Healing and survival

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by zot

Actually, Nils does make a good point. If a party of 5 get 5 attacks / turn against them for 5 turns per combat during 5 combats, that means there's a 44% chance someone will get triple damage on them during an adventure. You can check my math:
[... snip - I'm not disputing the math ...]
EDIT: The reason it's a good point is that there's a good chance you'll have one triple damage roll against the PCs in an adventure and triple damage is way out of hand anyway IMHO. It looks like there's an 83% chance you'll get at least one double damage roll against the party -- the average number of double damage rolls in 125 rolls escapes my rusty probability skills.

The problem with Nils logic is not the math.

The problem is the premise that your group is going to suffer 125 attacks in an adventure, and that you want a party that gets attacked 125 times to not have people suffer deadly hits. If you suffer 125 2-die attacks (imagine 125 crossbowmen shooting at your party), your party should be annihilated. And it probably will be, even if they don't take and double-or-triple damage hits.

If your party manages to get attacked by 2-die weapons 5 times each in a combat, they're either having very dangerous adventures, or they are doing a terrible job, and yeah they're going to have casualties and deaths, whether you use double or triple damage results or not (unless they have layered armor with Stone Flesh or something like that, which BTW double & triple damage are a much-needed possible way around).

Again, it seems to me that a big part of play of TFT is arranging to get attacked as rarely as possible. That's why there's a map and situations - they offer ways to greatly reduce the number of times foes get the opportunity to attack you.

[Nils_Lindeberg]

Originally Posted by zot

Actually, Nils does make a good point. If a party of 5 get 5 attacks / turn against them for 5 turns per combat during 5 combats, that means there's a 44% chance someone will get triple damage on them during an adventure. You can check my math:

The chance to avoid triple damage in one attack is 1 - 1/216

5 attacks / turn for 5 turns in 5 combats means the chance that none of those rolls will get triple damage is (1 - 1/216)^(5^3), or about 56%, so there's about a 44% chance of getting a triple damage result in an adventure like that.

I think maybe Nils erred by adding in the 5 party members for 5^4 instead of 5^3 but it's only the number of attacks / turn that matters. 5^4 would have made it a LOT worse. There are only 125 attack rolls in that type of adventure, not 625 :).

EDIT: The reason it's a good point is that there's a good chance you'll have one triple damage roll against the PCs in an adventure and triple damage is way out of hand anyway IMHO. It looks like there's an 83% chance you'll get at least one double damage roll against the party -- the average number of double damage rolls in 125 rolls escapes my rusty probability skills.

Thanks for correcting my math I did one extra x5. Five people in a party getting hit for five times in one turn would mean 25 monsters and not the five I thought about. :-)

But 2d damage is not a lot! We now have mastery talents, the old magic weapons, missile spells that can blast you to smithereens, effects that leave you open to insta kills, etc. Take a few HP of damage and even a double damage attack can kill you. Just one swipe from a big weapon can put you in serious trouble and have you knocked out bleeding to death.

And yes TFT is all about sneaking around, doing ambushes, find the bottle neck and bring in the over kill to end the fight quickly. But most of those tactical options are made available by the GM in a normal campaign. So it is part of the encounter set up. Will there be three half starved sleeping pirates blocking the exit and no tactical advantages to be found. Or do we have the initiative and can lure half of the pirate ship crew out to a place of our choosing and start the fight with a petard? Opponents tends to scale with both the PC "level" and their options. So if 2d damage seems like a lot it is mostly because your campaign isn't the fellowship charging in to a hoard of Uruk Hai. People do play defensively, but that can be encouraged by increasing the opposition. Or by just letting the players know that the multiple dragons in these caves tends to eat their fallen victims… As a GM it is not hard to make it more deadly if need be by increasing the encounter strength. It is much harder to make it less deadly if just about any opponent can kill you in one blow. :-)