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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6786526" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well, I kinda recognized that the stated case was too extreme, hence why I considered a second case that was much less extreme--merely 4 consecutive crits from the DM, and 8 consecutive misses from the party...exactly like you asked for. I'm not sure how I failed to meet your requirements! In fact, since most combats are longer than 2 rounds, even in 5e, you can instead consider that to be non-consecutive ones in a single combat, of say 3-4 rounds--the statistics shouldn't meaningfully change if all other attacks are "average." That you have, in fact, actually seen any combats that were THAT bad, let alone 2-4 per campaign, is eyebrow-raising--and, again, makes me think there is something else going on besides "100% pure double-distilled luck."I could probably get into some more complex, multi-part binomial statistics, which, sure, would increase the odds (since the DM needs to merely get at least 4 crits in, say, 8 attacks, while the party needs at least 8 misses in 16 attacks). But it's still going to be a hyper-rare event, because of that "lots of DM crits" thing. "At least 4 crits out of 8 DM attacks" has a binomial probability of p[SUB]1[/SUB]=0.00037175, while "at least 8 PC misses out of 16 attacks, 40% miss chance" has only a p[SUB]2[/SUB]=0.28394. The odds of two independent events happening together is the product of their probabilities, so p[SUB]1[/SUB]*p[SUB]2[/SUB] = 0.00037175*0.28394 = 0.00010555, or approximately 1 in 9,474. With weekly sessions for 1.5 years, and an expected value of 3 of these events per campaign, you'd need to have (3*9474)/(1.5*52) = ~364 four-round combats per session to achieve that expected value.But if the game is so fragile that just one round being unusually unlucky is enough to doom the party...well, again, I'd argue that there's something wrong here that fudging doesn't fix. In that case, it would be "the game system isn't designed to handle its own probability distribution," which is (IMO) a serious and condemnable design flaw.[Edit: For fairness, I ran the same numbers, e.g. miss chance of 40% for four PCs vs. two monsters over the course of 4 rounds, but with just "one round's worth" of crits on the DM's side (e.g. 2 crits) and misses on the players' side (4 misses). Probability is approximately 1 in 18.69--slightly more common than rolling any individual crit. Events at least this severe, or worse, would happen approximately (78/18.69) = ~4 times per average 1.5 year campaign, if there's only one combat per session on average. I suspect actual practice is going to be more like 3-4 average combats per session, so an average campaign should have around 15 of these events--roughly one per month. If a game system is so fragile, it causes divergent, party-killing issues once every four sessions or so, that's bad and should be fixed. And if it's not so bad that fudging is required if you want to fix it, I don't see how you can argue that my above, toned-down example is not precisely what is being asked for--and still sufficiently uncommon as to be not particularly worth considering.]</blockquote>

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