D&D 5E The impact of overkill damage

[FrogReaver]

In general, increasing damage increases the likelihood that an enemy dies in fewer rounds. In general, increasing damage increases the amount of overkill damage. *Note, there are a few ways to increase DPR without increasing overkill damage (Increases to accuracy or increases to number of attacks). Neither of those methods though actually increase overkill damage though. So the only scenario worth examining is one where your DPR increase is due to an increase in damage.

So let's look at the case of 1 hp enemies. Overkill matters in that scenario and higher damage characters will do more of it. In fact this scenario can be generalized to a case of enemies that you are guaranteed to kill in 1 hit. In any scenario where that happens then overkill matters. In scenarios where that isn't the case then increasing damage increases the chance you kill the enemy in fewer rounds.

This is why my conclusion has consistently been that normal assumptions about overkill damage being a mitigating factor for high damage characters is misleading. Under normal situations you fight enemies that take more than 1 hit to kill. Having a higher damage increases the chances you kill the enemy faster. Doing more damage isn't about assigning every point of damage to an enemy, it's about having those enemies you target die faster. Also worth noting is that this view requires one to move away from averages and instead view things through the lens of damage distributions - which makes for a more accurate view.

This isn't to say there aren't minor differences in same DPR distributions when facing enemies that take more than 1 hit to kill. There are. It's just that when really evaluating higher damage and higher overkill setups against the most common enemies, what we find is that the higher damages benefits aren't mitigated as much as looking at average overkill damage would seem to indicate when we look at the damage distribution and the average round to kill information.

Which essentially means that in all but the most rare or carefully constructed scenarios that overkill damage doesn't actually mitigate higher damage setups. Whatever negative impact of overkill damage exists, it never actually outstrips the value of a higher damage attack (at least under realistic parameters).

 

[Li Shenron]

I like featuring massive battles against lots of mooks that can be killed in 1 hit, and I am happy that 5e makes those a lot easier to run than 3e (and I am not even using mob rules). In those cases, there is a lot of overkill, and the main tactic the players need is to find all ways to maximize their number of targets instead of maximizing damage to each.

Last Sunday, we had waves of kobolds and the party Rogue didn't even need to roll damage since between her fixed damage bonus and the number of dice rolled when sneak attacking, she would autokill a kobold on a hit. Of course she also has the Sharpshooter feat so she's perfectly capable to deal with the opposite case of a single huge bag of HP

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

I like featuring massive battles against lots of mooks that can be killed in 1 hit, and I am happy that 5e makes those a lot easier to run than 3e (and I am not even using mob rules). In those cases, there is a lot of overkill, and the main tactic the players need is to find all ways to maximize their number of targets instead of maximizing damage to each.

Last Sunday, we had waves of kobolds and the party Rogue didn't even need to roll damage since between her fixed damage bonus and the number of dice rolled when sneak attacking, she would autokill a kobold on a hit. Of course she also has the Sharpshooter feat so she's perfectly capable to deal with the opposite case of a single huge bag of HP

Minions were the single greatest 4e innovation.

 

[Krachek]

To kill or overkill, the real challenge in DnD!

 

[ccs]

Minions were the single greatest 4e innovation.

Really? To me, as a player, at best they felt like a waste of time. At worst an insult.
Because if I'm playing a big damned hero who's bad-ass enough to drop ogres or whatever in a single blow? Then I expect to be able to do that vs the full on MM entry of that creature. When an "ogre" only has a high AC but 1 HP? Then you don't need me as any old mooks able to drop one.
And as the DM they were definitely a waste of my time.

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

Really? To me, as a player, at best they felt like a waste of time. At worst an insult.
Because if I'm playing a big damned hero who's bad-ass enough to drop ogres or whatever in a single blow? Then I expect to be able to do that vs the full on MM entry of that creature. When an "ogre" only has a high AC but 1 HP? Then you don't need me as any old mooks able to drop one.
And as the DM they were definitely a waste of my time.

I also DM. When players battle 50 or 200+ opponents, keeping tracking HP is a chore. Minions rock.

My players once attacked a goblin stronghold. The stronghold had 500 goblins inside (I wrote a JAVA program to roll attacks). I didn't want to keep track so many HP pools. Minions worked perfectly.

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

I tell the players the monster AC and give indication of creature's health, so they can have their characters place their attacks to best effect. Why not? I figure this'd be observable through the PCs senses. So yeah, not much DPR wastage.

If I use the 'mob attacks table' (DMG pg250), then I use the 'Cleaving through creatures' combat option (pg272). In these uncommon circumstances, again, there isn't much overkill wastage.

As a player I had one of my characters work out which buffs gave average damage to one-shot a stock Hobgoblin and Orc. Less a champion character, more a soldier type.

If you let players narrate their winning hit, and let them know the remaining hp, it can be funny with the right player. In this case, there's no such thing as 'wasted' damage.

 

[Retreater]

Really? To me, as a player, at best they felt like a waste of time. At worst an insult.
Because if I'm playing a big damned hero who's bad-ass enough to drop ogres or whatever in a single blow? Then I expect to be able to do that vs the full on MM entry of that creature. When an "ogre" only has a high AC but 1 HP? Then you don't need me as any old mooks able to drop one.
And as the DM they were definitely a waste of my time.

I loved minions. I would still use them if they were viable in 5e - but with bonded accuracy a squad of 4 minions is different than a single full-hp monster (more effective in terms of damage potential, but AC doesn't scale enough to protect their puny 1 hp).
I'm curious what hero build you can make in 5e that can drop a full-on Ogre with 59 hp in a single blow? I'll bet that most characters can't reliably drop a 15 hp Orc in a single blow.
Hit Points have inflated over the years. In OD&D I think Ogres had an average of 19 hp. Now in 5e, an Ogre's HP have more than doubled just since 3rd edition (when it was 29). Whereas in the past editions, characters could drop monsters in a single hit, that's really not the case anymore due to HP bloat. Minions would be a good remedy for that.
If being a badass warrior and having epic fights like we saw in the LotR films aren't your thing, I guess you can keep disliking minions.

 

[Asisreo]

What's interesting about overkill damage is that while few monsters will probably have low enough HP that it will matters within the first round, in the second round, the overkill damage may become greater since your allies also put damage in them. Round 2, the enemy might have 1 hp left after all.

That's not to say overkill is all that important. It kinda depends on the situation but I'm curious how much overkill a class would do on-average.

 

[MarkB]

Depending upon your play style, you could introduce some useful side effects of overkill damage. Like, if you deal sufficient damage to take down an uninjured creature in a single blow, their nearby allies must make a Charisma saving throw or become frightened of you for one round. The DC is equal to the number by which your damage exceeded the creature's total hit points.