A more complete DPR analysis method (input wanted)


Advice

Lantern Lodge

I'm expanding on a class guide, and I wanted to be able to better compare and contrast different archetypes/builds. One of the big considerations is limited resources. Hence, I want to add in concepts such as time between, length of, number of, preparedness for, and mobility in encounters.

So does the following numbers match your own experience?

4 combats a day
Each combat lasts 4 rounds
1 surprise round in favor of PC's (PC's can pre-buff)
1 surprise round against PC's (enemies can pre-buff)
Encounters 1 and 2 are 5 minutes apart
Encounters 2 and 3 are 10 minutes apart
Encounters 3 and 4 are 4 hours apart
Three of the four encounters require movement to engage in melee

What are your thoughts? Where did I over estimate, and where did I under estimate? Let me know!

Lantern Lodge

Also thinking about number of enemies. I'm thinking an encounter with 1, then 2, 4, and finally, 6.

The Exchange

I've found that 2-foe encounters are rare, so I would recommend 1, 4, 4, 6

The Exchange

It would be also cool to have 3 versions of DPR: [list]

  • Calculate the "standard" DPR.
  • Calculate how you've suggested.
  • Calculate how you've suggested, but you can depend on one caster ally of your choice to cast two level 1 or 2 buff spells and one buff spell of a level of one less than the highest they can cast. (these spells are reduced to one buff spell at level 1-6).


  • I agree with 1,4,4,6. If you want to go really up end, you can swap out one of the fours for 8, or even 10


    This looks really tough to perfectly evaluate because there are so many options, but it looks amazingly accurate if you do it correctly. I'm curious to see a few practice builds being calculated!

    Lantern Lodge

    It's mostly for a Magus guide.

    The reason I bring in multiple enemies is to consider how effective something like burning hands can be.

    Other factors, such as cover, concealment, and positioning, make this an impossible task. However, it's just going to serve as a demonstration of DPR amoung archetypes and builds of just the Magus (with other factors talked about, such as survivability, and contribution to the team). So, I won't need to worry about ranged too much.


    I was playing around with this a while back after the DPR olympics, and I used an arbitrary scenario, and calculated the number of rounds to kill the target.

    Basically, you start 30 feet away from a generic monster. The monster: 10 HD, 140HP, 24AC, +12 on all saves. After the players first normal round, the monster will move into melee. This is basically a composite of the worst case scenarios for various classes.

    For damage effects use the normal DPR calculations. For binary effects like save or die, use a 90% confidence interval(IE if the monster has a 70% chance to fail their save against a spell, then I assume it needs to be case twice to give a 91% chance to be effected).

    So the basic test is how many round does it take a given character build to incapacitate the monster.

    Lantern Lodge

    Eh, the main emphasis is the adventuring day, not the monster. I'm assuming that teammates are there helping with each encounter. So taking out a monster isn't the emphasis, but rather your contribution to taking out said monster.


    Rather than DPR/encounter, you might want to break down the encounters to the types of opponents involved, and look at DPR or time to kill different opponents with different resource expenditures.

    If the par encounter is CR = APL +2, that means


    • 1 enemy of CR +2 (Boss type)
    • 2 enemies of CR +0 (Strong Mook type)
    • 4 enemies of CR -2 (Weak Mook type)
    • Combinations: 1 CR +0 enemy, 2 CR -2 enemies, etc.

    So you might want to assess your DPR (or better yet, rounds to kill enemies) against a few types of enemies. Say, against CR +2 bosses, CR +0 Strong Mooks, and the highest CR you can consistently kill in one round without expending significant resources. More tactically, you want to account for different types of resource expenditures: None, resources that will last an entire combat, resources that are one shot or aren't expected to last the whole combat, and group buffs.

    Those three pieces of information let you put together different scenarios:

    If I assume I have 1 full BAB character in the party who can kill a CR +2 enemy in 4 rounds, a CR +0 enemy in 2 rounds, and a CR -2 enemy in 1 round, and 1 3/4 BAB character who takes about 50% more time to kill enemies, do I provide enough damage to help the party complete 4 combats a day within 2-3 rounds? Also, make sure to have an idea of what kind of damage a single attack or standard action does, that lets you model fights as 1 round of movement and the rest full attacking. (Better than just looking at raw DPR, still not an exact model of everything, all the time. But has been pretty functional for me.)

    Now you can start analyzing the different types of encounters and adventuring days.

    How does a 4, 2, 4, 1 day look?
    What about 2, 2, 4, 4, 6, 1, am I going to be useful against the boss? How much do I need to hold back on early fights, or fights with a lot of weak mooks in order to carry on later? If I do hold back on those fights, will they start to get dangerously long?

    What kind of resources should I expend on different encounters? Is Haste more useful on 2 enemy or 6 enemy fights?

    I think your analysis will be improved if you create building blocks based on different strengths of enemies and different levels of resource expenditure.


    FrodoOf9Fingers wrote:
    Eh, the main emphasis is the adventuring day, not the monster. I'm assuming that teammates are there helping with each encounter. So taking out a monster isn't the emphasis, but rather your contribution to taking out said monster.

    Yes and no.

    I am looking out how long it takes to take out a single CR 10 monster at level 10. A CR 10 monster is not a significant challenge for a level 10 party. 3-4 CR 10 monsters are. So the idea is "How fast can my level 10 character take out 1/4 of a CR14 encounter(4 CR 10 monsters)?"

    No, it isn't the end all be all of performance, but it does give a little more information than a straight DPR crunch.

    Lantern Lodge

    Though I really do appreciate the alternative methods, my goals are:

    Use DPR (Most people recognize it and understand it's imperfections)
    Take into account limited resources
    Not add too much work (I'm looking at building and analyzing 20+ builds)

    I'm afraid I've already decided and unwilling to change on the subject. What I really needed was whether the numbers I presented seemed realistic. Is there anyone who experiences more than 4 encounters a day?


    Quote:
    Is there anyone who experiences more than 4 encounters a day?

    Yes, but it's not a bad baseline.

    I never got around to collecting more data for this - it is wearisome - but it might be relevant?


    FrodoOf9Fingers wrote:

    T

    I'm afraid I've already decided and unwilling to change on the subject. What I really needed was whether the numbers I presented seemed realistic. Is there anyone who experiences more than 4 encounters a day?

    PFS scenarios contain 3-5 encounters, generally happening over the course of one day. (Noting this because a lot of your readers will play PFS)

    AP-wise, through the first chapter of Rise of the Runelords my party experienced everything from 1 through 12 encounters in one day's adventuring. 2-3 was probably the most common, from what I remember.

    Emerald Spire:
    Level 1: 6 encounters
    Level 2: 7-11 depending on <spoilers>
    Level 3: 9
    Level 4: 7
    Level 5: 8
    Level 6: 7

    6 to 10 seems about what most published dungeon crawling modules seem to have. Though the average encounter in those slogs is usually around CR +0 or even lower. They seem to usually only have 2-4 encounters with a CR higher than party level. Non dungeon crawls tend to have around 1 encounter per day, then things come to a head and you have 3-6 or so encounters. (Basing this mainly on City of Golden Death, Masks of the Living God and Feast of Ravenmoor.)

    Lantern Lodge

    Coriat wrote:
    Quote:
    Is there anyone who experiences more than 4 encounters a day?

    Yes, but it's not a bad baseline.

    I never got around to collecting more data for this - it is wearisome - but it might be relevant?

    Thats rather interesting, only a 20% main weapon full attack rate?

    What do you think were the main obstacles? Positioning and terrain? Lack of flight?


    Hm. Positioning would be an overarching category responsible for some (probably the plurality or majority, going off recollection) of that, yes. Within positioning, flight is an associated issue that contributes sometimes (as are "obstacles," "hostile battlefield control," "mobile opponents," etc). For example, relying on items to fly means low caster level (typically CL 5 for an item based fly spell out of the books) making it easy for even lesser foes and mooks to dispel at level 15. I don't recall whether that was a feature of the particular fights included in my counted data, but I know it happened in that adventure. Yay for falling back out of the fight after spending a turn to get up there.

    Yeah, 20% is low. On the other hand, I do play a fighter. This means that while my data is empirical data derived from actually counting full attacks in a real game, it is for a fighter, and I've also posted before about how they are below average at translating attack and damage bonuses into offensive performance.

    So I'm not necessarily saying you should use that 20% for any meleer.

    What I would advise is eyeballing your character to judge how easy he will be to interfere with and applying that to DPR on a per character basis. E.g. if there's battlefield control in between him and the enemy, does he Spell Sunder on through or have to go around or wait? Are his saves strong to power through adverse effects or weak and he will end up often stymied? Would difficult terrain present a minor or major obstacle? Can he fight in the dark? Etc. It's kind of unscientific, but it's a complicated evaluation of a large cocktail of factors (too many for math), and eyeballing would serve better than a standard approach where every meleer spends 1 round approaching and 3 rounds full attacking.

    Lantern Lodge

    I wish we had more data on the subject. :(. I should gather some data myself and see how it goes.

    I guess to boils down to a few very simplistic scenarios. Problem 1 is getting to the enemy. Problem 2 is keeping the enemy near. And problem 3 is acquiring new enemies.

    It looks like everything but the number of rounds spent moving is set in stone. I might bump it up to 5 rounds/combat, with 2 rounds spent moving. Does that sound reasonable you think? Or should it be 50% of rounds spent moving?

    EDIT: Part of my hesitancy is that most of the character's I've played recently have been ranged, with the melee in the group having pounce.


    FrodoOf9Fingers wrote:
    Coriat wrote:
    Quote:
    Is there anyone who experiences more than 4 encounters a day?

    Yes, but it's not a bad baseline.

    I never got around to collecting more data for this - it is wearisome - but it might be relevant?

    What do you think were the main obstacles?

    Me.

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