Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 2841681" data-attributes="member: 3424">I think Someone pegged what some players are looking for when they play D&amp;D: the illusion of the possibility of failure. They play D&amp;D to &quot;win&quot;, but they want to be challenged by the encounters, too. The DM's job is to calibrate the challenges so that they do not become too tough (TPK) or too easy (walkover).Frankly, when I DM, I expect the PCs to win. That doesn't mean that they always do. Poor choices and sheer bad luck have turned supposably easy encounters into near failures.Do you think that a 95% chance for a party of 4 PCs to defeat a challenge of equal CR is too high? Well, go ahead and do the math. The D&amp;D rules are set up so that the party needs to overcome about 14 such challenges before they gain a level. 0.95^14 is a little less than 0.5. That's right, even with a 95% chance of defeating a challenge of equal CR, chances are, the party is more likely than not to lose at least once before making a level.If losing means death, then less than half of 1st-level PCs will never make it to 2nd level. Less than half of those will make it to 3rd level. Less than half of those will make it to 4th. Were you planning for your campaign to reach 16th level or higher? At a 95% chance to defeat a challenge of equal CR, you'd have about a 1 in 500 chance of doing it.So maybe I should turn the question around. Is a 95% chance of defeating a challenge of equal CR too high? Or not high enough? If your players realized that in order to have a 53% chance of reaching 16th level, their chance of defeating a challenge of equal CR would have to be about 99.7%, would it spoil their fun?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="FireLance, post: 2841681, member: 3424"] I think Someone pegged what some players are looking for when they play D&D: the illusion of the possibility of failure. They play D&D to "win", but they want to be challenged by the encounters, too. The DM's job is to calibrate the challenges so that they do not become too tough (TPK) or too easy (walkover). Frankly, when I DM, I expect the PCs to win. That doesn't mean that they always do. Poor choices and sheer bad luck have turned supposably easy encounters into near failures. Do you think that a 95% chance for a party of 4 PCs to defeat a challenge of equal CR is too high? Well, go ahead and do the math. The D&D rules are set up so that the party needs to overcome about 14 such challenges before they gain a level. 0.95^14 is a little less than 0.5. That's right, even with a 95% chance of defeating a challenge of equal CR, chances are, the party is more likely than not to lose at least once before making a level. If losing means death, then less than half of 1st-level PCs will never make it to 2nd level. Less than half of those will make it to 3rd level. Less than half of those will make it to 4th. Were you planning for your campaign to reach 16th level or higher? At a 95% chance to defeat a challenge of equal CR, you'd have about a 1 in 500 chance of doing it. So maybe I should turn the question around. Is a 95% chance of defeating a challenge of equal CR too high? Or not high enough? If your players realized that in order to have a 53% chance of reaching 16th level, their chance of defeating a challenge of equal CR would have to be about 99.7%, would it spoil their fun? [/QUOTE]

Verification