Simplifying 3.5 Damage?

[Wookie-ranger]

hi there,
My players are out of the country right now, so i have a lot of time on my hands. (and no-one to play-test ;)
Its an idea I have been playing around with and could use some input.

How would it affect the game (flow, balance, etc) if i would make all damage a flat number, no more dice rolling for damage, simply average.
The main purpose is for large groups and groups with lots of minions.

How would ya'll round? up, down, to even/odd?
How would it affect enchantments?
What about attacks per round?

thanks for all the help.

[Mithril Leaf]

hi there,
My players are out of the country right now, so i have a lot of time on my hands. (and no-one to play-test ;)
Its an idea I have been playing around with and could use some input.

How would it affect the game (flow, balance, etc) if i would make all damage a flat number, no more dice rolling for damage, simply average.
The main purpose is for large groups and groups with lots of minions.

How would ya'll round? up, down, to even/odd?
How would it affect enchantments?
What about attacks per round?

thanks for all the help.

Just use averages. Take the max number on a die, add one, and divide by two. Statistically, that's what the die is equal to. Then just multiple that by the number of dice you've got and the percentage you'd hit on. For example, lets say I used telekinetic thrust to toss 15 +1 force javelins (because that's what I've got the numbers handy for). Since they deal 1d6+1 damage, I take 7/2+1 to give me 4.5. I then take that, multiply it by 15 and (let's assume I hit on anything bigger than an 8) multiply that by .6 for a total of 40.5 damage.

[TuggyNE]

I would suggest avoiding averaging damage by attack chance, unless you're feeling horribly overwhelmed; for one thing, it gets messed up too easily by differing ACs.

Instead, I suggest using Aid Another, possibly even for ranged attacks, to simultaneously decrease rolling (you only need to roll attacks for the aiding creatures, and sometimes not even that) and increase attack bonus.

As far as the metagame analysis goes, it's likely to make things slightly easier for the players, because generally averages favor PCs (otherwise, how could they win consistently?), so making all damage average favors them more — especially by reducing lucky NPC high-damage crits, which can have unfortunate short-term perturbations of iterative probability. (More explicitly, unusually lucky NPCs are more likely to kill PCs, but unusually unlucky NPCs just die a round or two earlier than they would have otherwise.)

[Duke of URL]

As noted above, reducing randomness helps players, because the game is statistically biased to them in the first place. It makes the combat portion of the game more of a tactical simulation than it already is. Whether or not that's a good thing is entirely dependent on your play style.

[kitcik]

So now I play a melee guy and I don't even get to roll my damage dice?

Man, might as well make me an NPC.

[supermonkeyjoe]

I do this if a player is going to be rolling a 10+ dice on their attack just to speed up combat, a wizard casting a fireball that does 35 damage is quicker than waiting for someone to add up 10d6 worth of damage

[Pilo]

Maybe you can ask your PCs to roll the damages and the attack simultaneously and keep the damages of your NPCs fixed. Pcs usually want to roll dices.

[Fitz10019]

"The main purpose is for large groups and groups with lots of minions. "

Three alternate suggestions:
1. Use a computer to yield the random die results. It'll be fast.

2. If the players love to roll dice, ask them to roll 20 attack results in advance. Then they can roll a d20 to identify one of those as the current attack result.

3. Eliminate the minions.