Okay, this happened on Friday night:
I'm fighting a monster with 4 hit points. I get to roll 6 dice, and I have an item that gives me the "add one to the result of one die" ability in effect, as well as another item that allows me to "reroll as many dice as I want on one test per round" in effect.
I roll 2 successes, a 4, and a bunch of misses. Essentially a very average result on 6 dice for a non-blessed person. That's when it get's tricky.
A) My immediate reaction was to add a pip to the 4, making it a hit, then reroll the other three dice.
B) My friend told me I should reroll all 4 of the misses and save the added pip for after the reroll.
So, assuming all I care about is defeating this monster (i.e. doing at least 2 more wounds to it on this encounter) and further assuming that saving up the reroll for a different test in a later part of the turn isn't required, which strategy above (A or B) gives me the greatest chance of killing the monster?
Strategy A is an easy enough math problem. You have 3 hits in your pocket and need one more, the odds of failing to hit one more time on 3 dice is 8/27, meaning that the odds of success my way are 19/27, or roughly 70%.
For the life of me I cannot figure out how to correctly count it up my friend's way (B). Every time I do, I get a slightly different result. That said, his way usually wins. But then that's not reliable given that I might be adding it wrong every way I've tried so far.
Help?