4e vs 3.5 dice rolling amount

[randomhero00]

It really sunk in a few days back when I was playing 3.5 and had to roll 44d6 (APL 16.) That's quite annoying. OTOH 4e, there is something a little less satisfying knowing you'll get almost the same damage every time.

So which system (regarding amount of dice only) do you like better?

Whats your ideal number of dice rolled?

Ideal crit %? (besides 100% hehe)

[PopcornMage]

I like to roll ALL of them. At once!

It makes the kiddies laugh.

[Dusk Eclipse]

I love rolling dice, the mo sre I can the better, possibly a reason of why I love playig rogues in 3.5 so much

[randomhero00]

I love rolling dice, the mo sre I can the better, possibly a reason of why I love playig rogues in 3.5 so much

eesh, even 44d6? Can't even hold that much. Plus the other players may as well go take a nap while you roll all your attacks and damage.

BUT you do have a bit of a point. When I'm rolling 2d6 and my mod is +22 damage, it feels kinda pointless to even bother rolling. There's got to be a system that combines the best of both worlds.

[Lord_Gareth]

I once made a capstone for a PrC that deals 60d6 points of damage.

Why?

Because it would be awesome to just crash that many dice into a plastic tote in a wave of fire-based death.

[randomhero00]

I once made a capstone for a PrC that deals 60d6 points of damage.

Why?

Because it would be awesome to just crash that many dice into a plastic tote in a wave of fire-based death.

I think you may be a dice addict So I take it doing massive damage through a huge mod is not as satisfying to you as rolling an insane amount of dice?

Seriously though, didn't that annoy your fellow players as you had to count that many dice?

[Tyndmyr]

It really sunk in a few days back when I was playing 3.5 and had to roll 44d6 (APL 16.) That's quite annoying. OTOH 4e, there is something a little less satisfying know you'll get almost the same damage every time.

So which system (regarding amount of dice only) do you like better?

Whats your ideal number of dice rolled?

Ideal crit %?

If by annoying, you mean awesome.

More dice is always better. Unless it's a larger number of dice than I have at hand.

[randomhero00]

If by annoying, you mean awesome.

More dice is always better. Unless it's a larger number of dice than I have at hand.

I'm just confused, doesn't this annoy other people at the table? What do they do whilst your dice-a-bating is there an efficient way of doing this that perhaps I have missed?

[Morph Bark]

I like to roll ALL of them. At once!

It makes the kiddies laugh.

...this gave me an idea to try out next time with my players.

At character creation, they'll get three 6s, three 5s, three 4s, three 3s, three 2s and three 1s that they can add together in whatever way they wish for their character's stats, but they'd have to put at least 1 point in each. Curious how that'd turn out.

[Oracle_Hunter]

OTOH 4e, there is something a little less satisfying knowing you'll get almost the same damage every time.

I suppose this is true for certain values of "almost."

I dunno, the variance on a d12 (or 2d6 + 1d4) is enough for me when I feel like doing some damage in 4E.

As for 3.5... I remember a friend of mine who bought several sets of color-coded dice solely to make his Dervish build playable in combat. He seemed to enjoy it at least

[Tyndmyr]

I'm just confused, doesn't this annoy other people at the table? What do they do whilst your dice-a-bating is there an efficient way of doing this that perhaps I have missed?

Play warhammer a lot. I suggest 40k, guardsmen. You'll get so used to dealing with ridiculous quantities of dice that it'll go fast.

I prefer chessex mini-d6s. Can fit lots in your hands, and still pretty readable. I dabbled in micro d6s for a while, but they're hard to read. Plus, I kept losing them all.

[Kurald Galain]

There's a 3E spell called Dice Storm. It's a 9th level area effect wizard spell, that precisely asks you to roll all the dice you own and deal that much damage, save for half.

[WitchSlayer]

There's a 3E spell called Dice Storm. It's a 9th level area effect wizard spell, that precisely asks you to roll all the dice you own and deal that much damage, save for half.

So basically anyone whose played Shadowrun has a big advantage?

[Lord_Gareth]

Shadowrun? Pffffffffft. oWoD Mage, man. 40k!

[DragonOfUndeath]

There's a 3E spell called Dice Storm. It's a 9th level area effect wizard spell, that precisely asks you to roll all the dice you own and deal that much damage, save for half.

i just hope my Warhammer-playing friend doesnt find out about this. he has an INSANE amount of dice that even if he rolled all 1s and the creature saved it would do THOUSANDS of damage

[Camelot]

If I had to pick I'd pick less dice, because it goes faster and I actually like being able to somewhat predict my damage output. But rolling a lot of dice is a lot of fun as well!

[Aron Times]

Rolling fewer dice per power is one of the improvements 4e brought to the game. While it is fun rolling a billion d6's for your full-attack-sneak-attacking rogue, it slows the game down a lot and it's easy to lose track of just how much damage you dealt.

[Crow]

I don't mind rolling a bunch of dice.

It's keeping track of a dozen different modifiers that all end at different times and trigger in different circumstances that I don't like.

[Tyndmyr]

There's a 3E spell called Dice Storm. It's a 9th level area effect wizard spell, that precisely asks you to roll all the dice you own and deal that much damage, save for half.

Oh dear. I must pray my players never hear of this. One of my players brings all his dice to the game in a sack. Not a nice, respectable crown royal bag like most of us, or a leather satchel filled with dice like me, but INNA FRIGGIN SACK!

The table will be covered, and so will the floor. There will be weeping, and gnashing of teeth. The pain of the D4s shall torture us all. We'll have to tunnel our way out. Oh, the dicemanity.

[Kantolin]

When we play, the 'Uh.... I... well uh...' takes infinitely longer than the actual dice rolling operation.

I'm playing a psychic warrior with Form of Doom (and one more extra-attack), giving him eight. I used to just roll all my to-hits in order, and then my damages are all listed (3d6+37, 3d6+37, 2d8+4) or whatever. It doesn't take me terribly long to go through my turn (and if the DM informs us that it doesn't have DR, then I can also do the basic addition to total the damage.)

What takes much longer is one of my good friends who, while she loves D&D, takes awhile to decide what she's doing each turn. Even when she's playing her Paladin, for whom the correct answer is frequently, "I ranged smite and full attack". Now, once she's done so she can quickly add her charisma and add the damage up, but hey.

Although, uh, the basic math aspect is entertainingly the part which has the most difficulty among our group. ^_^ Recently we had to multiply something by 1.5 twice, and then half it. That took a heck of a lot more effort than it needed to for a bunch of college students and teachers (My students, in fact, are doing things like this /right now/! You'd think I'd have it easy!)

Anyway! We all really like rolling a ton of dice. ^_^ That made exalted really fun for us! It's universally accepted in our group that doing +2d6 damage is superior to doing +7 damage.

[Shyftir]

My group will never forget the day we cast create water over a salt mummy. We figured the damage by using

(volume of water created/volume of water in a flask of holy water) x 2 =
number of d4 damage

This worked out to something like 44d4 or so, we had to pool the groups entire d4 collection then put them in a cup then roll them and everybody was given a pile to count.

Then the other divine caster did it too....

It. WAS. AWESOME.

[TheDarkOne]

It really sunk in a few days back when I was playing 3.5 and had to roll 44d6 (APL 16.) That's quite annoying. OTOH 4e, there is something a little less satisfying knowing you'll get almost the same damage every time.

So which system (regarding amount of dice only) do you like better?

Whats your ideal number of dice rolled?

Ideal crit %? (besides 100% hehe)

Interestingly, rolling 44d6 has a fairly narrow standard deviation(essentially: how likely it is for a result to be close or far from the mean value), in fact the more dice you throw, the closer the outcomes are likely to be to the mean value.

Why?

The variance of rolling a d6 is ~2.9. The variance of a sum of independent random variables is equal to the sum of of all of their variances. The standard deviation is equal to the square root of the variance. Which means that

standard deviation of Nd6=sqrt(N*2.9)

Meanwhile, the mean is N*3.5.

The mean grows significantly faster than the standard deviation, so you reach a state very quickly where the standard deviation is not significant compared to the mean value, so your less and less likely to find values "far" from the mean as you increase N. (where our understanding of "far" grows with the mean value, while a standard deviation of 2 would be a lot for a system with a mean value of 4, it's extremely small if the mean value is 2000)

For example: at N=1 the standard deviation is ~1.7, while the mean is 3.5, and the standard deviation is almost 50% of the mean. At N=1, different trials are quite likely to have different results to a significant degree. At N=44 the standard deviation is ~11 while mean is 154, and here the standard deviation is less than one percent of the mean value.

The up shot of the whole thing is that more dice can often mean the system is less random, not more random.

[valadil]

If you're gonna have ridiculous numbers of dice, they should all be the same type.