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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6786896" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I wasn't planning to say anything more--my contributions having been quite vehemently pronounced unwelcome--but I must respond to this.1. I wasn't setting up a straw man in the slightest. The statement made was:Insanely bad luck; players roll 1 multiple times; DM rolls 20 multiple times. "Insanely bad" is clearly a squishy, qualitative judgment that cannot be parsed mathematically, but it (coupled with "should be able to defeat [them] with ease") established a perspective of not merely below-average results, but divergently below-average. Explicit reference to multiple DM crits and multiple player nat-1s--these are clear, numerical results, which can be translated into specific probabilities. Which then people criticized me for taking seriously, despite the fact that I explicitly said "y'know, maybe this was not really what you meant" and thus provided an entirely separate set of calculations where I ignored the description provided and made the example much less extreme.2. I wasn't "disproving" anyone's personal experiences. I was stating that either the situation was not as bad as described, or quite rare and thus not something DMs should worry about, or a systemic fault of the system being used. If the situation(s) were not as bad as described, that doesn't mean they didn't happen--it just means that the perception of it made it seem like more of a problem than it really was. If it was exactly as described, which I explicitly allowed for by having those other options, then it's either a highly unrepresentative* result (and thus not a good example for why people in general should consider fudging) or it's caused by the underlying system being poorly designed for handling results that do happen with sufficient statistical frequency, at which point the better answer would seem to be "fix the system's math so you don't have to make these ad hoc corrections."Or, alternatively, the original assumption--that the DM and the players are not in any way responsible for this situation occurring--is wrong. If that gets rejected, then all my calculations are out the window. No amount of theoretical calculation can account for such unique details...but at the same time, that would still weaken the (purely hypothetical) example Imaculata made, because it would be "fudging to fix a DM/player bad decision," not "fudging to fix an otherwise-insoluble problem."I'll continue reading the thread, but from where I'm sitting now, I have nothing further to add. I think my analysis reveals meaningful weaknesses in the examples given. To say anything further would be merely to incite debate while saying "not gonna respond, goodbye!" And I don't wanna be that much of a jerk.*Events of low probability happen. They have to happen, at least some of the time, because they have a non-zero probability of occurring. Even some events of "0 probability" have to occur, when working with infinitely large sets, e.g. the number of points covering a particular area.</blockquote>

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