Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Tav_Behemoth" data-source="post: 4281135" data-attributes="member: 18017">I'm digging the statistical analysis, but here's some stuff I'm able to contribute:- The table of &quot;Skill Check Difficulty Class&quot; on DMG p. 61 repeats the table of DCs from p. 42, but adds 5 because this is explicitly for skills. That supports the footnote on p. 42 in showing that the base DCs are for ability checks, and they're supposed to be increased when using them for skills.- The level of the skill check determines the DC of the challenge, right? But the DCs run in bands of three. A level 1 skill check and a level 3 skill check use the same DCs, so the only difference between them is that one of them awards more experience points.Re: playtester's experience: during the slow patch of a session I made a die out of blu-tak. I then got interested in determining how it was skewed, and started tallying its rolls. Rolling a six-sided was fast, and I had statistical analysis tools on hand (thanks to the chi square table being helpfully presented in Paizo's Dragon Compendium). Nevertheless, even though it was easy to rack up observations in a row, at the end of the session I didn't have a large enough sample size to prove that my visibly lopsided dice wasn't giving an equal probability distribution. So it seems obvious to me that no individual playtester would be in the position of being able to make a valid judgement about the average chance of failure in a challenge based on experience, rather than a calculation of probabilities, and that it'd take some pretty organized, extensive, and tightly-directed playtesting for that trend to become apparent in the aggregate playtest reports.The point about level 1 and level 3 challenges giving different XP for overcoming the same DCs is obvious to the untrained observer, however, and that's still in there despite playtesting. &lt;shrug&gt;</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tav_Behemoth, post: 4281135, member: 18017"] I'm digging the statistical analysis, but here's some stuff I'm able to contribute: - The table of "Skill Check Difficulty Class" on DMG p. 61 repeats the table of DCs from p. 42, but adds 5 because this is explicitly for skills. That supports the footnote on p. 42 in showing that the base DCs are for ability checks, and they're supposed to be increased when using them for skills. - The level of the skill check determines the DC of the challenge, right? But the DCs run in bands of three. A level 1 skill check and a level 3 skill check use the same DCs, so the only difference between them is that one of them awards more experience points. Re: playtester's experience: during the slow patch of a session I made a die out of blu-tak. I then got interested in determining how it was skewed, and started tallying its rolls. Rolling a six-sided was fast, and I had statistical analysis tools on hand (thanks to the chi square table being helpfully presented in Paizo's Dragon Compendium). Nevertheless, even though it was easy to rack up observations in a row, at the end of the session I didn't have a large enough sample size to prove that my visibly lopsided dice wasn't giving an equal probability distribution. So it seems obvious to me that no individual playtester would be in the position of being able to make a valid judgement about the average chance of failure in a challenge based on experience, rather than a calculation of probabilities, and that it'd take some pretty organized, extensive, and tightly-directed playtesting for that trend to become apparent in the aggregate playtest reports. The point about level 1 and level 3 challenges giving different XP for overcoming the same DCs is obvious to the untrained observer, however, and that's still in there despite playtesting. <shrug> [/QUOTE]

Verification