D&D 5E Quick Great Weapon Style math question

[spinozajack]

In my home games I prefer to make all 2d6 weapons do 1d12, because I like twelve-sided dice and do not think they get nearly enough use as is. I also then make GWF do brutal 2 for 1d10, and brutal 3 for 1d12 weapons (unlimited re-rolls of 1, 2, 3). Why? Because of how good the dualist one is.

Since people mentioned that 1d8 + 2 is more powerful than 1d10 and reroll 1s or 2s a single time, statistically, I don't like how the sword and board guy gets a lot more of a damage boost for their weapon than great weapon users get when they focus on it. The longsword guy gets +2 flat damage, where the greasword guy gets 1.33, followed by the sad and lonely greataxe guy who gets only a 0.8333 damage boost? That is just wrong. Great weapon users should have gotten Brutal 3, which would be 1.5 damage bonus, at least. And that's still not only proportionally less, but 25% less in magnitude.

Sword and board + duelist is quite a bit superior mechanically to great weapons if you don't play with feats. I think great weapon users therefore get the shaft when you play basic D&D, particularly when you factor in that the most common magic weapon is the longsword followed by the short sword. If your DM uses treasure tables, you are totally screwed if you prefer greataxes or polearms for example. But if you use feats, you are better off using polearms than even worrying about getting a magic longsword because polearm master gives you up to 2 extra attacks with +10 damage on each, which massively overcompensates for not having the weapon be magic.

I do not like that greatswords do 2d6, then get re-rolls with the fighting style. I like re-rolls but not when the base damage already has two damage die. It's too much. Extra dice are fun, but there rapidly approaches a point when there's too much of a good thing. It racks my brain that half-orc barbarians are really the only character build that benefit from using greataxes over greatswords. What about dwarves? Think of the poor dwarves.

 

[PnPgamer]

Doesn't the stuff work on each rolled dice? Meaning that it would work greatly on a greatsword(pun intended), as rolling a 1 or 2 on each of the dice would cause a reroll of said dice, possibly rerolling both?

 

[spinozajack]

Really....??? It takes what, an additional 4 maybe 5 seconds? Okay, lets be crazy and say its 10 seconds..... is that really a concern?

Yes it is. Adding 4, 5, or 10 seconds, multiple times a round, over multiple rounds, and multiple combats per day, and multiple sessions, and multiple campaigns, simply multiplies that time.

I do like re-rolling but within reason. Rolling 2d6 already has less variance and extremes than 1d12, and has double the amount of rolls. That adds up quickly. Going to two then three attacks per round, that's a lot of dice. Just to determine someone's most basic weapon attack. Two damage rolls max per weapon hit is more than enough. 2D6 was a poor design choice. The whole point of the great weapon fighting style is to mitigate when you whiff by rolling a 1 or a 2 on your damage die. Rolling a 1 or 2 on each d6 means, to use MMO terminology, that GWF procs twice as often as it does for 1d12. 1d12 = 2 / 12 chance, 2d6 = 4 / 12 chance.

Why should great weapon fighting style proc not only more often, but more beneficially for greatsword users, who already have higher average damage? It's not balanced and it's just ill thought out. Rolling a d12 with a re-roll of 1s or 2s to avoid those poor rolls is fun and makes you feel like an expert in that weapon. Doing that for 2d6 isn't, in my opinion.

I would rather take +1 to AC, just to avoid the extra rolling which I think will begin to get tedious after a while (in a game where I'm a player and not the DM and greatswords have 2d6 instead of 1d12). I want combat rounds especially for melee types to go quickly. Especially when I play a simple fighter. It's not that big a deal to ask a DM to downgrade your damage from 2d6 to 1d12 if you do want to use greatswords, but anyway.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I had a great solution...then I realized there is an issue with it for using it on VTTs. For those who might not mind the issue, I thought I'd share.

Solution: For 2d6 weapons, you only reroll if both dice come up as 1s or 2s. This means you'll only be rerolling once every 8 attacks rather than one in 3--a significant benefit for those of us who don't like re-rolling that often. It does nerf the feature for 2d6 weapons, since average damage drops to 7.43, but it now is almost the same as the d12 weapons (7.33) which means that the Great Weapon Combat Style essentially equalizes the weapons (unless other features like half-orcs or barbarians come into play). It has the added benefit of being much easier in VTTs, as you just reroll the whole attack if the numbers are low.

The issue that occurred to me involves the additional functionality of the class feature. It doesn't have any limits on which damage dice you can reroll--they don't have the be the weapon's base dice! That means this feature works on Superiority Dice, (Improved) Divine Smite, magic weapons that provide extra damage dice, etc. Pretty cool feature I had forgotten.

The slight downside is that I wouldn't want to extend the change I'm considering to apply to those additional dice. It would just be on the initial 2d6 that both of them have to be below 3 and then you reroll them both. That might be fine at a table, but it would still be a hassle when using dice cups on a VTT.

 

[pemerton]

Whenever I used a brutal weapon in 4e I simply changed the math to remove the reroll.

<snip>

I remember having something that was 1d10 brutal 2, so the GM let me roll 1d8+2 instead. Heck of a lot easier.

We've done that from the start in my 4e game. Although now a couple of characters have weapons that do brutal 1 d8s.

When the fighter player has to roll 10 of these d8s for some of his daily powers, the rerolls (and the rerolls on the rerolls) start to become noticeable!

 

[The Human Target]

We've done that from the start in my 4e game. Although now a couple of characters have weapons that do brutal 1 d8s.

When the fighter player has to roll 10 of these d8s for some of his daily powers, the rerolls (and the rerolls on the rerolls) start to become noticeable!

Now that is a lot more of an issue I've seen myself.