Concur with the points above. The issue with exploding dice is increased by the fact that characters tend to be outnumbered by their opponents, which means that the enemy has a lot more chances to get lucky.
- If your fights are mostly one big boss and a group of players, the players are more likely to trigger an explosion and move ahead successfully. On the other hand, these fights tend to be quick because the players can focus fire and are active most of the time.
- If your fights are mostly hordes of minions, the minions are more likely to trigger an explosion and flatten a character or two. This reduces player participation, not a good thing, and it's for the fights that tend to drag the most, as the GM needs to roll and act for each member of the swarm.
Incidentally, using exploding dice can also skew your damage curve in weird ways. And it makes players want to use smaller dice sizes, so they can enjoy them exploding more. The table below shows the odds of rolling
Damage or more with an exploding die. For instance, you have a 25% chance of rolling 5 or more damage with an exploding d4.
Note what happens with 6 damage: you have better odds of rolling 6 or more damage with an exploding d4 than with an exploding d6! Not too critical when large amounts of hit points are in play, but possibly undesired.
Damage | d4 probability | d6 probability | d8 probability |
---|
1 | 100% | 100% | 100% |
2 | 75% | 83.3% | 87.5% |
3 | 50% | 66.7% | 75% |
4 | 25% | 50% | 62.5% |
5 | 25% | 33.3% | 50% |
6 | 18.8% | 16.7% | 37.5% |
7 | 12.5% | 16.7% | 25% |
8 | 6.3% | 13.9% | 12.5% |
9 | 6.3% | 11.1% | 12.5% |
10 | 4.7% | 8.3% | 10.9% |
11 | 3.1% | 5.6% | 9.4% |
12 | 1.6% | 2.8% | 7.8% |
Looking at things yet differently again, an exploding
N sided die has an average value of
X, and we have:
X = (
N + 1) / 2 +
X /
N
Which gives:
(
N - 1)
X =
N (
N + 1) / 2
X =
N * (
N + 1) / (2 * (
N - 1))
The average for an unexploded
N sided die is (
N + 1) / 2, so we get:
d4: normal 2.5, exploded 3.33 (+0.83 per die)
d6: normal 3.5, exploded 4.2 (+0.7 per die)
d8: normal 4.5, exploded 5.14 (+0.64 per die)
So the bonus you get from an explosion decreases as your dice become bigger - and on average you'd get more by adding 1 damage per die.
Edit: fixed the math. Explosions are worth even less.
This message was last edited by the user at 08:42, Thu 22 Dec 2016.