Static/Average Damage - anyone tried?

[Ry]

Since I'm a very "let's play faster!" kind of GM, I am seriously thinking of using static damage for both NPCs and PCs.

I'd like to leave the issue of whether or not I should do this (i.e. "Wow, that would spoil my fun." responses) to the side - all I'm interested in is has anyone actually tried this before? What's the impact on gameplay / surviveability?

 

[Pyrex]

It'll tend to slightly increase survivability for both sides by removing lucky (max damage crit and so forth) kills.

It makes Maximize Spell slightly stronger (which is fine, it needed a boost relative to Empower anyway).

The major downside is that players like rolling dice. Especially when the evoker picks up a double-handful of d6's for his Chain Lightning.

My advice: Try it out on your side of the screen for a session and see what you think. At the end of the session, talk it over with your players and see if they want to try it.

You might even consider making it optional. Give your players the option of dealing average damage and see how often they take it. My guess is that (except when needing high rolls to penetrate DR) players will choose to take the average fairly frequently; at least for weapon damage rolls.

 

[Quartz]

Which die rolls are you thinking of removing? Just the damage roll? The to hit roll as well?

Here's a dirty little secret: I used to designate mooks as '1-hit', '2-hit', etc. So I didn't have to bother with their HP.

 

[Ry]

Just the damage roll.

As for the #-hit thing, tried it, my players are too good at math. But they are OK with me introducing this house rule.

 

[The Levitator]

The single biggest improvement to speeding up combat with our group was when I started using DM Genie. It's not for everyone ( a lot of DM's don't like using computers to game), but I would never even consider DM'ing without it. Right now, we are using at least a dozen variants and house rules and we can still get through a combat round in just a few minutes.

If computers were ever made illegal and I had to go back to paper and dice, I think I would use the Injury Variant from Unearthed Arcana. A simple FORT roll tells how bad the blow was to the creature. It sounds a lot faster than a HP system, but I can't say for sure because I've never tried it. it would be interesting to hear if anyone has used this variant and if it has sped combat up.

While the group might like the increased speed in combat, they may not like it enough if combat feels more vanilla for the sake of speed. I think it might speed things up a bit, but with my group I don't think the tradeoff speed/excitement of variability would be worth it. The worst thing ya can do is try it with some mock combats with your group and see how it feels and they say no way. But they might also like it. That's how we developed our combat system and all of its variants. We just added things and tested them as a group. In a single session's time we had a combat system that everyone liked. Now they can't complain when they get walloped!

 

[mhensley]

It should play about the same as DDM does as it has fixed damage in increments of 5. It tends to make combat more chess-like which can be good or bad depending on your tastes.

 

[Aust Diamondew]

At high levels I once asked a player to do this who was a little slow at math and was playing a two weapon fighting character who routinely got 8 attacks a round (12-20 crit range too, both weapons had extra energy dice of damage).

He agreed, even though he'll normally roll for anything rather than take average.

When I DM I'll have mooks do average damage if I feel rolling would slow things down too much or if I'm lazy.

 

[airwalkrr]

I did run a short campaign using fixed damage and it worked wonderfully. The only problem is that players like rolling dice a lot. My Age of Worms players scoffed at the idea when I suggested it. "We like rolling 15 dice for our spells!" they whined. Still, those who played in my short campaign with fixed damage liked it a lot. Also, I am using the injury variant in a pbp campaign (see sig), but we haven't had any combat yet, so I can't say how well it works from experience.