I'm working on an article about "how fun can dice be?" And I need to know about how often on average you get to roll for damage as a martial character swinging your weapon.

I'm taking a guess that the answer is between 6 and 12x per session. 12 feels really high though.

Your poll has no statistical merit and will not be helpful to your article.  There are just too many factors you do not control for.

What level character and what class?  A max level Fighter with duel wielding can get 8 attacks in a single combat with 3x hits per attack, haste, action surge, and an off hand attack (and can do so in two consecutive rounds). A rogue will only get that one hit.  A lower level character might get one hit, but get more hits as they level up.

How long is a session?  An hour session is obviously going to have fewer hits than a six hour one. 

What type of campaign is it? Combat heavy? Roleplay heavy? Etc. This will have a huge effect on hits. 

Does your DM do lots of fights with lower difficulties, or a few fights at deadly difficulty?  This both changes how many hits the characters might attempt and the AC of monsters, making them harder or easier to hit.

How fast does your group do combat?

There are dozens of other factors that might influence how many hits one does per combat, making this particular metric completely incapable of producing worthwhile data.

I had a paladin who had such bad luck with attack rolls that she went three sessions without landing a blow.

Reading the title, I thought it was going to ask the likelihood of a given hit landing in my experience. Sure, it would still be somewhat prone to the peculiarities that come with a person's game etc, but it would be useful to see "real world data" of how often it actually hits in the field rather than the theoretical predictions (although I'm not sure memory is a reliable source for this kind of question).

Also just saying, in my now running campaign, we had three 6 hour sessions in a row with no combat at all.

So, what is missing for this poll are the basics, session length, number of combat encounters per session, type and level of martial character build... etc.

It's not even number of combats; different monsters rely on different ways to survive.

A gelatinous cube relies on tanking the hits, and so you will most likely hit & get to roll damage when fighting one.

An animated sword has a high AC and few HP, so you might spend a while trying to hit it but when you do, it falls down.

So far as how satisfying it is, that depends as well. I think (based on just the dice) that it's more fun to deal with hordes than a single large foe, because you feel like you're making a difference to a horde if you kill one with almost every hit. Big bads can just be damage sponges, and that doesn't feel satisfying on it's own - it relies on the DM's descriptions of the attacks and the big bad's responses to them (like recoiling, roaring in rage, laughing, and so on) to keep the combat interesting.

In our last session we fought a displacer beast. I had an artefact which gave me truesight (not nice for my character, who keeps disguise self up all the time to cover his burns), so I was hitting more often than the other characters. I was also a Warlock, throwing magic stones, so not really a martial character. In the combat before that, we fought big robot lumberjacks, and we all hit a lot easier.

I think people are focusing on the wrong things. Sure, you'll get different results fighting a Gelatinous Cube versus, say,. Tarrasque, but you don't spend your entire D&D career fighting either, and those kinds of things average out. It would then get averaged out by the poll, being spread over multiple players. Again, it's not often that a given player will spend an entire session just doing roleplay, which will also get averaged out twice - over their D&D career and over the participants of the poll. 

Given that this seems to not even pretend to be a scientific study, and seems to be isolating the joy of specifically rolling damage dice, those factors aren't terrible.

The major problem that I see is session length. Different players play for different amount of times. A person who routinely plays for 16 hours per session will almost certainly roll far more damage dice than someone who squeezes a half hour in here and there. Also, session lengths generally don't vary for an individual. I might have varied proportions of different kind of encounters that will average out, but I routinely only play 1.5 hours per session due to circumstances. It won't vary that much - very occasionally it may change, but it won't average out to become equivalent to other people's sessions. You only have one instance of it being averaged out - at the poll level. That makes it pretty much incompatible. My answer of, say, 8x per session cannot be compared with (say) Caerwyn's 30x per session because I have quick forays into D&D compared to Caerwyn's epic 50 marathons (ok O made up Caerwyn's habits, but the principle is there). The poll needs to be about times per hour or percentage rate or something like that, so we can be comparing at least apples to apples.

Quote from Linklite >>

I think people are focusing on the wrong things. Sure, you'll get different results fighting a Gelatinous Cube versus, say,. Tarrasque, but you don't spend your entire D&D career fighting either, and those kinds of things average out. It would then get averaged out by the poll, being spread over multiple players. Again, it's not often that a given player will spend an entire session just doing roleplay, which will also get averaged out twice - over their D&D career and over the participants of the poll. 

Given that this seems to not even pretend to be a scientific study, and seems to be isolating the joy of specifically rolling damage dice, those factors aren't terrible.

The major problem that I see is session length. Different players play for different amount of times. A person who routinely plays for 16 hours per session will almost certainly roll far more damage dice than someone who squeezes a half hour in here and there. Also, session lengths generally don't vary for an individual. I might have varied proportions of different kind of encounters that will average out, but I routinely only play 1.5 hours per session due to circumstances. It won't vary that much - very occasionally it may change, but it won't average out to become equivalent to other people's sessions. You only have one instance of it being averaged out - at the poll level. That makes it pretty much incompatible. My answer of, say, 8x per session cannot be compared with (say) Caerwyn's 30x per session because I have quick forays into D&D compared to Caerwyn's epic 50 marathons (ok O made up Caerwyn's habits, but the principle is there). The poll needs to be about times per hour or percentage rate or something like that, so we can be comparing at least apples to apples.

Even then it still doesn't work, because there are so many factors.

- an intrigue campaign will have lots of skill checks and roleplay, and not many attack rolls
- a game focussing on enemies which are hard to hit (displacer beasts, high AC enemies, ghosts) will get less hits than one focussing on many enemies (goblins).
- A game with many enemies will get more hits because damage doesn't overflow - you need 3 hits to kill 3 1hp enemies, but only one hit to kill 1 3hp enemy
- A character who is optimised for more attacks (EG a monk) will give a different answer to one optimised for fewer, stronger attacks (barbarian)
- Any encounter where the enemies fly invalidates 50% of martial capabilities, so someone who would normally swing a bunch of times with a pair of swords may be reduced to one attack with a crossbow.

It still seems like it's not going to mean much, to me!

60 percent of the time, I deal damage every time

it depends of nany factors;  how many combat encounter you have in a given session, how many attacks you can make per turn, how Lucky you are with d20 roll, how long combat last, how many monsters there is and how high is their AC vs your attack bonus, how frequent ennemies provoke opportunity attack from you etc.. 

Id say a martial chatacter with 1 attack doing 4 combat in a session could damage up to 12 times a session, where one with Extra Attack  Two-Weapon Fighting or Polearm Master as much as 16+

Giving this a bit more thought, I wanted to raise another issue with your survey and provide what might be a better set of questions.  

To start with the issue, your article wants to discuss something subjective - how fun dice are - but asks a question that is objective in nature - tallying how many times you hit.  This creates a problem for your article - the article would be you taking the, as discussed herein, extremely problematic objective data and trying to make a subjective point from it - that guarantees the article will be about your subjective analysis of the data and what you find fun, making the article really more of a personal anecdote than generally applicable analysis. 

What you probably want to do is ask questions that focus on subjective enjoyment, not on mechanics. The questions should be focused on gathering subjective data you want for your article, so it is a bit hard for outsiders to come up with the right questions.  “Do you enjoy dice-based combat?”  “Have you played tabletop RPGs that do not use dice-based combat?”  “If you have played tabletop RPGs that do not use dice-based combat, which do you generally prefer? Dice/ Diceless/I have not played)”. “Do you believe dice-based combat adds to your play experience?”  “Do you believe dice-based combat is an acceptable metric for simulating the random elements of a real fight?”

Things like that which speak to both the players’ experiences with alternatives and their perceptions of the system itself. 

Okay, here's the thing: I don't have a questionnaire for you. I have one poll on D&D Beyond. Everyone knows that rolling a 1 on damage feels lack-luster, but rolling maximum damage feels great. It isn't about your static bonus, but how lucky you feel when you roll that top number.

Is rolling 10 in 2d6 as exciting as rolling 10 on 1d10? It isn't because the number is invisible to your emotions. "Maximum" versus "really good" is visible. Do you get 12 damage every session with 2d6? On average that'll be once every 36 hits. Is that a nightly occurance for most players using a great sword? Or once every three to five sessions? You are far more likely to get that dopamine hit from 1d12 than you are from 2d6. Heck, rolling a 10 or 11 sometimes results in the Silver Medal Fallacy. If a game maxed out at 1d12 instead of 2d6 would it actually be more fun, because you might reliably get a max roll every session.

You'll feel the difference between two or three times per session, once per session, once every other session, more or less frequently than that blurs together, because it's either "all the time" or "super rare".

Sure, I could ask, "How often per hour?" But that's assuming every table has 30mn of combat, followed by 15mn of exploration, and 15mn of social play, rinse and repeat, as opposed to the far more common 1hr-ish of combat, 2hrs of something else... then maybe another 30mn combat and 30mn of faffing about if you play for 4hrs; or you continue the cycle if you play for longer.

Most combats are going to last about 3 to 5 turns. Hit 60% of the time (average) and you'll hit 6x, unless you're an uncommon level of fighter, or any monk.

So with just 1 question to ask, "How often do you roll max?" Without including homebrew, how else do you want me to ask?

Your poll, as written does not address any of this. It does not even ask the question you present in your last paragraph, though that question would still have myriad issues, including all of the issues about length of session, type of character, playstyle, being an objective question trying to gauge a subjective, emotional response, etc. 

That last point is even more dire in light of your most recent post - I expressed concerns in my prior post that you were attempting to apply your own subjective bias to objective survey results, trying to pass off your own personal analysis of other’s data as some insight into how everyone enjoys the game.  That is evident from your post, where you just casually postulate that 1d12 is objectively more fun than 2d6, even though I know plenty of players who simply find 2d6 more enjoyable because they find consistency more fun than variation.

Your question is like asking “how many times do you swallow?” What? Food, beverage, or both? When? Is it meal time? Over how long? Per meal…? Per day…? Lifetime average…? There are too many parameters required to accurately answer that question.

It would be a more accurate question to ask how many hits per however many attacks made during combat as an overall average. My group could go through two to three 3-4 hour long sessions and not see combat at all, or have nothing but combat for three sessions. Some tables play 1 2-hour session every other day, other groups play a single 6-hour session once/month… my group does one 3-4 hour long session every week…. But hits/attacks on average is answerable. Make sense?

It sounds like what you're after is the frequency of maximum damage, which implies you're missing a word from your question in the poll!

Would it be a better option to ask people if they prefer 2d6 damage weapons or 1d12 damage weapons? This way you take out all the variables for what they are fighting and how their game works, and focus on your hypothesis - that people prefer 1d12 weapons because they have a higher chance of 12 damage than 2d6 weapons.

Quote from Erokow32 >>

Is rolling 10 in 2d6 as exciting as rolling 10 on 1d10? It isn't because the number is invisible to your emotions. "Maximum" versus "really good" is visible. Do you get 12 damage every session with 2d6? On average that'll be once every 36 hits. Is that a nightly occurance for most players using a great sword? Or once every three to five sessions? You are far more likely to get that dopamine hit from 1d12 than you are from 2d6. Heck, rolling a 10 or 11 sometimes results in the Silver Medal Fallacy. If a game maxed out at 1d12 instead of 2d6 would it actually be more fun, because you might reliably get a max roll every session.

 I disagree with this premise. Sure max feels good, but min feels worse. We are hardwired to feel the bad results more than the good, and try hard to avoid those bad results. I absolutely prefer greatsword over greataxe because the average is higher, I can't roll a 1, and even a 2 is very unlikely. 

Furthermore, 90% of the fun of mechanics like Sneak Attack and Fireball is the chance to roll a whole fistful of dice. These things are extremely unlikely to ever max out, so there must be other factors that affect the thrill of rolling. With no other factors other than enjoyment of rolling, I'd rather play a rogue than a fighter.

You could even argue that the 5e devs themselves believe that "more" beats "max" in terms of dice enjoyment. In 4e crits maxed dice rolled, but for 5e they decided to double dice rolled instead. And my group hates getting a 1 for crit damage so much that we've instituted a damage floor equal to proficiency bonus to avoid it.

Wait, do you want to know how often we hit, or how often we roll high damage?!? My character’s almost never miss, but I’ll be dipped if I can even roll average damage, even on a crit.

I wonder if the OP is secretly Wil Wheaton? ;p