D&D 5E Musings about weapon damage.

[James Gasik]

Racial weapons is a neat idea, and it preserves some flavor, though not all lists are created equally- Elves have solid choices, Dwarves have an incredible list, while Gnomes, Halflings and Half-Orcs need some love. The only problem with the idea is that, obviously, not all Elves are going to care about wielding a bow or a sword, so there should be an option for magicians as well.

 

[Cruentus]

That is a pretty cool idea! I was just looking at a way of adjusting martial character's melee damage without increasing the time spent in combat significantly. In my opinion this is one aspect of combat in 5e that doesn't scale appropriately.

We dropped HP across the board. With all the HP bloat, weapon damage was usually second or third to things like sneak attack, smite, and other bonus damage, etc. By dropping HP on characters and monsters, fights are shorter (less Bags'o'hit points to wade through), and monster attacks (CR 12 monster claw attack doing d6 +3) might then matter a tiny bit.

The other thing we did was remove gaining weapon proficiency based on ancestry, and gave ancestral weapons a bump in die, along with selecting 1 from a range: Dwarf: Battleaxe, HandAxe, Warhammer. So a Dwarf who picks battleaxe as their ancestral weapon gets d10 damage, Handaxe gets d8. Elf has Sword (d8, one handed, not versatile), Longbow, Spear: becomes d10 for Sword, d10 for Longbow, d8 for Spear. (We also tweaked ranged Feats and such to lower their overall power level). Hasn't hurt anything in our application. The extra points here and there don't overbalance anything, and result in more varied weapons in use. We also run very low magic items, and use weapon and armor crafting that grants non-magical bonuses to AC, hit, damage, etc.

 

[DND_Reborn]

We dropped HP across the board.

Yep. We just removed CON bonus from adding to hit points. Most monsters are now 50-70% of their RAW hp.

It was a mistake of bounded accuracy, IMO, to bloat hp and damage.

 

[Blue]

I just want to point out that if you go back and look at older editions, spell damage hasn't really changed much, but hit points totally have. Case in point, the humble Fireball. In AD&D, it did 1d6/caster level. Monsters had d8 Hit Dice and rarely added any bonus to this number. Players had at max 10 Hit Dice of varying sizes and other than Warriors (who only got 9), the maximum bonus was +2 per die.

2nd Edition capped fireball damage at 10d6 at 10th level.

3rd Edition was exactly the same as 2nd, but now players got up to 20 Hit Dice, and larger monsters had grossly inflated Constitution scores. I mean, just to compare, a 2e Ogre had 4+1 Hit Dice, for an average hit point total of 19. The 3e Ogre had 10 more hit points.

Now in 5th edition, a Fireball does 8 dice of damage. And that's that. (Yes you can upcast it, but at that point, it's no longer a 3rd level spell). And oh hey, an Ogre? FIFTY NINE hit points. And his CR is 2 instead of the 3e Ogre's CR of 3.

So don't tell me that they couldn't have increased damage to compensate.

It seems you were not aware that high level casters were considered much more powerful than equal level martial characters. Martials basically only do damage. Having casters that can keep up with (or exceed) them for damage and do everything else there magic allows is poor design.

And again, there's a lot less "Fire resistance 5" and such around since they streamlined Resistance to just "take half damage".

 

[James Gasik]

Except they really didn't increase player damage in any meaningful way, except for maybe Smite- it's pretty good, but has a limited resource- and if they'd given Paladins more reason to cast spells, it would be used less often.

EDIT: I was just pointing out a big damage attack with Fireball. It's not like Martials are doing any better in the damage department than their older edition counterparts. They definitely do less damage than 3e Fighters, and 2e Fighters would still be competitive if dropped into a 5e game (after calculating Thac0 into a positive attack bonus, that is).

 

[Stormonu]

Adding damage would just create a treadmill effect.

Besides, martials already get additional attacks as they level*. Improving chance to hit, upping damage plus extra attacks might be a bridge too far.

* I'd rather extra attacks - if you down your opponent, with extra attacks you can move the next attack to a different foe, rather than lose the damage to overkill.

 

[James Gasik]

It really doesn't when you consider that hit points were increased but damage wasn't. Fighters have had extra attacks since 1974. I'd offer some clear numbers on damage for evidence, but some assumptions would have to be made and I know people would be like "oh but you arbitrarily gave them this ability score or that fighting style" lol.

EDIT: Oh fine, here, I did it. I decided to use Feats and Variant Human (Optional Content) for the 5e Fighter, and then grabbed an option from The Complete Fighter's Handbook for the 2e Fighter.

Fighter 1 (2e Sword Guy)

Race: Elf

Strength: 16 (it's what a 5e Fighter starts with, even though ability scores work a lot differently today).

Weapon Proficiencies: Longsword, Weapon Specialization Longsword, Ambidextrous, Two Weapon Style Specialization.

Attacks: 2 Longswords +2 to hit, 1d8+3 damage (15 average damage per turn). Extra sword attack every even round.

Over the course of 3 rounds, 52,5 damage.


VS.

Fighter 1 (5e Sword Guy)

Race: Variant Human.

Feat: Dual Wielder

Fighting Style: Two-Weapon Fighting

Strength: 16.

Attacks: Longsword + bonus Action Longsword: +3 to hit, 1d8+3 damage (15 average damage per turn).

Over the course of 3 rounds, 45 damage.

 

[Cruentus]

* I'd rather extra attacks - if you down your opponent, with extra attacks you can move the next attack to a different foe, rather than lose the damage to overkill.

In my mind, extra attacks (not that fighters don't need it, they absolutely do) begins to slow down the game (combat specifically), when a fighter type is attacking 2 and 3 times per activation, plus the potential of a Bonus Action, plus then maybe a Reaction based on Feat or Opportunity Attack. Its the same thing with spellcasters and the action economy of 5e. Not only do we have the hit points at ridiculous levels, but the damage, as pointed out by @James Gasik, hasn't kept paced, aside from "forced" stuff like sneak attack and smite, and upcast spells, etc.

Streamlining combat is a lot easier when a fighter gets 1 or 2 (or 3/2 a la 2e) tops, and they all take place on their activation.

Thats why limiting HP helps immensely.

I'm also playing now in a DnD Basic game (d8hp at first level - I have 5! as a fighter), with no bonuses for any stats, and one attack for the foreseeable future (forever?). Its so much faster and easier to manage from a player perspective, and I have to look for answers to things off the character sheet.

 

[Stormonu]

Yeah, I do wish that hit points at higher levels weren't so bloated. I do wish that HP gain was slowed after 9th level/CR or so. Chewing through 200+ hp monsters isn't much fun and after a few rounds, gets redundant.

 

[Cruentus]

I'm still trying to figure out how to remove those damage multipliers from classes to get at some sort of manageable baseline (i.e. removing novas) but its a lot of work to tweak a chassis like this. Things like removing the Paladin Smite ability, and allowing the Smite spell, maybe, last until the next attack to deal bonus damage (or make it a Bonus Action cast). Have Sneak Attack be back to an "occassional" thing if set up properly, remove damage resistance from Barbarians, etc. Just basically lower the temp on damage output for everything (including monsters), and then set HP where they can be challenging, but not sacks, and encounters can be longer or shorter depending on turning a few dials.

Nothing wrong with a combat lasting 5-6 rounds and getting dicey from my perspective.