D&D 5E Average damage or rolled damage?

[Lanefan]

Hiving off from the "Access to Races in a Campaign" thread derailment:

You and I must have different definitions of what an informed choice is.

A player that sees that a monster is going to do somewhere between 13 and 68 damage per successful attack (assuming no critical hits) is not nearly informed enough to decide how many rounds to spend in combat with the creature before breaking off or healing, but a player that knows the monster is going to do 40 damage per successful attack (assuming no critical hits) can say with a significant amount of accuracy exactly when the tide of the battle has turned decidedly against them.

There's such a thing as too much information, or information a character in character would not necessarily have, and this is one. In the fog of war there's no way of knowing whether the next swing that gets by your defenses is going to produce a small nick (4 points damage) or stove your head in (50 points damage); just like there's no way of knowing what your own successful attacks will actually accomplish.

It's along the same lines of a character in-character knowing its turn in the initiative order - an equally outlandish concept solved by rerolling initiatives each round.

Lan-"wondering both what monster does 13-68 points on a hit and what set of dice one rolls to get that range"-efan

 

[Galendril]

I concur. My players use an app for rolling initiative. It has everyone's bonuses and I just tell the Initiative Keeper the names of opponents and their bonuses. With the click of one button each round, we have a new order. The only person who knows the order is the IK and he calls out each person when they're up. It adds almost zero overhead to do it this way.

And as far as NPC/monster damage, I have been using average since it's very quick. However, I recently watched a Critical Roll episode and noticed the DM there rolls all of his damage. I might tinker with doing that to see if it slows things down or not. I think it's good for the players to be sure how much damage a particular opponent can do and it adds more drama to the battle.

 

[crashtestdummy]

6d8 + 2d6 + 1d4 + 4

Wasn't that obvious?

 

[Sunseeker]

Non-rolled damage is great for mass-fights, hordes of zombies, armies, etc... It's simplified bookkeeping.

Plus, IMO, there's just as much fear in knowing as not knowing. Knowing may mean you know just how many hits it will take to kill you, but it also means you know just how many hits it will take to kill you. Personally, I find rolled damage less/I] frightening after I've seen the rolls, especially on a bunch of small creatures, all you need to do is calculate maximum damage and then you're right back to the same calculations as if they were rolling flat damage: aside from a nat 20, you know exactly how much damage they'll do and how many hits you can take.

Randomness is fun...but I don't care for unnecessary complications. I've really stopped using inititave and just go clockwise around the table. With how long people take even in 5E combat, anything I can do to speed things up is something I'll do. As a DM my "turn" takes the longest, so to keep the pace up, I use flat damage.

Sure, rolling damage is fun when you dump out all the dice for those breath weapons and AOEs, but short of that, I have no interest in rolling a die for 15 kobolds/skeletons/soldiers who all do 1d6+X damage. Just call it 5 points per hit and move along.

This sorta strikes me as one of those metagaming attempts to not metagame. Players are going to calculate probabilities in their head, or they're not going to play D&D. Randomness doesn't keep them from doing this. It just alters the equations.

 

[Psikerlord#]

I always roll damage because I find the uncertainty a big part of the fun.

Similarly I always roll monster HP.

I find the game is fast enough (excluding huge battles) without needing to average damage.

 

[Rhenny]

All of the games I've DMd or played over the past few years have been online using Fantasy Grounds so there has been no need to use avg damage. If I ran a game in person now, I'd probably have the monsters/foes do avg damage to speed up the game.

 

[77IM]

I use average damage, except for boss/special monsters. Rolling damage for them makes them feel a little bit more "special."

 

[SnakeEyes097]

I like to use rolled damage so that my players don't know what's coming. Also, if I need to fudge a damage roll on occasion, they don't know about it.

 

[Kobold Stew]

what set of dice one rolls to get that range

8d6+5d4.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

...or information a character in character would not necessarily have..

I think that either you go full-on one way or the other on this, and find any middle-ground to be rife with self-contradictions and double standards: either damage and hit points are entirely unknowable as anything the character can get a sense of and thus the player gets no more than a vague description of their current state from their DM who is keeping the character's hit points and magnitude of recent changes to them secret, or damage and hit points are an abstraction of what the character can get a sense of so no harm is done by the player knowing the numbers, rolled or otherwise.

As for the wondering, that example was a Chasme demon which does 4d6+2 piercing and 7d6 necrotic with it's probiscus attack - which was fresh in my mind because a recent session involved one.

For the declaration of "too much information" I can only say that I disagree. My goal is to provide fun for myself and my players, and more unpredictability than not knowing whether an attack will miss, hit, or crit does not improve the fun in any way but does increase the chances of less enjoyable outcomes (such as rolling low damage often enough to seem like a pushover, which spoils the feeling of a monster being threatening, or rolling high damage often enough to leave the player feeling that their character can't handle even supposedly easy combat challenges).