Vadskye
2013-04-21, 09:07 PM
One of the slight oddities of D&D is that the quality of your hit never matters. You could beat a creature's AC by 1, or you could beat it by 20, and it makes not a sliver of difference - you roll the same damage die either way. Yes, there are specific options like Power Attack which can be used to translate excess accuracy into damage, but I'd really like to see it more fundamentally written into the game; it just feels so intuitive that hitting really well should mean that damage is at least somewhat affected. The closer you get to hitting a creature's weak point directly, the more it helps!
There are two main problems with implementing this in game, however. First, game balance dictates that attack bonus should not directly translate into damage. I respect that - it could have strange effects that I don't foresee. (And true strike would certainly need a rewrite if that were the case!) Second, it's really slow. If the exact difference between an attack roll and the target AC becomes a significant gameplay mechanic, the process of rolling attacks will get a lot slower. I don't want that - if anything, I want to make rolling dice in combat faster!
Thus, we come to my proposed solution. If your attack hits by 10 or more, you deal maximum damage with your weapon. Very simple and streamlined. Sneak attack dice and other extra damage dice aren't maximized in the interests of sanity and balance.
This means that, if your first attack has a nigh-deific attack bonus and always hits, you can save the trouble of actually rolling the damage and get on to the other attacks which are more variable. There is only a minor impact on game balance; at high levels, most damage doesn't come from the weapon's damage die anyway, so it just saves some time and gives a nice reward for rolling well.
The only major exception I can think of is for builds which optimize weapon size, which can yield damage dice that get startlingly high and shouldn't be maximized. My response to that is that I don't like those builds for other reasons (your six foot tall fighter should not be walking around with a 15 foot long sword) and I am going to ignore them for the purpose of deciding the balance of this change. (In my system, some mechanics changed so that maximizing weapon size is not an effective build choice).
So... what do you think?
There are two main problems with implementing this in game, however. First, game balance dictates that attack bonus should not directly translate into damage. I respect that - it could have strange effects that I don't foresee. (And true strike would certainly need a rewrite if that were the case!) Second, it's really slow. If the exact difference between an attack roll and the target AC becomes a significant gameplay mechanic, the process of rolling attacks will get a lot slower. I don't want that - if anything, I want to make rolling dice in combat faster!
Thus, we come to my proposed solution. If your attack hits by 10 or more, you deal maximum damage with your weapon. Very simple and streamlined. Sneak attack dice and other extra damage dice aren't maximized in the interests of sanity and balance.
This means that, if your first attack has a nigh-deific attack bonus and always hits, you can save the trouble of actually rolling the damage and get on to the other attacks which are more variable. There is only a minor impact on game balance; at high levels, most damage doesn't come from the weapon's damage die anyway, so it just saves some time and gives a nice reward for rolling well.
The only major exception I can think of is for builds which optimize weapon size, which can yield damage dice that get startlingly high and shouldn't be maximized. My response to that is that I don't like those builds for other reasons (your six foot tall fighter should not be walking around with a 15 foot long sword) and I am going to ignore them for the purpose of deciding the balance of this change. (In my system, some mechanics changed so that maximizing weapon size is not an effective build choice).
So... what do you think?