Adding Base Attack Bonus to damage, good idea or bad idea?

[Ken Murikumo]

I want to give my players a little more oomph to there martial damage for an upcoming game. They are not very optimized, some more than others, but still very powered compared to what i've been exposed to on here. I want to make combat a bit more lethal for both them and their enemies and thought a scaling damage bonus as they level up may work.

Is this going to throw the game into chaos?

Will the campaign erupt into a hellacious ball of flames because of this one rule?

Any thoughts on the matter?

Pathfinder and 3.5 material is available if anyone wants to know...

[Venger]

I want to give my players a little more oomph to there martial damage for an upcoming game. They are not very optimized, some more than others, but still very powered compared to what i've been exposed to on here. I want to make combat a bit more lethal for both them and their enemies and thought a scaling damage bonus as they level up may work.

Is this going to throw the game into chaos?

Will the campaign erupt into a hellacious ball of flames because of this one rule?

Any thoughts on the matter?

Pathfinder and 3.5 material is available if anyone wants to know...

it's not going to make that much of a difference, and will absolutely destroy your pcs if monsters get it too. their BA is often much higher than their cr, plus they have larger amounts of base damage.

for a quick example, let's take the frost giant (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/giant.htm)

if your party's not very optimized, this may be the kind of encounter you' throw at them at cr 9.

his base amount of damage with his axe is 3d6+13, or 23.5 average damage. add base attack onto this and it becomes 33.5 on average for each swing.

this is just one example, and it will be much worse when it gets to enemies whose hd to cr ratio is even worse than giants, like undead, constructs, or dragons.

all this change will really do is make combat even swingier, making it so they're never able to effectively escape the whole orc with a falchion thing you blow past at level1-3. if the game is rocket tag, players will need to go with their strongest, most effective option first to avoid the monster getting to act at all. this will reduce the overall variety of different things done in combat

overall, i would advise against this houserule

[SangoProduction]

It's not going to be incredibly impactful, even for a low-op game. It's a decent idea though.

[Bucky]

This is basically Power Attack+Shock Trooper, except without the feat investment. You might want to make it a drop-in Power Attack replacement feat, which solves the monster problem above.

[NevinPL]

I want to make combat a bit more lethal for both them and their enemies and thought a scaling damage bonus as they level up may work.
[...]
Any thoughts on the matter?
Two words: Grim and Gritty.

[Eldariel]

It's not going to be incredibly impactful, even for a low-op game. It's a decent idea though.

The biggest thing is, multiattackers get much better. For PCs this means Natural Weapon users and dual wielders (the latter of which could certainly use the help) but for monsters it can be problematic with things like Hydras and Dragons (and many sorts of magical beasts, aberrations and demons). However, as long as you just keep that in mind when assigning their CRs, it should be all good. Or perhaps only give damage bonus from class-derived BAB or something.

[Buufreak]

As a side note, it will almost completely trivialize any sort of DR that players can commonly get, and even some that monsters have.

[Ken Murikumo]

it's not going to make that much of a difference, and will absolutely destroy your pcs if monsters get it too. their BA is often much higher than their cr, plus they have larger amounts of base damage.


You're telling me 2 different things here, but the monster example was a good point. However, assuming the party is level 9 to fight this cr 9 monster, the martials going up against it will have roughly 90ish HP. That brings the giants number of successful hits from 4 to 3 against the same PC before he goes down (and even that's a maybe). Eventually their Hp totals will far outstrip the bonus damage. And the bonus to damage from multiple attacks assumes all attacks are successful.

Although, if one lvl 9 pc were to dance toe to toe with this guy, there's a good chance the pc wouldn't make it.

I do plan on taking this new rule into account when building encounters. If i sense that there could be a party wipe from something using this rule, i'd scale it back. (I'm not THAT bad of a DM)


This is basically Power Attack+Shock Trooper, except without the feat investment. You might want to make it a drop-in Power Attack replacement feat, which solves the monster problem above.

good point


The biggest thing is, multiattackers get much better. For PCs this means Natural Weapon users and dual wielders (the latter of which could certainly use the help) but for monsters it can be problematic with things like Hydras and Dragons (and many sorts of magical beasts, aberrations and demons). However, as long as you just keep that in mind when assigning their CRs, it should be all good. Or perhaps only give damage bonus from class-derived BAB or something.

The class derived bonus damage may actually be a remedy for things that were overlooked. It wouldn't effect the more tricky monsters, and give enemies with class features a sense of lethality from normal attacks.

But for multiattackers, how about the bonus damage is equal to the bab used for the current attack (+20, 15, 10, or 5). It would give diminishing returns for multiple attacks.


As a side note, it will almost completely trivialize any sort of DR that players can commonly get, and even some that monsters have.

That is a serious problem. Very good point. I could make it so the bonus damage doesn't count towards the damage needed to overcome the DR, but that could be too one way or the other.
Say a lvl5 barbarian dealing 9 damage (excluding the 5 from bab) to a creature with 10 DR would do no damage, but if he dealt 11 damage, he would get the full benefit of 16 damage (with the bab included) for a total of 6 damage dealt, rather than 1
^^^I know this is a very mediocre barbarian, but it was for the sake of example^^^

[Eldariel]

The class derived bonus damage may actually be a remedy for things that were overlooked. It wouldn't effect the more tricky monsters, and give enemies with class features a sense of lethality from normal attacks.

But for multiattackers, how about the bonus damage is equal to the bab used for the current attack (+20, 15, 10, or 5). It would give diminishing returns for multiple attacks.

You could do that of course but given they're already at a significant penalty, I'm not sure how much more trivial you want to make them. Two-Weapon Fighters specifically are already a huge investment for little gain in the default game: this change makes them better and they're the only kind of multiattacker that gets iteratives so I wouldn't try to address this by going after iteratives specifically. If anything, cut the iterative hit penalty entirely and go with just a damage penalty instead, or the other way around.

Fundamentally the classes benefiting the most are those that can get natural attacks anyways (Wildshapers, Summoners, etc.) though they don't have quite that high BAB naturally. There are forms with crazy amounts of natural attacks and they're all done at full or -2 (with Multiattack). I'm not sure what, if anything, should be done with those. Natural weapons are already kind of an outlier in the system. You could halve the bonus for natural weapons or something of the sort but it might be just fine anyways.

[Esprit15]

Teach them about Power Attack and getting bonuses to hit things.

You might even be able to do this in game and safely. Have some sort of martial tournament. No magic allowed, just men (and women), their armor, and their blades (or clubs, arrows, etc.). Fight until X percentage of HP, to keep things non-lethal, or give people weapons enchanted to deal only non-lethal damage. Have them fight a couple people, each focused on a different method of combat: a power attacker, a manyshot bow guy, and so forth. After the battles, win or lose, let them talk to some of the combatants and discuss fighting styles. "Oh yeah, it's called power attacking. Sacrifices a bit of accuracy, but lets you really put some muscle behind your blade. I could show you a thing or two if you like." Let them use a weaker version of some of them as a sort of combat maneuver until they can take the feats to properly do them.

[Venger]

You're telling me 2 different things here, but the monster example was a good point. However, assuming the party is level 9 to fight this cr 9 monster, the martials going up against it will have roughly 90ish HP. That brings the giants number of successful hits from 4 to 3 against the same PC before he goes down (and even that's a maybe). Eventually their Hp totals will far outstrip the bonus damage. And the bonus to damage from multiple attacks assumes all attacks are successful.

Although, if one lvl 9 pc were to dance toe to toe with this guy, there's a good chance the pc wouldn't make it.

I do plan on taking this new rule into account when building encounters. If i sense that there could be a party wipe from something using this rule, i'd scale it back. (I'm not THAT bad of a DM)

Okay, so to clarify, when I say "it won't make much of a difference," what I meant was the amount of damage PCs will do to monsters will be affected in a less significant fashion than the amount of damage monsters do to PCs, since PCs will generally speaking have 1 BA per lvl max, whereas monsters do not always adhere to that rule.

I used that as example for simplicity's sake, but you can see how it would be even more pronounced if instead of going up against a single cr 9, they went up against 2 cr 7s, or 4 cr 6s, with each of them getting BA to damage on each strike.

[KillianHawkeye]

Fundamentally the classes benefiting the most are those that can get natural attacks anyways (Wildshapers, Summoners, etc.) though they don't have quite that high BAB naturally. There are forms with crazy amounts of natural attacks and they're all done at full or -2 (with Multiattack). I'm not sure what, if anything, should be done with those. Natural weapons are already kind of an outlier in the system. You could halve the bonus for natural weapons or something of the sort but it might be just fine anyways.

Perhaps the secondary natural weapons only get half the bonus? It doesn't fix the hydra, but in all honesty hydras could stand to be a bit more terrifying. I always felt like they didn't live up to their real world reputation as a legendary beast.

[DarkSoul]

If you want to make combat more lethal, change the massive damage threshold to 50% of maximum health. You might want to go easy on them in the first few levels though, or start at a higher level.

Just remember that anything that introduces more randomness or rolling into the game is inherently bad for the PC's because they make way more rolls of every type than any NPC ever will.

[Troacctid]

Mostly this will just screw up the math a lot.

[Extra Anchovies]

This shafts medium-BAB martial characters, who already have a bit of a hard time keeping up.

It would also have rather inconsistent effects on monsters, because monster BAB varies by type.

If you want combat to be more lethal, make healing magic less powerful and/or less accessible. When the party is patching themselves up mostly with the Heal skill and natural healing, HP suddenly becomes an actually limited resource. That can mean short adventuring careers if you throw direct-damage beatsticks at the party, but there's plenty of interesting encounters to be had where the difficulty is not in having higher numbers but in having better tactics.

[danielxcutter]

This shafts medium-BAB martial characters, who already have a bit of a hard time keeping up.

Yeah, classes like Monks, Scouts, and Rogues are really going to suffer(unless you give them something else as well).

Especially Monks. :smallannoyed:

[Troacctid]

Really I think this makes more sense as a feat or class ability.

[Fizban]

For players, you'll find that a lot of favorite sources of bonus damage boil down to around +1/level, so yeah. For monsters it's a terrible idea that will eat PCs for breakfast.