D&D 5E So why all the freaking dice?

[variant]

For really pivotal rolls? (fireball , meteor swarm) Sure , 8-10 dice is fun. For a regular attack? you shouldnt need to roll more than a d20 and then... let's say 3 other dice for weapon damage or whatever. Ideally, they will have what 13th age has, and recommend that you use dice conventions (average die rolls and such) to cut down on rolling. It's just insane to see a fighter roll a d20, then weapon damage, then 6d6, then add his strength, then also add his damage bonus. If you are doing that every round or every other round with a cleric rolling a crap ton, and with the use of advantages or disadvantages. Ugh, it pains me to even think about waiting for the players to find the correct dice, then roll them, then add them up . No thanks.

edit* And who knows what crazy stuff they will pull out with the ranger and other classes. I don't know it just seems way too excessive for a single round to grind the game to a hault to make sure the person has the correct number of dice they need to roll.

I don't see how it is insane when you consider in 3e you were rolling 4d20 at level 20 plus all the damage of the weapons which could be anything from 8d6 to 4d12 on top of adding your attack modifier to each d20 and your damage modifier to each attack. In that light, weapon dice + 6d6 isn't that much.

 

[Evenglare]

I don't see how it is insane when you consider in 3e you were rolling 4d20 at level 20 plus all the damage of the weapons which could be anything from 8d6 to 4d12 on top of adding your attack modifier to each d20 and your damage modifier to each attack. In that light, weapon dice + 6d6 isn't that much.

I don't see the point you are making, because this is less awful than 3rd edition's godawfulness, it makes it okay to roll 8+ dice? Aren't edition supposed to get better and learn from their past mistakes? In respect to this 4th edition is great. Pick a power and bam. Done. Any given spell you dont roll more than... lets say an average of 4 dice for any given power even around level 29. Granted the system got bogged down by the sheer amount of powers to pick from, but actually using those powers was elegant.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

Interesting point about 3E rogues and their many dice for sneak attack. I think that works because the important thing about the rogue is that their damage comes almost entirely from sneaky sneaky. Currently it feels like the fighter, master of arms, doesn't care whether he uses a dagger or greatsword, because all those damage dice don't depend on weapon.

 

[delericho]

I remember at the very, very very beginning of all of this there was a poll, and the question was something long the lines of "how many dice do you like to roll", and later on it turned out that more often than not, people liked to roll lots of dice as opposed to few. This transformed into the line of "we like to roll dice", which I saw often repeated in many of the postings on the WOTC site.

WotC would be well advised to remember the New Coke "sip test". Basically, taken in small quantities, the increased sweetness of New Coke wiped the floor with both old Coke and Pepsi. But taken in larger quantities (that is, in real life use), it quickly became sickly.

Yes, people do indeed enjoy rolling "big handfuls of dice"... occasionally. When the Wizard ends the encounter with a fireball, and grabs 10d6 to do so, that's cool. (And, indeed, it would be just as cool for the Fighter to use a similar 10-dice pool for his big end-of-encounter power.)

However, when the party Rogue is rolling 1d4+5d6+2 damage for each of 4 sneak attacks in the round, and the same last round and the same next round... it really starts to get a bit much.

Do it once, and it's awesome. Do it every single time, and it quickly becomes routine at best.

 

[Gorgoroth]

too many dice = ugh.

Some people like the idea that a high level fighter with a toothpick does virtually the same damage as a guy with the big sword, but I don't. If you want to be lethal with your bare hands, play a monk or take a feat. If you want to deal insane stabbity stab with a dagger, play a rogue, etc. The martial damage dice number should be cut in half but the die type should be the weapon.

People mentioned that high level maneuvers may be "too good". That could easily be balanced by the loss of your bigger damage die. Or if you are a maneuver junkie and you have a schtick with that, then trading off the extra damage from the die by using a smaller weapon is not a penalty. I see that as a more realistic modelling anyway. Why should parrying not work super well with a parrying dagger? So some maneuver's effects, as someone else suggested here, need to be decoupled from the damage die of the weapon to make the tradeoff worth it.

As it is, it's not a big deal to trade off a single d6 for a whole extra attack at level 1 with whirlwind attack. But if whirlwind attack costs me an extra d12 off my greataxe's main swing, I might think otherwise. I think dual wielding should work the same as whirlwind attack, except both attacks can be against the same enemy. It's a very natural sort of load balancing that occurs here. If you dual wield, you give up a martial damage die for a use of your offhand weapon that round, which as it turns out, is precisely that same offhand die!! what's not to love.

I agree, an insane amount of dice rolls is annoying, each round, after the beers and "old fashioned"s start flowing freely. But in 3e and PF it was the iterative attacks with different attack bonuses that really irked me. I tended to avoid dual wielding characters for that reason alone. too many rolls per round.

Instead of W + 6d6, why not 4W ? where if you are a dwarf with a greataxe doing 2d6 per swing, it amounts to the same maximum (slightly different average, but practically the same). The benefit of a half number of dice rolled is huge to my mind. It auto-balances the tradeoff of maneuvers vs Deadly Strike or whatever it is, nicely. I don't mind trading a d12 damage to a d6 damage reduction to parry once in a while when I need it. It's still useful, but not a no-brainer. Sometimes I want to take some damage, but still dish it out two-fold to my foe.

This puts the big sword or big axe back at the top for fighters, as they should be!!!

 

[Evenglare]

Yes! Yes to all of that !

 

[DEFCON 1]

Well, in terms of Fighter maneuvers, the reason for more dice is simple... more dice means more things to "trade in" to do all the maneuvers a Fighter has. Cut back on the number of dice, and you cut back on both the number of maneuvers you can do *and* the amount of extra damage you can also do at the same time.

That might have been one of the problems they found with the previous packet when the expertise dice went from 1d4 to 1d6 to 2d6 to 2d8 to 3d10... each die spent for a maneuver at higher levels was an increasing amount of extra damage LOST. So balancing the two was probably harder. After all... when one maneuver was worth only 1d6 at a lower level but 1d10 at a higher one... that maneuver's cost is getting higher and higher the more powerful a PC gets (which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.)

At least by keeping all damage at d6s (and giving out more of them)... a maneuver that cost one die at level 3 has the exact same cost at level 15. Which wouldn't be the case if the size of the dice kept getting bigger over time. Yeah... a PC at level 15 might only be rolling 3 Martial dice in that scenario rather than the current 6... but if those 3 dice are d12s? Do you really want to give up 1d12 or 2d12 worth of damage just to Disarm someone? I doubt anyone would. But if its 2d6 to Disarm them, plus you still have 4d6 worth of extra damage to add... that's a bit more cost effective and will make the use of maneuvers actually occur more often.

 

[Stalker0]

WotC would be well advised to remember the New Coke "sip test". Basically, taken in small quantities, the increased sweetness of New Coke wiped the floor with both old Coke and Pepsi. But taken in larger quantities (that is, in real life use), it quickly became sickly.

Yes, people do indeed enjoy rolling "big handfuls of dice"... occasionally. When the Wizard ends the encounter with a fireball, and grabs 10d6 to do so, that's cool. (And, indeed, it would be just as cool for the Fighter to use a similar 10-dice pool for his big end-of-encounter power.)

However, when the party Rogue is rolling 1d4+5d6+2 damage for each of 4 sneak attacks in the round, and the same last round and the same next round... it really starts to get a bit much.

Do it once, and it's awesome. Do it every single time, and it quickly becomes routine at best.

Well said!

 

[Stalker0]

Instead of W + 6d6, why not 4W ?

I wonder if this could be incorporated into the martial damage bonus. Instead of getting a +5 damage bonus at 10th level or whatever, you now get 2[W] damage as a base. It emulates the scaling found in 4e without the reliance on powers.

 

[Gorgoroth]

Well, in terms of Fighter maneuvers, the reason for more dice is simple... more dice means more things to "trade in" to do all the maneuvers a Fighter has. Cut back on the number of dice, and you cut back on both the number of maneuvers you can do *and* the amount of extra damage you can also do at the same time.

That might have been one of the problems they found with the previous packet when the expertise dice went from 1d4 to 1d6 to 2d6 to 2d8 to 3d10... each die spent for a maneuver at higher levels was an increasing amount of extra damage LOST. So balancing the two was probably harder. After all... when one maneuver was worth only 1d6 at a lower level but 1d10 at a higher one... that maneuver's cost is getting higher and higher the more powerful a PC gets (which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.)

At least by keeping all damage at d6s (and giving out more of them)... a maneuver that cost one die at level 3 has the exact same cost at level 15. Which wouldn't be the case if the size of the dice kept getting bigger over time. Yeah... a PC at level 15 might only be rolling 3 Martial dice in that scenario rather than the current 6... but if those 3 dice are d12s? Do you really want to give up 1d12 or 2d12 worth of damage just to Disarm someone? I doubt anyone would. But if its 2d6 to Disarm them, plus you still have 4d6 worth of extra damage to add... that's a bit more cost effective and will make the use of maneuvers actually occur more often.

Disarming the enemy before he can hit you with that Morgul or poisoned blade could be well worth more than 1d12 or 2d6 damage. They can tweak how often you get bumps. By removing the silly extra fighter flat bonus, and even the strength bonus to damage, they can make the system a lot simpler than it is. Strength bonus, I used to think, was a sacred cow that I didn't want to lose, but with all this damage, it's superfluous and bloaty at higher levels, and like Mearls wrote, breaks low level enemies (there is no chance to not kill a kobold at level1 if you have any kind of str mod, since you'll always do at least 2 damage).

I get your point about the same maneuvers costing you proportionately more damage at higher levels, but there is such a thing as overkill, right? With whirlwind attack, for example, instead of doing 6d12 extra damage on one guy, who'll be so dead it's not even funny, do 3d12 on three guys having sacrificed 3d12 to do that. If you're smart or lucky, you can kill all of them. That's a worthwhile tradeoff, IMO. Especially if you're wielding a sword of slaying X and you can gain multiple times the benefit of the 2d8 flame or holy damage.

The 4e motto for rangers was multi-attacks on one foe to kill'em dead faster. The DDN motto seems to be, you have the flexibility to assign damage where you want to, with some tradeoffs for splitting the damage over foes. Don't split it around if you really need the first big guy dead. But if you're fighting eight mooks and one BBEG at the same time, you really want to pick off 2-3 mooks every round, to reduce incoming damage, rather than just concentrate all your dice on the BBEG and die in the process since the number of incoming attacks stays the same. Mop up the mooks first. That makes perfect sense to me.

If maneuvers aren't worth a whole W's worth of extra damage when using a greatsword, but are worth a d6 or d10 of extra damage, then maybe if you're wielding an offhand light weapon then you are only trading off a d6 for a d6 of parry with that hand's weapon die anyway. I think that's a feature of the system, not a bug. You really should only be disarming that enemy when it's way more important to not get hit by it even once, than it is to simply finish off the foe faster. Or blocking, or parrying. If I give up d12 damage for d6 damage reduction, is that not worth it?

Maybe not when I'm at full HP, but when I have 3 hp left, you can betcha it is. I like the fact that finessable, lower damaging weapons would be used more for maneuvers than a big old sword. You can use a polearm to trip people up, since it's a ranged control weapon. So what if you trade off d12 to do it, all your friends now have advantage against him. Pummel him to pulp now, guys...ps you're welcome.

" (which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.)" there are probably other neat-o ways of addressing this issue we haven't thought of. If I get 1/2 the number of dice but higher values than now, you betcha the opportunity cost of chosing to apply it to damage over that maneuver is different. but that's what playtesting is for, am I right? It's just an idea, anyway. I like big swords doing more damage as you get higher in level.

Stealing 4e's W damage dice mechanic for basic attacks if a good one, IMO, and partly addresses this concern. e.g.. at level 6 you get 2W. It's not such a huge bump than going up by a d6. Do it on a dead level when the d6 martial damage die count doesn't go up.