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<blockquote data-quote="Wulf Ratbane" data-source="post: 3752932" data-attributes="member: 94">Unless I am really misreading him, though, what I think he was saying was that in a 2 Good Guys fight vs. 1 Bad Guy fight, the one Bad Guy got to line up and fight one Good Guy at a time, instead having to fight both at once. And all things being equal, trading blows back and forth, one Good Guy kills one Bad Guy at about the same time that the Bad Guy killed him, so you could predict the outcome of the combat by just subtracting the size of the smaller force from the large.Obviously that's not the case. Two good guys team up on the one bad guy, they do twice as much damage in the same amount of time, the bad guy dies twice as fast, so he only inflicts half as much damage as he would otherwise. The disparity is 4:1. (Quadratic.)So while it is true that the Fighter in D&amp;D is largely going to be focusing his offense on one opponent, he can, of course, still pitch in against a common foe with a teammate and so benefit from quadratic force projection.That was basically the gist of my intended post. Spreading damage around makes even less sense.It makes opening with a fireball against a mob of Bloodied-Bonus creatures a bad idea. The wizard can really sour things for the party.It also makes the Knight-like power (calling out a foe to man-to-man combat) particularly useful.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Wulf Ratbane, post: 3752932, member: 94"] Unless I am [i]really[/i] misreading him, though, what I think he was saying was that in a 2 Good Guys fight vs. 1 Bad Guy fight, the one Bad Guy got to line up and fight one Good Guy at a time, instead having to fight both at once. And all things being equal, trading blows back and forth, one Good Guy kills one Bad Guy at about the same time that the Bad Guy killed him, so you could predict the outcome of the combat by just subtracting the size of the smaller force from the large. Obviously that's not the case. Two good guys team up on the one bad guy, they do twice as much damage in the same amount of time, the bad guy dies twice as fast, so he only inflicts half as much damage as he would otherwise. The disparity is 4:1. (Quadratic.) So while it is true that the Fighter in D&D is largely going to be focusing his offense on one opponent, he can, of course, still pitch in against a common foe with a teammate and so benefit from quadratic force projection. That was basically the gist of my intended post. Spreading damage around makes even less sense. It makes [i]opening[/i] with a fireball against a mob of Bloodied-Bonus creatures a bad idea. The wizard can really sour things for the party. It also makes the Knight-like power (calling out a foe to man-to-man combat) particularly useful. [/QUOTE]

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