[ister]

Just because Kivan is great without the bracers doesn't mean he isn't even better with them.

And you're right about the relative boost. If Imoen (otherwise) has a 15% chance to hit an enemy while Kivan has a 35% chance to hit the enemy then it is true that Imoen's odds will go to 25% with the bracers while Kivan's will go to 45%. The relative boost for Imoen is much better. But no-one should care about the relative boost - what matter is how often you hit the beggar. And they get exactly the same boost to how often they actually hit. Maybe it's more noticeable when 15% goes to 25% than when 35% goes to 45%, but the change is the same. Human intuition about these sorts of things is notoriously bad.

And it is obviously true that there are a hge numebr of variables that affect the outcome of a given battle. But you can vary basically every parameter and in almost all cases Kivan will be more effective than Imoen with the bracers. I've identified a couple of situations where Imoen would be better. I honestly can't think of any others - the only advantage to giving them to Imoen is to minimize the number of misses, and you'll very rarely want to minimize misses rather than maximize kills.

Let me try to put this another way. Suppose that we can identify all of possible battles, and we can define exactly how a player will fight each of these battles. The number of combinations is clearly immense, much larger than the number of dice rolls in the game. But I think it's broadly true that we can define every single battle and every single 'fighting style'. For each combination of battle and fighting style we can exactly calculate the odds of all possible outcomes. Once we've defined the battles and fighting styles this part is indisputable. We can then calculate whether the outcomes are more favourable (say by calculating total number of hps lost by the party in each case, or total number of party deaths in all outcomes, or potions consumed or whatever) with Kivan wearing the bracers or with Imoen wearing the bracers. To work out the best outcome we'd then need to decide what is a good measure of 'most favourable' and add up all the outcomes for all the combinations to see which is better. All of this is an immense amount of work, but theoretically it could be done. Now my argument is that in almost all battles and almost all reasonable fighting styles Kivan will be more effective. If there are a reasonable number of combinations of battles and fighting styles in which Imoen will be better then the questions of how we define a favourable outcome, what the incidence of the different battles will be, and what fightign styles are likely will play a big role in evaluating which is the better choice.

But I think I can show that in almost any battle situation and in almost any fighting style Kivan will make better use of the bracers than Imoen. This is because he fires the bow more often (until he kills his target) and each of his hits does more damage.

I do concede that if your fighting style is such that Kivan will be in melee combat when facing tough opponents Imoen should get the bracers. And that for situations where Kivan can only miss on 1, Imoen should get the bracers. And that when you're trying to disrupt spell casters and not cause damage (or bring down mirror images) Imoen should get the bracers. And that in cases where oppenents are easy to hit and are usually killed by a single arrow it makes no difference who gets the bracers. However I think it should be clear that if both are only firing arrows, Kivan is better with the bracers when faced with two melee-only half-ogres on a bridge, or with a half dozen kobold commandos in a dungeon.

My argument is not therefore that we can predict the expected outcome of all battles. (Although theoretically we can.) It is that the situations where it makes more sense for Imoen to have the bracers are vastly outnumbered by the situations where it makes more sense for Kivan to have the bracers, and that the importance of the situations where it makes sense for Imoen to have the bracers is generally pretty low by any reasonable measure.