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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DDNFan" data-source="post: 6313503" data-attributes="member: 6776483">Let's say two weapons have the exact same average and minimum and maximum damage, except one is more reliable at reaching the average.Which do you prefer? Do you prefer to take a bus to work that's unreliable but potentially much faster or slower? And take a gamble? This is just a job we're talking about, deadly combat is much more serious. If you have weapon A that's super reliable and weapon B that's much less reliable, but over many many hits they converge to the same value, which is better? Faster convergence is a desirable property for the same reason that having the trains show up on time and follow a schedule is better than trains that can go potentially faster but screw up your schedule. Frustrating, innit? I don't care if train A has a 20% faster top speed than train B, if the average speed of both is the same and train B always shows up when the ticket says it will, and gets me to my destination at the pre-ordained time. This allows you to plan on a schedule, and make that meeting or connection after you get ott. This the same thing for weapon damage, only instead of potentially missing a connection, you could be not killing a crucial foe you're engaged with before it's too late. Swinginess is dangerous. Less swingy is better. That's why it's desired, and it's not just a char op thing, it's an in-game thing. I don't see why dwarves wouldn't notice their chosen weapon's variability is greater through analysis, for the same reason that they would be aware that a greataxe kills enemies faster than a battle axe or a short sword. That's not char op, that's part of the fiction and deals directly with the believability of these weapons.What some believe is a benefit to the greataxe is actually a penalty. Killing  opponent A 1 round sooner but opponent B 1 round later is a wash. Killing opponents A, B, C, D....Z all at a fixed rate would be very advantageous, because it allows you to plan your moves, it allows you and other allies using similar reliable weapons to much more readily ensure that opponent A dies in round X than X+1.Crits only make it even worse. A crit used to max out the first 12 HP and then add another 1d12 or 2d6. Now it doubles the impact of the greataxe variability, resulting in a lot more overkill than the greatsword would have. Weapons that are twice as reliable as twice as good, given all other factors are equal. Since the other factors are not equal, then that just compounds the superiority of 2d6 vs 1d12. In earlier packets dwarves used to get a boost to their hit dice when taking a short rest, so that a barbarian would go from 1d12 to 2d6. How many times have you rolled a 1 on your hit dice? It happens a lot. Here, getting a more reliable average is a big benefit, because it means you will be less likely to waste bonus HP if you are somewhat close to your max, but also less likely to roll a 1 and have to spend 2 HD to achieve the same effect.In the extreme, if you took out all variability from damage for character A and made them deal the average each time, and twice the average on a crit each time, there are less situations where that would be a disadvantage than an advantage, because there is not always a benefit to dealing more damage (if your total surpasses the foe's current HP), but there is always a benefit to never dealing less than the average.Greatswords and mauls aren't quite like that, but their distribution function does make them inherently better, and not because of the loss of rolling max damage often. Rolling max damage or close to it, might be exciting at the table, but it's not sound math  game design</blockquote>

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