D&D 5E Define "good" damage...

[Caliban]

Good Damage: At least 20% more damage than anyone else in the party.

Great damage: making the DM's eyes widen in shock.

 

[Bacon Bits]

You can certainly dual wield crossbows with the Crossbow Expert feat. As long as the crossbow is loaded you can fire as a bonus action. If you have both crossbows already loaded you can fire one with each hand. Knock yourself out. You can't reload without a free hand (usually) to draw the ammunition but you can, in fact, dual wield loaded crossbows with the Crossbow Expert feat.

Come to think of it, you can even dual wield without the feat, too. You can't fire both crossbows in the same turn, but you can do it.

I guess it never occurred to me (or to Crawford, apparently) that people would think you somehow didn't need some way to draw ammunition.

Realistic dual wielding as a character strategy involves being able to use the same attack routine round after round with two weapons in hand. Yes, if you grossly warp the normative meaning of "dual wield" then you can dual wield hand crossbows. However, that's incidental dual wielding because it lasts exactly one round before it falls apart. You can't build a character around doing it.

However, even if you have the Crossbow Expert feat, you still don't get round after round of identical attack routines with both weapons in spite of the fact that you can do it with a single hand crossbow and it's just mechanically better to do it that way. In other words, Crawford ruled that the game explicitly subverts the Rule of Cool.(And if you don't think dual wielding pistols is cool, you haven't watched enough John Woo.)

It's the same stupid problem as thrown weapons and dual wielding. You can do it once, and then you have to find something else to do because of the stupid "draw a weapon" restriction that doesn't apply to arrows and bolts. Remember when darts (and shuriken, IIRC) started out 3 per 1 and went up from there?

 

[Zardnaar]

Great weapon or sword and board with duelist and class ability.

 

[discosoc]

5+stat mod per 3 levels, as a rough baseline for expected damage.

 

[mellored]

You could also look at HP gains.

Creatuers gain about 8 HP per level, so i would say 4 damage per level (including accuracy, which scales faster than AC). Though of course, it's not smooth.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

"Good" damage is any damage done by a PC where the Player says "I do X damage"...and feels happy about it.

How much damage, how often, the DPS, and ALL the other mechanical stuff is totally irrelevant as long as the player can say "I hit for X damage", and he/she thinks that's cool.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Horwath]

Any damage not going your way is GOOD damage.