Fixed damage per attack

JoeNotCharles · Dec 11, 2008

I've been thinking about using the system proposed here where all attacks do average damage, to speed things up. The problem with this is that it means effects that let you reroll damage become useless. If you're going to do this, you should convert these effects to effects that give a slight damage bonus.

Brutal is easy for a single die - since you reroll all 1's (or 2's), it just changes a range of 1-N to 2-N (or 3-N). For a single die, there's still no belling on that so the average is just 0.5 (or 1) higher. So Brutal 1 is a +0.5 damage bonus and Brutal 2 is +1.

So a weapon doing 1d8 damage would do 4.5 (rounding down to 4 for 1[W], or the full 9 for 2[W]), 1d8 Brutal 1 would do 5 (5 for 1[W], 10 for 2[W]), and 1d8 Brutal 2 would do 5.5 (rounding down the 5 for 1[W], 11 for 2[W]).

Are there any other effects that allow you to reroll damage? I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I haven't read all of AV and MP yet.

CapnZapp · Dec 11, 2008

Thanks for bringing this up to our attention.

For the max dmg variant, arriving at a table of plus damage for these effects is slightly tricky, but can (and probably should) be done.

The simplest (but possibly not entirely accurate) option is of course to equate Brutal 1 to +1 dmg, and Brutal 2 to +2 dmg. Double that of the avg dmg variant, that is.

Brain · Dec 11, 2008

You're referencing something, but where is it? Please provide a link to the original.

Harr · Dec 11, 2008

Yep, there's Pray for More in the Astral Weapon powers in PHB pg 100. You can basically reroll a damage roll as an Encounter power. My solution is just to have it do 150% of the flat damage.

I don't know of any other instances of rerolling damage, though there could be... I assume you're familiar with Vorpal weapons and their exploding criticals, but that's another topic mostly, since you can still roll on criticals without intruding too much into the regular game.

JoeNotCharles · Dec 11, 2008

Harr said:
Yep, there's Pray for More in the Astral Weapon powers in PHB pg 100. You can basically reroll a damage roll as an Encounter power. My solution is just to have it do 150% of the flat damage.

I don't know of any other instances of rerolling damage, though there could be... I assume you're familiar with Vorpal weapons and their exploding criticals, but that's another topic mostly, since you can still roll on criticals without intruding too much into the regular game.

Arg, it ate my post. (Well, I hit "back" by mistake and lost it.) Here are the number, I'll fill in the explanation later:

Code:

      1   2   3   4
 1   1   1   3   4
 2   2   2   3   4
 3   3   3   3   4
 4   4   4   3   4

     1   2   3   4   5   6
1   1   1   1   4   5   6
2   2   2   2   4   5   6
3   3   3   3   4   5   6
4   4   4   4   4   5   6
5   5   5   5   4   5   6
6   6   6   6   4   5   6

d4: (2*1 + 2*2 + 6*3 + 6*4) / 16 = 48 / 16 = 3 (+0.5 bonus)
d6: (3*1 + 3*2 + 3*3 + 9*4 + 9*5 + 9*6) / 36 = 153 / 36 = 4.25 (+0.75 bonus)

This looks like a pretty simple pattern - should be easy to turn it into a formula, but it looks to me like Pray For More should give a variable bonus of (sides / 8), depending on your damage dice.

CapnZapp · Dec 12, 2008

Brain said:
You're referencing something, but where is it? Please provide a link to the original.

He's talking about the general idea to do away with rolling damage dice, instead replacing it with a static number. (This number could for a d6 be the average damage, 3.5; the maximum damage, 6; or some nice number in between)

As for links there are several threads discussing this. I didn't get the impression he was talking about any one of them in particular, hence no link.

Hope that brings you up to speed!

CapnZapp · Dec 12, 2008

JoeNotCharles said:
Arg, it ate my post. (Well, I hit "back" by mistake and lost it.) Here are the number, I'll fill in the explanation later:

Code:

1 2 3 4 1 1 1 3 4 2 2 2 3 4 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 3 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 1 1 1 4 5 6 2 2 2 2 4 5 6 3 3 3 3 4 5 6 4 4 4 4 4 5 6 5 5 5 5 4 5 6 6 6 6 6 4 5 6

d4: (2*1 + 2*2 + 6*3 + 6*4) / 16 = 48 / 16 = 3 (+0.5 bonus)
d6: (3*1 + 3*2 + 3*3 + 9*4 + 9*5 + 9*6) / 36 = 153 / 36 = 4.25 (+0.75 bonus)

This looks like a pretty simple pattern - should be easy to turn it into a formula, but it looks to me like Pray For More should give a variable bonus of (sides / 8), depending on your damage dice.

Are you trying to determine the average result of roll a d6; if you "don't like the result", roll again and keep the new result?

Let's assume you'll want to re-roll all 1s, 2s and 3s (because the average result of a d6 is higher than that) but that you'll never want to to re-roll any 4s, 5s or 6s (again because you've already rolled higher than the average). Obviously, in some cases where you "only need one more point of damage" and your current result is effectively worthless this won't necessarily be true. But in general, this will allow us to compute the highest new average of this kind of roll.

And it is very straight-forward:

1 => 3.5
2 => 3.5
3 => 3.5
4 => 4
5 => 5
6 => 6

The average of this strange beast of a die roll is 4.25. An improvement upon the standard d6 with 21.4%.

A quick check confirms that this increase is relatively constant for all die sizes, increasing very slowly with bigger dice. (It's +23% for the d12, for instance).

From a purely statistical standpoint, it would stand to reason to have Pray For More give +25% more damage once per encounter.

However, this doesn't take into account the fact that you might want to use Pray For More only when you roll really badly. To mimic the choice you have with the original power, upping the damage to +50% doesn't seem unreasonable in practical play.

Alex319 · Dec 16, 2008

The average of this strange beast of a die roll is 4.25. An improvement upon the standard d6 with 21.4%.

A quick check confirms that this increase is relatively constant for all die sizes, increasing very slowly with bigger dice. (It's +23% for the d12, for instance).

From a purely statistical standpoint, it would stand to reason to have Pray For More give +25% more damage once per encounter.

However, this doesn't take into account the fact that you might want to use Pray For More only when you roll really badly. To mimic the choice you have with the original power, upping the damage to +50% doesn't seem unreasonable in practical play.

Don't forget, though, when doing this calculation to keep in mind that you will likely have a lot of static damage modifiers which aren't affected by Pray for More.

JoeNotCharles · Dec 17, 2008

Alex319 said:
Don't forget, though, when doing this calculation to keep in mind that you will likely have a lot of static damage modifiers which aren't affected by Pray for More.

Yeah, that's why I wanted to add a point bonus based on the die size rather than a percentage - you could do a "percentage of the damage coming only from dice", but that's confusing.

CapnZapp · Dec 18, 2008

Here's a bonus expressed in damage points, to be added to the rest of the damage (which you have already maximized, or otherwise made static), calculated as 150% of the average:

d4: +1
d6: +2
d8: +2
d10: +3
d12: +3

Say you use this power in a game where damage is maximized. You have a +1 Longsword and 16 Strength. No other damage bonuses. In other words, 1d8+4.

Normally you'd make 12 points of damage. With the above numbers, you'd do 14 points of damage with such a power.

Hardly worth it, wouldn't you say? At least the "+150% damage" proposal puts some oomph into the power (damage is upped to 18), but of course at higher levels this could become too powerful.

---

Personally I'd be inclined to simply say this power adds +6 to the damage (per damage die, of course), irrespective of your die size and what bonuses you have.

Fixed damage per attack

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