Math That "Just Works"

[RadiantPhoenix]

I think Manxome has a point here. 'Bonus bosses' do not feel like an appropriate measure of a game.

I also feel that the second video is an example of a steady state because the characters are all being healed to full each turn. Even the first one is pretty close to steady state as well in my opinion. Indeed, I think both of those videos reinforce the point: If you aren't constantly putting everyone back together, those battles appear to be basically impossible.

[Roy]

I think Manxome has a point here. 'Bonus bosses' do not feel like an appropriate measure of a game.

I also feel that the second video is an example of a steady state because the characters are all being healed to full each turn. Even the first one is pretty close to steady state as well in my opinion. Indeed, I think both of those videos reinforce the point: If you aren't constantly putting everyone back together, those battles appear to be basically impossible.

Steady state, by his definition is slowly DPSing ti down, while keeping your own health up.

In the first video, there's not much choice. Solo hero and all. Even then, notice how the life is slowly dropping? if not for the lol block six times in a row, that'd have been a fail run.

In the second video, he was trying to DPS it down as fast as possible, only paying the minimum attention to healing. Which, incidentally was a healing spell that restores everyone to full, but even so 4k damage a round to something with 13k HP is hardly a slow and steady strategy.

Now I'm sure with a little effort you can find one of the many videos where 4 Gladiators two round it by using a similar strategy, sans healing.

Fact of the matter is, since they can full life you to dead in one turn, every turn you let them live is another turn they can annihilate you. As such, it's offensive tactics that are incentivitzed. DPS it down NOW.

[Manxome]

In the second video, he was trying to DPS it down as fast as possible, only paying the minimum attention to healing. Which, incidentally was a healing spell that restores everyone to full, but even so 4k damage a round to something with 13k HP is hardly a slow and steady strategy.

*facepalm*

Yes, the "minimum attention to healing", which happens to be a steady state amount, because anything less and they'd lose. Exactly as I've been saying.

Both of your videos involve the party healing themselves for many times their max HP over the course of the battle, negating the overwhelming majority of the boss's damage output rather than trying to match it. That's a steady state strategy. The first video involves supplemental defensive buffing because his healing isn't good enough on its own, and the second video involves combat resurrection!

Obviously, after you've established a steady state strategy where you negate as much of the boss's damage as you possibly can, any additional resources might as well go into offense. And that additional offense may even noticably affect your win rate, since the bosses are slinging (effectively) save-or-dies.

But those battles look like they'd go about the same way and have a vaguely similar win rate even if you made a huge reduction in the party's offensive output -- say, reduce it by half, or even three-quarters. A comparable reduction in their healing and they'd be hopeless (unless you made up the difference by switching more people to healing duty). Fast healing is essential to their strategies; fast damage is a luxury.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Steady state, by his definition is slowly DPSing ti down, while keeping your own health up.

In the first video, there's not much choice. Solo hero and all. Even then, notice how the life is slowly dropping? if not for the lol block six times in a row, that'd have been a fail run.

That's why I said the first video was nearly steady state, not fully steady state.

Even so, the fact that you mention the lack of choice supports the superiority of the steady state strategy in boss fights. An all out 'everyone attacks' simply will not work, probably even if you somehow had eight characters, while an attempt at a steady state strategy allows you to win the battle with a single hero, albeit with some difficulty.[/b]

[Roy]

I said there was a lack of choice because 1 person can't do enough DPS. 4 however can, and that's the party size.

Round 1: Priest uses Gritty Ditty, fastest Gladiator uses the appropriate Fource, other two Falcon Slash.

Boss beats the crap out of you.

Round 2: Everyone Falcon Slashes. The Priest goes first, doesn't do a lot of damage, but does start the combo. Then the Gladiators 1.2 1.5 2.0 him. That's 5 digit damage right there.

No healing.

[Judging__Eagle]

I think that honestly, Roy has a very solid point in terms of the game he's talking about.

In the game being talked about, the biggest monsters, the ones that set the bar for "you are tall enough for this world" are the gold standard for that setting. The highest challenge monsters always are the gold standard.

In D&D, the gold standards are things like Great Wyrm dragons, Arch-Fiends, Dieties. Quite honestly, we know that say.... let's be honest here, 95% of the D&D, or the general gaming, population could not pull off a successful campaign involving some sort of encounters with said creatures unless the DM is merely using them as "do not attack, made of arbitrarium, just so you don't get any stupid ideas" sort of Plot speeding NPCs.

Some PCs can seriously solo some of the Arch-Fiends; the rickoculous contests that some mentally deficient WoTCers made about "Kill Grazzt, the Iron Duke". Frank seriously wrote up the two things you need to utterly wtfpwn Gra'azt: Super Charger Damage, and Xorn Movement. Which.... imho, are not too hard to get at say.... level 14 or so.

Of course, most people really don't get the abilities needed to pull things like that off for their characters. So, while they may be "successful" D&D adventurers... they're not "gold standard" grade player characters that everyone else in their profession looks up to.

Diety-slaying needs slightly more legendary abilities, like you know, Mind Blank [Fuck your Wish or less; Mind Blank doesn't even care if you can cast that all day long. Not detectable even by magic sensors or any scrying]

[RadiantPhoenix]

I said there was a lack of choice because 1 person can't do enough DPS. 4 however can, and that's the party size.

Round 1: Priest uses Gritty Ditty, fastest Gladiator uses the appropriate Fource, other two Falcon Slash.

Boss beats the crap out of you.

Round 2: Everyone Falcon Slashes. The Priest goes first, doesn't do a lot of damage, but does start the combo. Then the Gladiators 1.2 1.5 2.0 him. That's 5 digit damage right there.

No healing.

I may have been wrong about it being impossible to do without healing even with 8 characters. The core point still seems to remain: a steady state or nearly steady state strategy appears to be able to do the job at lower level or with less characters, unless the combo you listed above is doable at or before the point where you can get a party that can full heal the entire party every turn and raise the dead.

[Roy]

I said there was a lack of choice because 1 person can't do enough DPS. 4 however can, and that's the party size.

Round 1: Priest uses Gritty Ditty, fastest Gladiator uses the appropriate Fource, other two Falcon Slash.

Boss beats the crap out of you.

Round 2: Everyone Falcon Slashes. The Priest goes first, doesn't do a lot of damage, but does start the combo. Then the Gladiators 1.2 1.5 2.0 him. That's 5 digit damage right there.

No healing.

I may have been wrong about it being impossible to do without healing even with 8 characters. The core point still seems to remain: a steady state or nearly steady state strategy appears to be able to do the job at lower level or with less characters, unless the combo you listed above is doable at or before the point where you can get a party that can full heal the entire party every turn and raise the dead.

Honestly, if you're at a level lower than 99, that isn't just 98 or something meaningless you don't have a chance against the uber bosses. Gritty Ditty, Fource skills, and Falcon Slash are all level independent.

Meanwhile, Kazing and Omniheal are like... 60s, 70s... you won't have the stats to survive then.

So either way, you're going to be 99, with all class skills maxed, swords maxed, shields maxed, and anything else is optional really.

Also, lower level Priests will not act before the boss. This is a major problem.

And anything much harder than Baramos (which, since he's the easiest is all but about 3 others) is flat out impossible to solo. They just one round you, and that's that.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Ah. So the primary barrier to entry is "Make sure the boss doesn't TPK you before you can react"?

[Roy]

Ah. So the primary barrier to entry is "Make sure the boss doesn't TPK you before you can react"?

Well yes, that's a very real possibility as they will have very high speed and a lot of damage even vs max level characters.

If your healer goes after the boss, you can't react properly to heal. They also can get more than one round on you in a row. If they go before the boss, this is avoided.

Your damage dealers, meanwhile either need to all be going after the boss, or all be going before the boss. Otherwise your combos get broken. Doing the latter is basically impossible without either massive seed farming or speed debuffing, so the former it is.

[Swordslinger]

Favoring steady state combat style is done for an obvious reason in tabletop. You only get one shot at it. Unlike Dragon Quest, where you can just go reload your game and try a new strategy. If you lose your party in D&D you are dead, you don't just reload at the save point. Having two glass cannons fighting each other is not a good idea.

In D&D it shouldn't be assumed you know what the monster you're fighting can do. And if it kills you in one round, you can't learn from your mistakes.

[Lago PARANOIA]

As far as designing tabletop games go...

The obvious problem of favoring a steady state strategy is padded sumo/death spiral, whereupon once you locked into a steady state it just becomes an inevitable plod towards victory or defeat.

You can shake this up by either giving the losing side a chance to make a comeback once a winner starts to get established such limit breaks, blood meters, etc.. The obvious problem with THAT is that it can become a rubber band where a only marginally more competent force is crushed when they would've won by being less so (see Mario Kart) and that it can also lead to an even worse form of padded sumo that drags on fights because a clear winner can't be established.

The other alternative is to favor alpha strikes, where a side is encouraged to crush enemies and quickly. You can do this with tiered, easily replenished charge attacks and limiting healing/defense bonuses that can be accrued in combat. The obvious problem with that is that it encourages rocket launcher tag (making it a lot more lethal for parties) and/or might cheat people out of combat time if the enemy breaks too soon.

It's a 'pick your fucking poison motherfucker' situation. Personally, I prefer an alpha strike situation. It's very depressing to have to put up with an hour of going 'my bard fails his saving throw against Hold Person a fourth time in a row'. It's also a little anticlimatic having to spend another twenty minutes taking down The Dark Prince even though you already defeated his chancellor, dragon, and throne room guards in the same combat. The trick is to give players enough of a cushion so that they can see that they're losing and make it so that it's easy to escape or surrender. This means that mindless or murderous foes need to be some combination of slow, stupid, blind, or easily distracted and that enemy forces need to be generally willing to take prisoners, parlay, or have their morale broken. This also means that you will have to have it so that defeating the leader will quickly break an enemy squad's morale; the Final Fantasy trope of taking out the chaff assist mobs and wailing on the Big Bad is appropriate for some foes but lame against others.

[Lago PARANOIA]

One thing that didn't really occur to me until now but made perfect sense after Frank pointed it out was the issue of damage rolls. He's totally right that rolling 2d4+25 is weaksauce. I mean, it's good to have a DPR stat but when the RNG is that narrow it eliminates the surprise of 'holy shit, Jerry rolled a 27 on the 5d6 and one-shotted that guy'.

One of the really good ideas that proto-4E had I believe was to have scaling [W]s where damage got added to each weapon die. If average DPR was mostly composed of those and the amount of bonus damage players got was small (like no more than 3-5 per W) it'd have more suspense and also make it easier to scale damage without going off into padded sumo or rocket-launcher tag. You could even do shenanigans like allow people to split up their [W]s against multiple targets or even sacrifice it for bonus effects without running into the problems that multiple attacks had in 3E.

[Swordslinger]

One thing that didn't really occur to me until now but made perfect sense after Frank pointed it out was the issue of damage rolls. He's totally right that rolling 2d4+25 is weaksauce. I mean, it's good to have a DPR stat but when the RNG is that narrow it eliminates the surprise of 'holy shit, Jerry rolled a 27 on the 5d6 and one-shotted that guy'.

Well even going to multiple dice produces a stronger bellcurve.

When you start at 1d8+1, you have the biggest potential variance you ever will. After that, adding more static bonuses or more dice produces a constantly more predictable result.

It's why the 20d6 blasting spells were boring in 3.5, because most of the time you're so close to the average that you might as well not bother rolling.

[Chamomile]

One thing that didn't really occur to me until now but made perfect sense after Frank pointed it out was the issue of damage rolls. He's totally right that rolling 2d4+25 is weaksauce. I mean, it's good to have a DPR stat but when the RNG is that narrow it eliminates the surprise of 'holy shit, Jerry rolled a 27 on the 5d6 and one-shotted that guy'.

One of the really good ideas that proto-4E had I believe was to have scaling [W]s where damage got added to each weapon die. If average DPR was mostly composed of those and the amount of bonus damage players got was small (like no more than 3-5 per W) it'd have more suspense and also make it easier to scale damage without going off into padded sumo or rocket-launcher tag. You could even do shenanigans like allow people to split up their [W]s against multiple targets or even sacrifice it for bonus effects without running into the problems that multiple attacks had in 3E.

Apologies for noob question. But. Someone please explain [W] and DPR.

[Maxus]

[W] is the notation 4e uses to stand in for "Weapon damage"

So your almighty homerun swing with a greatsword does 4[w]. That's four times the normal weapon damage.

DPR is damage-per-round. It's figuring up how much damage you can reasonably expect to do, barring flukes of the dice either way, per turn.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Well even going to multiple dice produces a stronger bellcurve.

The alternative unfortunately is to either inflate hit points or damage reduction even higher than what was proposed in Frank's chart. That's just the way things are.

[Ice9]

Or multiply. Makes things swingy, but if that's what you're going for, it works. And you can always use a combination of multiple dice + multiplier to get the amount of randomness you want.

There is a practical limit in that you want to stick to multipliers that people can do without a calculator - 2x, probably 3x, maybe 5x, 10x, 20x, ...

[Swordslinger]

Or multiply. Makes things swingy, but if that's what you're going for, it works. And you can always use a combination of multiple dice + multiplier to get the amount of randomness you want.

Yes, multipliers maintain the swinginess you want.

If 2[W] damage was 2* (1d8+4) instead of 2d8+8, the average remains the same for both, but the first has a greater volatility. If fireball was 20 * 1d6 instead of 20d6, you get much the same result.

Another option is enforced variability around an average, then rolling a d6. On a 1-2 you do 50% of your average, on 3-4 you do exactly average damage, and on 5-6 you do 150% your average.

Then of course, you can dump hit points and go to a relative damage system which always keeps its volatility constant. An example of that is the M&M toughness save.