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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GnomeWorks" data-source="post: 7492380" data-attributes="member: 162">It isn't a question, really, of resources available, or of what's in your players' toolbox. The problem is, and has been since at least 3e, a mismatch between damage output and hit point totals.What caused me to notice the problem was this: at first level, the mage should be terrified of the fighter. At high levels, that dynamic goes away (for a variety of reasons). So what I wanted was summarized by a simple goal: a mage within swording distance of a fighter of equal level should be terrified of getting one-shot'd.The answer to this problem is something I call potency, which can be summarized like this: a sword, rather than dealing 1d8 damage, deals potency 4 damage. What that means is relative to the sword wielder's level: at 1st level, it deals 1d2+9 damage. At 10th, 1d8+30; at 20th, 2d8+55.HP values, which are actually what I started with, are thus: 2.5 * (size of HD - 4), plus Con score, at 1st level. Then, every level after, is (max(HD) - 1) + Con mod. So a class with a d8 HD would start with 10 + Con HP, and get 7 + Con mod HP every level afer.The potency values were then calibrated off of those, so that at every odd level, an attack of potency X has a 50% chance of dealing lethal damage to a creature with an HD of size X. Potency values only change every odd level, with even levels everyone getting a +1 bonus on all d20 rolls (basically how 4e does things). IIRC expected variance is around 10 to 15% of that, so an attack of potency X should do at least 85%, and as much as 115%, of the HP a character with HD X would have.The math then mostly works out that for every 2 points of Con you have, your HD goes up effectively by 1 in terms of the potency you can survive.tl;dr - I made damage output math scale with level proportionally to HP, to retain roughly the same danger level across all levels, gave the concept a fancy name, and did a bunch of math-hammering to get the results I wanted.</blockquote>

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