D&D 5E Race/Class combinations that were cool but you avoided due to mechanics?

[Kurotowa]

I don't think it's necessary to mock other peoples' math skills to make this point, but it is an important point, and it continued to get ignored in this thread even after you made it.

I'm not trying to mock anyone. Probability math is one of those things that's highly unintuitive for most humans and nearly everyone gets wrong unless they're an expert (which I'm not either) or they really sit down to work it out.

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

I'm not trying to mock anyone. Probability math is one of those things that's highly unintuitive for most humans and nearly everyone gets wrong unless they're an expert (which I'm not either) or they really sit down to work it out.

It's also something important to modern-day like. Unfortunately, most people (including myself, to some extent) choose not to educate themselves and decide to remain ignorant.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Probability math is one of those things that's highly unintuitive for most humans and nearly everyone gets wrong unless they're an expert (which I'm not either) or they really sit down to work it out.

Yes, agreed.

But if you don't think that "this is where people being bad at probability math really shows" is unnecessarily condescending (and therefore a fairly ineffective way to persuade people to be open to your argument) then I doubt I'll be able to persuade you otherwise.

 

[Oofta]

See, this is where people being bad at probability math really shows. They look at a +1 bonus to hit and say, "Oh it's just a 5% difference." Well the thing is, that 5% difference doesn't mean you hit or miss 5% more often. And that chance to hit is what really matters.

Say you need to roll an 11 or better, giving you a 50% chance to hit. If you add a +1 then your chance to hit has gone up by 10% of its old value. That's a noticeable amount. Now say you need a 16 or better to hit a heavily armored boss type foe. Pushing that to a 15 means your chance to hit has gone up by a full 20%. That's a massively noticeable level.

So don't undersell the value of a single +1 to hit, especially in 5e with bounded accuracy. That +1 matters a lot.

There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Yes, going from 50% to 55% is a 10% increase. But you will still only hit 5% more often because you roll a 9 5% of the time.

In any case, I personally don't think it matters all that much because the way the math is set up you still hit most of the time anyway, especially at higher levels. In addition, combat isn't the only aspect of the game for a lot of people. There's the RP/characterization, out of combat skills, is the PC fun to play. YMMV.

 

[Horwath]

There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Yes, going from 50% to 55% is a 10% increase. But you will still only hit 5% more often because you roll a 9 5% of the time.

In any case, I personally don't think it matters all that much because the way the math is set up you still hit most of the time anyway, especially at higher levels. In addition, combat isn't the only aspect of the game for a lot of people. There's the RP/characterization, out of combat skills, is the PC fun to play. YMMV.

you cannot use absolute percentage difference when relative is needed.

If you are at 1st level fighting someone with heavy armor and a shield. Lets give them AC18 so we do not go into fullplate range.

if you have 14 in your attack stat, you have +4 attack. you hit 35% of the time. with +5(main stat 16) you hit 40% of the time.

your character is simply 14,3% better at hitting high AC targets.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Has anyone thought of a cool concept of a PC they wanted, but when creating the character, saw that the mechanics of how racial features didn't really support it well from a mechanical standpoint?

Well, I don't see much point in playing a Wood Elf Wizard over a High Elf Wizard when it comes to things like Mask of the Wild since I won't be using my action to Hide much (hopefully!), but that doesn't stop my Wood Elf Wizard from being a "cool concept". If it did, I would say it was rather a weak concept anyway. shrug

With bounded accuracy, every modifier counts

Not so much IMO. Because of BA, modifiers actually count for less because the range is much narrower. When I say "they count for less" I mean they are less important. You don't need huge bonuses because you aren't trying to hit huge numbers.

so have you ever been swayed to avoid a particular concept that you would do if features were decoupled?

Not at all.

I know the argument: the +1 modifier bonus from the non-optimized to the optimized races. Sorry, but IMO, not a big deal.

Being more the optimist in life in general, I prefer to think all races are "good" at every class. The so-called "optimized" races are simply better. I don't know why it bothers people so much, frankly. Other people are stronger, faster, smarter, etc. than I am, so why shouldn't some races in a game be better than others in one facet or another?

That being said I think there are issues with the balance of racial traits between races, but that is a different topic.

 

[Guest 6801328]

There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Yes, going from 50% to 55% is a 10% increase. But you will still only hit 5% more often because you roll a 9 5% of the time.

In any case, I personally don't think it matters all that much because the way the math is set up you still hit most of the time anyway, especially at higher levels. In addition, combat isn't the only aspect of the game for a lot of people. There's the RP/characterization, out of combat skills, is the PC fun to play. YMMV.

I gotta admit, this sort of makes me want to retract my criticism of @Kurotowa.

 

[Cadence]

See, this is where people being bad at probability math really shows. They look at a +1 bonus to hit and say, "Oh it's just a 5% difference." Well the thing is, that 5% difference doesn't mean you hit or miss 5% more often. And that chance to hit is what really matters.

Say you need to roll an 11 or better, giving you a 50% chance to hit. If you add a +1 then your chance to hit has gone up by 10% of its old value. That's a noticeable amount. Now say you need a 16 or better to hit a heavily armored boss type foe. Pushing that to a 15 means your chance to hit has gone up by a full 20%. That's a massively noticeable level.

So don't undersell the value of a single +1 to hit, especially in 5e with bounded accuracy. That +1 matters a lot.

I don't think it's necessary to mock other peoples' math skills to make this point, but it is an important point, and it continued to get ignored in this thread even after you made it.

This whole "It's only 5%" ignores the difference between a "change in percent" and a "percent change". +1 makes the most difference against the hardest foes.

you cannot use absolute percentage difference when relative is needed.

It doesn't seem obvious to me that relative risk is necessarily more useful in this case than the difference in absolute risk. The classic example of where looking at just relative risk breaks down is in the extremes. If event A occurs with probability 0.0001 and event B occurs with probability 0.001. B's probability is 10x larger (it's gone up 900%). Even if you have A and B compete a 1,000 times, A will still win around 4% of the time and will tie B around 37% of the time in spite of B's win probability being a massive 10x that of A. Looking at that same relative risk with P(A)=0.05 and P(B)=0.50, where there's a much bigger difference in absolute risk, B wins the match essentially all the time. So, in something like treatment effectiveness, looking at just relative risk as a descriptive feels like it can give a very odd picture of the actual overall impact of the treatment.

As I noted in a previous post, if P(A)=50% vs. P(B)=55% were to compete 100 times, then B would have around a 74% chance of winning the title for the session, A around 22%, and they would tie around 4%. So there will certainly be a lot of times when even after a full hundred rounds that B hasn't shown better than A, let alone clearly so. (The expected number of extra hits for B over A over the 100 is of course 5, so even some of the times A is losing it is only by a few hits). The probability of getting the arbitrary alpha=0.05 level statistical significance in this case is less than 20%, even if doing the one sided test because you think you know which is better. It feels odd to say that something is clearly noticeable based on just the successes and failures if the best test for finding a difference would only reject 20% of the time. If that was enough power to be happy with a sample size, then that means one is happy with a 20% false discovery rate (0.05/(0.05+0.20), right?

Making it more extreme, 15% vs. 20% does make it slightly more apparent, but even then A still has about a 15% chance of doing better over 100 trials, and 5% chance of tying. The estimated power at alpha=0.05 is still only around 22%.

Going to 5% vs. 10% A is down to winning or tying a total of only 10%, but the estimated power is still just around 30%. So it certainly does matter in the ends. If everyone was 99% at something and I was only 94%, it feels like it would stand out and the party would groan when it was my turn and I missed. What percent of combat happens off in the tails like that?

<Slap-dash R code at bottom in case my numbers are off. Also, please insert disclaimer about the arbitrariness of alpha=0.05 and how hypothesis tests aren't usually what you want... and also a that power seems like a relevant idea here anyway.>

If Legalos had a 5% bonus over Gimli and they kept track over several game sessions, it feels like Gimli would be able to say he wasn't doing nearly as well after a few of them against hard to hit monsters. But against things in the middle it feels like it would take a while longer before his inner statistician would let him concede. That it's hard to be confident in the difference after just 100, but easier when you get several times more, seems to fit in with what you might get in baseball - how does a .250 vs. .300 batting average feel after only 100 plate appearances at the beginning of the season for making long term decisions vs. after 500+ plate appearances? (Well, I mean except for batting average being a horrible statistic).

All that being said, it's hard for me to argue with the fact that the human brain isn't always big on caring what the probabilities say if it fits the story that it's working on:

Statistically, 5% is barely noticeable. But there is a psychological factor that you can't ignore. As soon as you miss by one (5%) you will blame it on that missing 5%. That is why as a DM I try to co.pensate for that missimg 5% with a relevant magic item.

#nsims=number of simulation runs, I didn't feel like digging up the convolution of
# different binomials
#sz is the number of trials a and b have, where they succeed with probabilities pa
# and pb
#The first three numbers that are output are the estimated probability b wins, estimated
# probability a wins, and the estimated probability they tie.
#The next are the estimated power at a=0.05 for rejecting the null hypothesis that
# they're equal using either the exact McNemar's test (since we know the order they
# were in) or the usual two-sample z-test. As the pairing explains no variance
# I was a bit surprised the McNemar test was as different in a few cases.
nsims=100000
sz=100
pa<-0.5
pb<-0.55
aplus<-rep(0,nsims)
bplus<-rep(0,nsims)
abeq<-rep(0,nsims)
pmcn<-rep(0,nsims)
pind<-rep(0,nsims)
for (i in 1:nsims){
x<-rbinom(sz,1,pa)
y<-rbinom(sz,1,pb)
aplus<-sum(x>y)
bplus<-sum(y>x)
abeq<-sum(y==x)
pmcn<-binom.test(aplus,aplus+bplus,p=0.5,alternative="less")$p.value
pind<-prop.test(c(aplus,bplus),c(sz,sz),alternative="less")$p.value
}
sum(bplus>aplus)/nsims
sum(aplus>bplus)/nsims
sum(aplus==bplus)/nsims
sum(pmcn<0.05)/nsims
sum(pind<0.05)/nsims

 

[Oofta]

you cannot use absolute percentage difference when relative is needed.

If you are at 1st level fighting someone with heavy armor and a shield. Lets give them AC18 so we do not go into fullplate range.

if you have 14 in your attack stat, you have +4 attack. you hit 35% of the time. with +5(main stat 16) you hit 40% of the time.

your character is simply 14,3% better at hitting high AC targets.

Which is why I said there are lies, damn lies and statistics. I mean, on average if you fighter is doing 10 points of damage on a hit going from a 14 strength to 16 is going to increase their average damage (vs that 50% hit target) from 2.75 to 3.575. Less than a point per attack.

Of course there are a lot of other ways to slice it to prove a different point, because statistics can be presented in ways to prove different things depending on what you want to "prove".

 

[billd91]

I gotta admit, this sort of makes me want to retract my criticism of @Kurotowa.

You would be wrong to do so.