Galloglaich
First Post
I've been doing some heavy permutations/probability number crunching over the break, and I wanted to run something past the folks here.
Playing around with possible speed fixes for iterative attacks, I've found something that works pretty good for me personally:
But there is just no way around one peculiarity of the 3rd and 4th iterative attacks, to wit:
- At 6th level, you get a 2nd attack, but both attacks suffer a -2 penalty (-2/-2 instead of 0/-5).
- At 11th level, the penalty drops to -1/-1 (instead of 0/-5/-10).
- At 16th level, the penalty drops to -0/-0 (instead of 0/-5/-10/-20).
Against creatures that you have almost no hope of hitting (natural 18 or better on your first attack, and natural 20's thereafter); and against creatures that you almost can't miss (needing "less than a natural 2" on your first attack, with a great chance of success on even your 3rd and 4th attacks), your expected damage will drop off.
So the core poll question is this:
If your expected damage over the range of 80-90% of all creatures you will encounter will INCREASE by 5 to 20%, would you be willing to lose your 3rd and 4th attack, and accept a DECREASE against the "edge case" creatures (very high AC or very low AC)?
EDIT: I want to clarify that. At -1/-1, your expected damage against most creatures you will encounter is BETTER than three attacks at 0/-5/-10; and at -0/-0, your expected damage against most creatures you will encounter is BETTER than four attacks at 0/-5/-10/-15.
There are other emergent benefits to this proposal (levelling the expected damage output non-fighter classes, reducing the necessity of AC-pumping for PCs, etc.) but I am primarily concerned with how this fix strikes the primary fighting classes.
I selected "Other": I agree iterative attacks is a clumsy rule: use the Martial Pool instead.
Give your players a Martial Pool dice at a certain rate, say one at first level plus one per every 3 BaB. (Or alternately do as we do and give them one per BaB with a cap at 4th level)
Then once they have say two Martial Pool, that means two dice, with no extra bonus ove their BaB, but they can choose to either attack twice with one die each, or attack one time using both dice and keeping the highest roll. This is called a "roll many / keep one" system. It improves their average die roll by about +4, doubles their chance of getting a natural 20, and all but eliminates their chance of getting a fumble (all of this increases with more and more dice). You can also give them multipliers on critical hit damage, one per dice they rolled.
If you are using armor as damage reduction you can have even more fun with this by letting them use their MP for active defense die rolls.
This eliminates all that useless arithmetic, and also allows you basically replace things like full attack option, tracking the number of AoO, fighting defensively, etc. etc. just by weighing the dice in your hand instead of doing a bunch of math.
It's much more intuitive, more cinematic / dramatic and also faster IMO.
G.