Hiya!
Players Advice: If a newbie player is trying to find/ask what the "best choice or build" is, then their first DM failed miserably at teaching them the basis of the game; to use your imagination to create an interesting persona with which to engage in a world of make believe. If I start talking to a player at my FLGS (not very often, nowadays), and they spout on and on about how they have been playing for "almost ten years now, and DM's hate me because I make the best characters"....RED ALERT!...RED ALERT!...RED ALERT! That is a player who's advice every should ignore except as an example of a 'player gone bad'.
DM's Advice: If a DM is young (early to mid 20's or younger), and has less than a decade of experience playing and DM'ing in several multi-year campaigns using several different game systems and milieu's...then take that advice with a grain of salt. If they are older, with 10 to 20 years experience...but most of that is focused on one key system (say, "D&D"), then again...grain of salt. But if you find a DM in their 30's, 40's or 50's....and they've been DM'ing for 20 years or more, and they've DM'ed multiple systems/games that lasted multiple years each? Yeah...write down what he/she says. In short, the more experience and the more variety, the more wise the advice will likely be. NOTE: Not always! There are always outliers, to be sure.
As for damage of d6 vs d8 as "optimal"; This is one of the things that REALLY impressed me with Hackmaster 4th. The exceptionally cool "penetration damage". In HM4, doing d6 could do more damage than the d8 in the long run (or even in the short run!). If you rolled max on a die, you rolled it again (with a -1). If you kept rolling max on that die, you kept rolling until you didn't roll max. Ex: You roll a d6; you get a 6, 6, 6, 6, 1. Your total would be 6 +5, +5, +5, +0 for a total of 21 damage. With this system, a weapon that did 4d4 was, overall, superior to a weapon that did 2d10 simply because rolling a 4 is two and a half times as likely as rolling a 10; and you get 4 initial chances over 2. My late wife, Yen Lo Wang bless her soul, had a female half-ogre fighter who was strong (and big) enough to use a Giant Sized Battle Ax did 4d4 damage with it (plus str, which I can't remember). She killed herself. She had a LOT of HP's. She Fumbled (roll of 1 on attack roll), then managed to get the dreaded 'hit self'. She started rolling 4d4 and ended up with multiple dice penetrating multiple times. I can't remember what the total was, but if I had to guess it was well into 60 points!
Anyway. Advice is good from experience in time and in variety. Focused experience, I find, is usually a LOT less useful in a RPG context. (and yes, I take the Sage Advice stuff with a grain of salt specifically for these reasons; I trust multiple folks on these boards more, @
Saelorn, @
Lanefan, @
Sacrosanct, to name but a few).
^_^
Paul L. Ming
