D&D 4E Wandering Star: Jonathon Tweet's 4E Campaing (He Wants Your Help)


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New update: Monsters do average damage.

Didn't play 4E this week as I'm getting ready for GameStorm in Vancouver, WA. For now, here's a heretical house rule that I'm going to return to.

Monsters deal average damage (no dice rolls).

Rolling damage slows things down. In my high-level 3rd Ed campaign, players dealt average damage, too. It speeds things up considerably. The main chanciness and tension in an attack is the d20 roll, hit or miss. The damage roll takes a long time to add up and generates relatively little information. Often, it's close to average anyway.

In my Wandering Star campaign, players will still roll damage. At least while everyone is getting used to their characters' powers, there's still a lot of fun in the dice-rolling step. Part of the reason that I instituted average damage for players in my 3rd Ed campaign was that combat was complicated and thus slow. 4E makes things faster, so the cost of rolling damage is lower. For monsters, though, I just don't get a kick out of rolling damage dice and it's easier to figure the average once and just use that.
 

TerraDave[B said:
Monsters deal average damage (no dice rolls).[/B]
But... but... why!?!?!?


I could see making it easy, but I'm assuming attack rolls are still made. Why not just roll damage along with attack roll... it can't take that long.
 

I don't really like it either. You roll enough monster damage, you are going to get some high totals, and hammer the pcs. Fun stuff.
 



I hate average damage, but <3 Killshot and Story Points. In any case, must hand it to JoT for his experimentation, some really interesting ideas here. His campaign sounds like a lot of fun.
 

OgreBane99 said:
But... but... why!?!?!?


I could see making it easy, but I'm assuming attack rolls are still made. Why not just roll damage along with attack roll... it can't take that long.

+2 frost acidic burst shortsword. And I skirmished. And bard song.
 

*shrug* Not how I'd want to handle it, but if it works for his table, I can't criticize the matter.

Maybe, if I had a fight with a :):):):)-ton of people on both sides, and for whatever reason didn't want to use minion rules, I'd consider it.
 

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