D&D 5E do you still roll for damage?

[Croesus]

I almost always roll for damage, but make an exception when there are a huge number of creatures to track. In those cases, it's much easier to just multiply the number of hits by average damage.

I also tend to use average damage for things like dragon breath, as rolling so many dice slows things down.

 

[aco175]

I gave up rolling damage as the DM, I now have the players roll their own damage and I only tell them. I'll roll to hit and tell them something like 1d6+2 and they roll it. Sometimes I'm not even sure how damaged a character is.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'm just coming back to D&D after a seven year hiatus (and probably even longer from these boards). I've only had one session of 5e so far but I have been reading through all the core rulebooks, Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide and Storm King's Thunder and one thing that keeps jumping out at me is the way all the damages for all the different monsters/NPCs are given as a static number with the die range in parentheses. Its' cool that they list it both ways so you can roll or not if you choose, but to me as a life-long player, rolling for damage just seems like such a basic part of the game. I am curious to what the consensus is. Do most DMs out there roll for damage for enemy attacks or just deal out the standard damage every time the monster/NPS connects?

I roll for damage when the situation is simple and the number of hits is small. However, if I roll 20 d20s for twenty hobgoblins firing arrows at you, and 11 of them score hits and one of them is a crit, I won't roll 12d8+11 for damage, I'll just say you take 58 points of damage and move on.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Yeah, I can't even imagine not rolling damage. There are few moments in the game that create the tension of damage rolls, which just keep getting more tense as the HP dwindle. I also roll HP for all my monsters btw.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I love the looks on my players face when a grab a huge pile of dice and toss them on the table, watching the looks of horror or joy develop as they see all the high or low rolls and they realize they are either screwed or the gods have favored them.

 

[jrowland]

In the current campaign I'm running I took the average until the characters got to level 5 then I started rolling all damage dice.

I do the same, except for BBEG. Way to swingy below 5th to roll, and deadly to boot 1-3!

 

[Prakriti]

Averaging can have weird effects. For example, Goblins do 5 damage, which means that a character with 11 HP can take 3 hits while a character with 10 HP can only take 2.

There's only a difference of 1 HP between them, yet the character with 11 HP has effectively 50% more health than the character with 10.

That's just wonky.

 

[Kalshane]

I still roll for damage, though we play most of our games in Roll20 so looking at the rolled damage total isn't any slower than looking at the average number. (I'd still roll even if we were using dice, though.)

 

[hastur_nz]

I roll until it becomes a pain, then average.

In particular, for high level play, I almost always take average. I started doing that back in the 3.5 days, as did my players, when we got near 20th level, as rolling handfuls of dice and trying to add them up, across multiple attacks, isn't actually much fun compared to how much it slows everything down - you still roll attacks / saves, but average damage at high levels is way faster and the net effect is pretty much the same (in 3.5, we pre-calculated everything, especially for melee PC's it made things way faster).

 

[Caliban]

I no longer roll for damage.

Instead, I use a complex formula that involves the average damage of the monster, plus a value derived from how much the player has annoyed me recently, minus a value based on how on board they are with the current storyline I'm forcing on them, and either multiplied or divided by a number based on how interested I am in continuing the current combat.