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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4967123" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, psychology aside I'm not really sure it is necessary for PCs to hit better than 50/50 overall. However I think what any analysis vs a given monster fails to take into account is what is the actual mix of monsters you face and how often do you actually have a particular chance to hit?At first blush it seems like the math would say a level 1 PC is hitting on a 6-8 and maybe a 10 or even 11 vs soldiers, but probably an average of 7 vs a baseline monster with a baseline PC sounds right. The problem is you don't actually engage baseline monsters. You engage a variety of monsters with different defense numbers. More than that the monsters with higher defenses are usually higher level and thus each hit is worth less. This means that in reality a PC's hit chance averaged over all the attacks he makes (which is all the player really sees and cares about) is going to be some factor less than that ideal 7.Its almost impossible to say for real what PCs hit on overall. Its going to depend on the mix of monster roles and levels used by a given DM. I'd say in fact that the variance due to different monsters is going to be greater than the variance due to different character builds. This is because dropping a level +2 skirmisher into a fight in place of some level +0 skirmisher means not only is the monster's defense 2 higher, but it takes about 2x as many hits (and thus attack rolls) to kill him. So, you end up with the tougher monsters dominating the equation.I think this is the main reason why it is becoming more and more apparent to 4e DMs that overlevel monsters are generally a bad idea. I think its why MM2/DMG2 ditched boosted defenses for elite/solo monsters as well. No amount of wimpy lower level monsters really budges the hit average down much. It was a nice theory to make elites have better defenses, but in practice it wasn't balanced out by their XP cost. Solos were so much to the extreme that it required knocking off 20% of their hit points to get it right. Considering DMs seem driven to overlevel these types of monsters it just made it that much worse. I know I've learned to NOT do that and I think the DMG guideline is generally too liberal. The only time I've found it to be really fun to have overlevel monsters is controllers or maybe artillery where one bigger one can replace a couple equal level ones and to-hit doesn't fall too far.</blockquote>

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