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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Zardoz" data-source="post: 3060125" data-attributes="member: 704">I would have to say no.The use of average damage instead of rolling dice is not something I would endorse.  There are a number of reasons for this.- Tradition:  It may not be a rational arguement, but this is not an issue that requires a rational counter arguement.  I happen to like using dice- Not using dice alters the basic psychology of the game:  Consider this situationYour a fighter with 9 Hp.  Your opponent is a warrior using a longsword that does 1d8+3 damage with a reach weapon.  Your certain the next hit you inflict will kill him.If your using pure averages, you can just eat the AoO and take 7 or 8 damage, depending on how your round it out.  There is no way you can die on the next attack.  You know for a certaintly that you can close to melee and if your attack hits, you will finish himIf your using dice, you will die 3 times out of 8.  Law of averages is still in your favour, but your probably not going to be so eager to close to melee to finish him.When you know the outcome of your actions in advance, it will have an impact on your decision making.- There are better ways to deal with the preceived problem:  If you can get access to a laptop, you can use all sorts of programs to automate the dice rolling.  Barring a flaw in the random number generator, it preserves the element of chance.- There are more rolls than just damage to consider:  In most cases, rolling damage is not going to be the bottle neck.  You also have to account for things like the attack roll, saving throws, spell resistance checks, opposed rolls for various actions, and ability checks.  Not all of these can be reasonably reduced to average rolls without harming the integrity of the game.  If you remove the to hit roll, you also remove criticals, or you have to factor them into the average damage.  If you remove saving throws, your players will probably murder you the first time you use something like a sorcerer with a hold person spell that none of the players can succeed against on average.The only situation that I even come close to considering using average rolls for is when I have masses of archers shooting at a player.  And even then, I used a percentile roll to decide how many of the attacks hit rather than assuming X hits from Y attacks.END COMMUNICATION</blockquote>

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