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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Altin" data-source="post: 291934" data-attributes="member: 3107">I had a thought just recently that an interesting variation on the basic D&D rules would be to have exploding dammage dice. What I mean by that, for those not familiar with the concept, is that when a dammage die rolls its highest value (6 for a d6, 8 for a d8, ect.) it is rerolled and the two values are added together, this being done as many times as the highest value comes up. Other bonuses (strenght, magical argumentation, ect.) would still be added only once.Now, the idea is probably a little too outlandish to use in most campaigns I can think of and it would probably play havoc with the magical weapon pricing system but - just theoretically - what would be some of the gameplay consequences? For instance:I imagine simple duke-it-out combat would get even deadlier at low levels and would stay deadly for a bit longer than it does with the normal rules.At least in theory, a single lucky blow could kill just about anyone (but the better they were, the luckier it would have to be) which adds a bit more realism to proceedings (whether this is a positive thing or not I will leave as an exercise for the reader).The symptom of other bonuses making the die roll more or less irrelevant at higher levels would be aleviated slightly as exploding dice would mount up significant dammage now and again.Weapons which use dice with lower ranges would become more desirable in comparison to their high-range counterparts (ie. a d6 would explode more often than a d8). In other words, the ranger with two shortswords would become even more disgusting <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />. The last is potentially the most problematic change but, according to my maths, a dagger (which explodes 25 % of the time) still sucks in comparison with a longsword (explodes 12.5 % of the time). For instance, in eight hits, a dagger will on average do 6d4 normal and 8 (two max rolls) + 2d4 exploding dammage without factoring in repeated explosions. A longsword, by comparsion will do 7d8 normal + 8 + 1d8 exploding dammage. Thus: Dagger = 8 + 6d4 + 2d4 = 8 + 8d4 = 28 dammage on average whereas Long Sword = 8 + 7d8 + 1d8 = 8 + 8d8 = 44 dammage.A d6 to d8 comparison is somewhat more complicated as the first common denominator is 24 but, if my maths is right the numbers look like this (note that not including repeated explosions is a bigger distortion because of the increased sample size but this is much simpler to work out):Short Sword = 24 (4d6 each rolling a six) + 20d6 + 4d6 = 24 + 24d6 = 108 dmgLong Sword = 24 (3d8 each rolling an eight) + 21d8 + 3d8 = 24 + 24d8 = 132 dmg It has just occured to me that the 'normal' dammage should be calculated with the assumption that the maximum will not be rolled (ie. a non-exploding d4 should return results in the range from 1 to 3, not 1 to 4) so the average results I used for the above calculations should be slightly lower. Still, I think this actually favours weapons with greater rangers and should in any case not change the results too drastically. So, what do you think? Are there any other consequences of the change that I'm not seeing? Any game-breakers this would cause?Yours,Altin</blockquote>

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