Because I want to see what other people's opinions are?
Am I not allowed to talk to people here unless I'm trying to solve a problem?
Hey
@CubicsRube ,
We just played another marathon 14-hour session yesterday (into 3 AM this morning) and one of the players who up til now was
not using average damage jumped on the bandwagon and started using it last night. He was the final hold-out.
Our group discussed it again and here are some responses:
The guy I mention above said he feels a bit like using average damage is cheating because he knows he could easily roll worse. He settled on taking the average for the "big important battles" because he wants to ensure at least "decent" damage so he knows he's contributing to those fights. In the "smaller fights" he's happy to roll because if he rolls badly, it has less impact.
Another guy who's been doing average damage for a while now said he only really like to roll for the more unique attacks. His druid wants to roll for his
primal savagery damage because it is his basic melee attack, which he doesn't do often so it is fun to roll on the rare attack. For his ranged cantrips and AoE damage spells, he nearly always just takes the average now.
Yet another player has been using average damage since we first decided to try it. He sucks at math and has all the different averages noted on his character sheet, so feels it keeps the game going faster and he isn't dragging it down for the rest of us by having to add up his big damage attacks (like his sneak attacks, which he gets
most rounds).
For myself, probably the quickest in doing the math, I'm happy with average damage because I know it does speed up combat (which we do a lot of, probably 65-70% of our game time often) and makes it easier for the DM since he's memorized a lot of our average damages, thus doesn't need to ask how much we did. For example, a
lightning bolt averages 28 damage, when ones of the PCs casts it, the DM knows the DC and just rolls and deducts the damage for saved or not without having to wait for the player to roll and add up the dice.
So, I think if you are considering it give it a try. You might decided it isn't for you, but your table might decide it makes things faster and more fun. There are plenty of other times when rolling happens and the randomness really isn't lost at all IMO.