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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Plane Sailing" data-source="post: 236811" data-attributes="member: 114">I think we are in agreement then !Explaining something behind my chain of thought... I guess that one of the issues which gets hidden by average damage calculations is that it hides the extremes. I've seen people talk on these boards about Barbarians only having on average 2hp more per level than clerics - but their bigger HD means that they *could* have 4hp more per level.Or a more direct example. I've seen people (rightly) portray the average damage from a greatsword and a greataxe to be broadly the same, even taking criticals into account - but that very thing doesn't take the potential maximum damage into account. Your PC with 30 hit points will not be killed by one hit from a greatsword, even on a critical. He could be killed by one swing from a greataxe. Even the fact that a greataxe has a 1 in 12 chance of scoring 12 damage on a standard blow while a greatsword only has a 1 in 36 chance can be hidden by "average damage"Most melee combats that I DM run between 3-8 rounds, rarely any longer... over that short duration randomness "overcomes" the averages, as it were. Over the life of a campaign this wouldn't be true, but in any individual encounter... That's where I'm coming from, I reckon. Where am I going to? Well, that has yet to be decided <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Cheers</blockquote>

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