[Points of Light] Static Damage an Improvement?

[C4]

...for DMs?

An idea that's recently occurred to me, as I've begun writing monsters and monster guidelines for my Points of Light clone:


Would diceless damage for all monsters be an improvement for you, a fly in your pudding, or no big deal either way?


PoL won't have tons of canned monsters, but it'll have detailed guidelines for monster creation and conversion. Thing is, there's no good way to write damage guidelines other than 'Monsters should do 8 + level damage, modified by caste and riders. Split damage evenly between dice and a flat bonus. (For non-minions.) Here's a table of dice and average damage; have at it!'


That's probably how the 4e team does it, but I wonder if regular DMs who convert/invent monsters wouldn't rather leave out those last two sentences. I know I'm leaning that way; I've already made a standard 'Critical: x damage' line for every monster attack -- including minions -- and it's very tempting to write all monster damage as static values. (Crit damage = 1.5 x normal damage.)


And of course, diceless damage means less die-rolling for the DM, which means faster combats. So, opinions?

 

[Viking Bastard]

It's a turn off for me. Yeah, it saves time, but I like rolling damage.

I'm totally cool with not rolling for attack, though. But ah like mah damage pool.

 

[jodyjohnson]

I mix it up. When I want fast I go average, when I want more variety use the dice.

Or mooks get average, leaders and specials get to roll.

 

[MarkB]

It does at least make criticals from monsters more consistently impressive. Since monsters and NPCs in 4e don't generally get to throw in extra dice of damage on crits, but simply maximise their damage, I've often seen cases where a monster catches a group of PCs in an area attack, crits against one and hits a couple of others normally, but then the damage roll was high anyway, so the critical hit only actually inflicts a couple more points of damage.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Make it like this: 1d12 + 6 (12) damage, or 1d12 + 18 (24) on a critical hit. In fact, you probably would need to list the crit damage even if the attack isn't "high crit".

 

[S'mon]

I'm in favour - I noticed that the D&D Minis game ran much quicker than 4e despite being so similar, and the lack of pointless arbitrary damage rolls was a big factor. 4e damage rolls get far too convoluted for practicality and just slow the game down; IME fixed damage with x1.5 for crit (x2 for high crit) would be far better.

I'd make PC damage fixed too, likewise. Been running Dragon Warriors recently, it has fixed damage and I was using x1.5 crits; worked excellently.

 

[MarkB]

I'm in favour - I noticed that the D&D Minis game ran much quicker than 4e despite being so similar, and the lack of pointless arbitrary damage rolls was a big factor. 4e damage rolls get far too convoluted for practicality and just slow the game down; IME fixed damage with x1.5 for crit (x2 for high crit) would be far better.

It can get pretty complicated. The barbarian in our game is built for crits and has a high critical range, and on a crit he rolls 8d12 + 2d6 + 1d10, re-rolls 1s and 2s on the d12s, and can re-roll one of the d6s if it rolls a 1. It can take awhile - though we usually feel that the results are worth it.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Something I've noted when I'm DMing, die-rolling damage doesn't take time for regular attacks (even AoE attacks), but the turn becomes much longer if a crit is rolled or if an elite/solo is making multiple separate attacks (such as Dual Slice, or what have you).

My last session ended with a 5 on 5 battle, with each enemy being an elite. Most of them had double attacks of some kind, and they all had silver swords (so they all did bonus damage on a crit).

 

[Kinak]

I've been doing the same thing (in Pathfinder) with the criticals and it's worked well. For normal damage, I've just capped the number of dice monsters roll (rolling a maximum of three dice at any time) and made the rest static.

So, at most, I'm adding three dice to a flat value (plus a modifier if critical). That provides a bit of a damage range without bogging things down.

I agree with [MENTION=1165](Psi)SeveredHead[/MENTION] that multiple attacks and crits slow it down more than just rolling damage. Cutting out multiple attacks has done way more to speed things up than the damage or critical changes. Added together, it makes things run a lot smoother.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[the Jester]

While there's nothing wrong with average damage per se; however, I love rolling dice, so I would never use a system that didn't allow for it.