UA: Modern Handbook Damage Suggestion

[Endal]

I have an idea for updating combat using the Unearthed Arcana: Modern Setting. Since the weapon damage is so dang high I was thinking it might be kinda' cool to set it up so that depending on their attack roll they would get X amount of dice.
Let's just use no armor, so an AC of 10

For firearms only:
If the player rolls a 10-14, they do 1dx
If they roll a 15-19 they do 2dx
If they roll 20-24 they do 3dx
If they roll 25+ or a Crit they do 4dx
This would of course raise if the AC is higher than 10 by whatever that number is (and yes, I know that this is basically THAC0)


Right now the damage for all firearms is 2dx, and that just seems too dang high. Having this method in the system would make it so that depending on how well you roll, you would do better damage. I always thought it was strange when I hear people roll a 26 to hit on something with 12 armor and then roll a 1 for damage, it just seems a bit strange. We should reward them for how high they are hitting!

Any thoughts?

[Endal]

For those of you who haven't seen it, the weakest firearm is the Pocket Pistol, and it does 2d4 damage. The highest damaging is a mix of a few, and they all do 2d10, and sometimes to multiple targets.

[HoodedHero007]

I have an idea for updating combat using the Unearthed Arcana: Modern Setting. Since the weapon damage is so dang high I was thinking it might be kinda' cool to set it up so that depending on their attack roll they would get X amount of dice.
Let's just use no armor, so an AC of 10

For firearms only:
If the player rolls a 10-14, they do 1dx
If they roll a 15-19 they do 2dx
If they roll 20-24 they do 3dx
If they roll 25+ or a Crit they do 4dx
This would of course raise if the AC is higher than 10 by whatever that number is (and yes, I know that this is basically THAC0)


Right now the damage for all firearms is 2dx, and that just seems too dang high. Having this method in the system would make it so that depending on how well you roll, you would do better damage. I always thought it was strange when I hear people roll a 26 to hit on something with 12 armor and then roll a 1 for damage, it just seems a bit strange. We should reward them for how high they are hitting!

Any thoughts?
Well, the attack roll is pretty much "Do You Hit?", taking into account stuff like armor plating, parrying, counters, et cetera, whilst the Damage Roll is "How Well do You Hit?". With damage rolls, you can still get pretty low results, or high results, or moderate results. If you were hit by a frickin' Greataxe, it doesn't matter if you nearly dodged it, it's still going to deal damage. So really, the reward for high hits is just Critting, as well as worked into the Damage rolls.

Long story short: no.

[Man_Over_Game]

It ends up being a lot of real-time number tracking that slows down the game, which is why 5e went the simplistic route of having no damage-accuracy scaling.

I think a simpler method would be to have precision-based weapons roll multiple d20s to hit, and the damage die you roll is equal to the number of hits you made.

Start with your lowest roll, ask if that hits. If it doesn't move up to the next roll.

Say you rolled 3d20, and your rolls, before modifiers, are:

5, 9, 16.

Check your 5 first. You have a +7 to hit, so that's a 12 to hit. DM says you miss.
Now check your 9. 9+7=16. DM says you hit. You know the 16+7 roll hits as well, so that's two hits. Roll 2dX, where X is the damage dice size. For accuracy weapons, Advantage/Disadvantage simply adds or removes a dice to hit. So where you'd normally roll 3d20, with Disadvantage you only roll 2d20.

The only thing you do is track your lowest rolls and how many dice you rolled, which may be a bit easier than tracking the difference in AC vs. hit for a damage buff based on a chart.

[SkipSandwich]

The damage values are probabally a holdover from d20 Modern back in the days of 3e.

Part of the rational for damage was that in d20 Modern you ran the risk of instant death anytime you took more than Con score damage from a single hit since they wanted guns to remain threatening at all levels.

Personally, I would treat burstfire and other special weapon firemodes as akin to cantrips.

Aimed Burst
Weapon Stunt
You make an Aimed Burst as a Ranged Stunt Attack dealing normal weapon damage +1 die, +1 additional die at 5th, 11th, 17th. This consumes 3 units of ammo plus 3 units per added die.

[Vogie]

In my sig, I have a Gunslinger class that you may want to look at.

The main change that I used that you'd probably be interested in is swapping the "extra attack" ability to "increased accuracy" for more powerful firearms. It's mechanically identical to multiple hits on a single target, but allows you to make all of the rolls to hit first, then base the number of damage die you roll on the number of "hits", giving the effect of a single shot that hits, but may be a direct hit or a glancing shot