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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5785038" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree with you that results are important.But I still personally feel that 1 in 20 is too low - and, acknowledging Crazy Jerome's point that my preferences shouldn't dominate, I thik that the system therefore needs to make it easy, without too much tweaking or PC resource investment, for a wizard to get to a point where they can hit on better than a 1 in 20.The reason that I think 1 in 20 is too low is because, in any game, the wizard is not likely to be rolling very many melee attacks. (At least, this is my experience. Maybe my experience is unrepresentative.) In the typical fight in which it comes down to the wizard needing to weigh in with staff or dagger, let's say the wizard is going to make 3 attacks. With a natural 20 needed to hit, that is a (1-.95^3) = slightly more than 14%, or about a 1/7 chance, of hitting and thereby making a difference. If such fights occur as often as 1 in 3 (which seems a high incidence of such fights, in my experience) then the wizard will make a difference in melee in around 1 in 20 fights. At 3E/4e rates of advancement, on the (unreaslistic) assumption that all XP come from fighting that's once per 2 levels.I don't find that to be often enough. 4e compensates by always permitting the wizard to make a difference via magic, and I gather at mid-to-high level 3E it's much the same. (I think this was [MENTION=6675228]Hassassin[/MENTION]'s point upthread.) So the issue doesn't come up except in extreme corner cases (like the time the wizard PC in my game took an OA with his fire tome as an improvised weapon, needed to roll exactly a 20 to hit, did so and therefore critted, incinerating his enemy - fun, but a one-off event for the campaign most likely).But if the wizard is expected to sometimes have to somewhat regularly contribute to combat in non-magical ways (ie if these compensation mechanisms are not going to be present) then I think that the system needs to offer cheap and easy ways of boosting that chance above 1 in 20. After all, it's not as if a wizard who hits half as often as the fighter for half as much effect is in any danger of dominating the game, or of being tempted to try and tread on the toes of the fighter player.</blockquote>

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