## Portent feature: is it replacing only the d20 roll or the final outcome?

The divination wizard’s Portent ability states (emphasis mine)

You can replace any attack roll, saving throw, or ability check made by you or a creature that you can see with one of these foretelling rolls. You must choose to do so before the roll, and you can replace a roll in this way only once per turn.

The PHB (pag 7, "The D20", 3rd paragraph) describes saving throws, attack rolls and ability checks as

[…] the three main kinds of d20 rolls, forming the core of the rules of the game.

All three of them consists of a d20 roll and then modifiers are applied to this die roll. The description of Portent is quite foggy: the first sentence suggests that it allows to replace the final result (d20+mods), while the second part of the description mentions the roll, without specifying if it just refers to the d20 roll or to d20+mods.

Is Portent allowing the wizard to replace the final result or just the d20 roll?

This topic is covered in several answers and questions related to Portent working with other rules/aspects of the game: these report some tweets by Jeremy Crawford. On one hand, the Sage Advice Compendium ("Official Ruling" section) states they are not considered official anymore, on the other hand in the very same section is stated that they could be a preview of rulings that will appear here [i.e. in Sage Advice]. Jeremy’s tweet about this issue have not been still included in any version of Sage Advice Compendium, at the best of my knowledge.

## Does a “willing” creature know the outcome of the spell that is being cast on them?

Perhaps put another way, can you lie when casting a spell on a "willing creature"? For instance, I could cast Dimension Door on myself and one willing creature. I may tell him we’re going across that gorge, but in reality, we’re going 500 feet up for some tasty 20d6 fall damage for both of us, because why not?

Does a willing creature know what they are subjecting themselves to specifically? Or do they merely allow a spell to be cast on them, trusting that you’re going to do what you say you’re going to do?

## Which modifier added to a 1D20 has the closest outcome probability as rolling 2D20 with advantage with no modifier?

I’m trying to determine the probability of every modifier to a 1D20:

1D20 +1 1D20 +2 1D20 +3 1D20 +4 1D20 +5 

2D20 (Keep highest) 3D20 (Keep highest) 4D20 (Keep highest) 

Any help would be highly appreciated

## How does rolling two d20 and taking the higher affect the average outcome?

D&D 5E has an “advantage” concept where instead of rolling 1d20, you roll 2d20 and take the higher. Likewise, disadvantage means rolling 2d20 and taking the lower.

How does this affect the expected average outcome of the roll?

## When using the Augury spell, how good or bad does the outcome of the course of action have to be to justify a response of Weal / Woe?

My players are planning to use Augury to decide whether to enter a dungeon, and I’m trying to decide what the outcome of the spell should be.

I can see that some extremes should be obvious: for example, if the dungeon contains four ancient dragons that will annihilate them, it’s Woe. If the dungeon contains a pile of platinum and no dangers at all, it’s Weal. But what if it’s a ‘typical’ dungeon with monsters and traps but also treasure? Does that count as Weal, Woe, Weal and Woe, or neither? What if, again as is often the case, there is danger first before there’s treasure? What if there’s a tough puzzle that might cause them to quit after taking damage but before finding treasure?

If it makes a difference, which I think it might, I would like them to explore this dungeon, and I think they have the skills to survive it and find the treasure. I’ve seen people suggest that Augury is really a way for the PCs to communicate with the DM, and if that’s the case, I would be tempted to say Weal, as code for ‘yes, please do it’. But I don’t want them to feel betrayed when they get (non-lethally) hurt.

As pointed out in comments, Augury only covers events in the next 30 minutes. I’d be interested in answers for both of the following situations:

1) This is a very short dungeon which can be cleared in less than thirty minutes; or

2) The players ask only about whether they should enter the first room of the dungeon – I think this exacerbates the problem because it’s even less clear whether this will be good or bad.

## Predicting the outcome of sporting events with multiplicative scoring

In the Olympic format for sport climbing, eight athletes compete in three rounds of climbing. Their final score is the multiplication of their rankings in each round. For example, an athlete who comes 1st in the first round, 5th in the second round, and 7th in the third will have a final score of $$1\times5\times7=35$$. The athletes with the lowest final score wins.

Assuming that the competition is already partly underway (possibly even mid-round), is there a computer algorithm to quickly compute the probabilities $$P_{ar}$$ of each athlete $$a$$ achieving a final ranking $$r$$, assuming the performance of the athletes is entirely random from here on? Even with 8 athletes the brute force method seems too computationally intensive.

If this isn’t computationally possible in a reasonable time, is there an algorithm to get “close enough” to those probabilities?

## Outcome of Needham-Schroeder protocol

I am studying Needham-Schroeder protocol in my course subject and I understood it well, but there is a homework problem which is asking, “what is the outcome of Needham-Schroeder protocol?”

According to me, its outcome is a security session between Alice and Bob for communication and kdc is responsible for that security session. Is my answer is correct or is this question is about anything else?

## Displaying outcome of Trace

Is there a better way to display Trace output? Parsing could be provided to separate blocks of the computation by an extra line. Trace produces a large chunk of unbroken output that I copy into a new Mathematica window and need to parse manually to display the result in more readable format.

Surely, Mathematica must come with a feature that ensures this and other debug features? If so, can you point me in the right direction? I found a link to the DebugTrace package online, but this only goes up to version 9 of Mathematica.

## How to document the outcome of an event storming session

It’s been a long time since I was first introduced to Event Storming in a DDD workshop. More recently we decided to apply it in practice and we have planned our first sessions with a facilitator (someone from the company who has experience).

The only thing i’m wondering now is how the process AFTER event storming takes place? How does one take the domain knowledge gathered during an event storming session and make sure that it’s well documented for other people to consult?

Are there modelling techniques to document the outcome? Do I just take pictures? Should we start the software architecture process straight away and let the code speak for itself?

## How can I end combat quickly when the outcome is inevitable?

I’m DMing for a party of 6. In our next session, I’m planning on running four combat encounters. With such a large group, I’ve found that it usually takes an hour or two to get through a single battle. So I’m potentially looking at an 8-hour session!

However, I’ve also noticed that once my players have taken out most of the enemies in an encounter, the outcome of the battle is set in stone. The players will win, it’s just a matter of time. Even so, it can take 10-20 minutes and multiple rounds around the table to finish lopping off those last few hit points. Skipping these rounds and saying the enemies are just dead doesn’t quite work because the players will probably lose a few more hit points and spell slots/ability uses before the end of combat. I want to balance my dungeons on the attrition between consecutive fights.

How can I speed up these last few rounds of an encounter without letting my players keep all of the HP and spell slots they would have used had we played them out in full?

(I’m looking for answers other than making the enemies retreat. I can do that in a lot of situations, but I’d like other options as well. And sometimes, enemies will want to fight to the death no matter what.)