define them here, but since we are dealing with many rolls, and those rolls are unimodal and symmetric, the law of large numbers applies very well, and the average will also so be very close to the mode and the median, so under pretty much any English way of stating it, yes, if the average is 4 rounds, it is definitely ”the most likely“ outcome under the three most usual ways of defining most likely: the long run frequency, the most likely point outcome, and the point at which half the results are lower and half are above.Worst case is trivial; everyone rolls 1s all the time for everything and they all die in about 15 rounds after expending all healing. That’s one reason. The other is that the premise of this argument is not that “in the worst possible case, traps are deadly”. It is that traps are very often deadly. So the main reason is thag I want to address the situation under discussio, not make up a different one. I am happy to say that the worst case for pretty much any encounter in any system is ”everyone dies”.Less facetiously, I see that in your next argument you consider using not the worst case, but the 90% worst case — this is a much better suggestion, but again, it’s much more tricky to math out, so when I address it below, I’ll use common sense rather than statistics.Honestly, it depends on your group. I’m personally not a fan of “every 10th serious encounter kills someone” levels of difficulty, but some groups like that level of difficultly. But let’s assume you want a game where no-one ever dies to traps. Our trap does 4d8+10 damage. The 90% most extreme result is something like a crit with average rolls, so about 56 points damage. That just won’t kill anyone. Like, ever.It’s honestly really hard for me to envisage a scenario where a damage-dealing trap is going to kill anyone — certainly not as often as a combat encounter will. The damage numbers are so low for complex traps that unless your party has made it to 9th level with no in-combat healing and has had all their magical healing stolen (although that would make an interesting hazard … my players might just kill me though) I just can’t see it.Help me out here, [USER=12731]@CapnZapp[/USER] — point me to the level 11 damage-dealing trap (or build one) that you think will kill a PC. I’ve never seen one, never had it happen, and this thread isn’t exactly full of people reminiscing over when the trap TPKed their group.You have the really easy task here — find a single counter example. so I think, that to progress this examination, we need you to stop just making general “I don’t like Paizo” and “you don’t know how math works” statements and come up with a single, concrete example and show how it can kill a standard party.Actually, don’t. we are discussing non-haunt traps here and so beating them to a pulp is a completely reasonable thing to do. If you are going to ignore the fact that half the time a trap is trivial, and ignore the fact that you can defeat them with physical damage, then please do me the favor of ignoring my whole post and moving on.</blockquote>

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