D&D 5th Edition: Thread #7

[PairO'Dice Lost]

To put things simply, just over a month ago I walked barefoot across hot coals. The same fire, just lit, was not that hot - and when it was roaring before we spread the coals out to walk across the fire it was painful to get close to.

To say "Fire does x damage" bears no resemblance to the way that that one single fire behaved. And that was just a single fire made out of the same logs and wood at different points in its life. Different woods burn at different temperatures and have different specific heat capacities, and different ways of laying the fire and fuel densities affect the heat given out.

At this point we're into a formula for fire damage by temperature because fires vary hugely in terms of how hot and likely to burn they are. I can't be bothered working out the temperature of a fire. Can you?

Well, first off, walking on hot coals works because of the technique; if, as you emphasized, someone is being pressed into them in combat rather than using a special technique, it would do some damage.

Second, I can certainly come up with a workable fire-damage solution that varies by size and intensity. For a 2e-style overly-detailed solution, let's say fires deal d4 for momentary contact, d6 and ongoing 2 for voluntary contact, and d8 and ongoing 5 for forceful contact, and they do one die of damage per size category starting at Fine (1d6 for Fine, 2d6 for Tiny, 3d6 for Small, etc., with smaller than Fine just doing 0/2/5). Walking on hot coals? Less than Fine, ran right across them, so no damage. Grabbing onto the lit end of a torch? Fine flame (3-6 inches tall), holding it carefully, so 1d6 and ongoing 2. Knocked into a bonfire? Medium flame (4-8 feet tall), unexpected, so 4d8 damage and ongoing 5.

Or we can go with a 3e-style solution. Fire deals 1d6 damage per minute by being too close to them (adjacent to a bonfire or larger, in a burning building, etc.), and coming into contact with a fire makes an attack on you, +5 vs. Reflex to avoid ongoing 5 fire (save ends) for campfire-size fires or smaller, +10 vs. Reflex for ongoing 10 for larger fires. Walking on hot coals? Not a large fire, no contact, so no damage. Grabbing onto the lit end of a torch? Contact, Ref attack for ongoing, take 5 for a few rounds. Knocked into a bonfire? Contact, Ref attack for ongoing, take 10 for a few rounds.

Or we can go with a 4e-style solution. Fires smaller than you deal 1d6 and ongoing 5 (save ends) if you come into contact with them, or 2d6 and ongoing 10 for fires as big or bigger than you. Hot coals don't count as contact, torches are smaller, bonfires are bigger.

As you can see, having concrete rules that don't depend on the level of the challenge or the attacker rather than variable guidelines doesn't mean that the rules can't be simple, or that they'll make knocking people into braziers not worth it at higher levels. They can be as simple or complex as desired (simpler being better for some, complex being better for some) as long as you know what you're getting into. Falling damage and bull rushing managed to condense all the vagaries of wind resistance, terrain at the bottom, angle of impact, etc. in the former case and leverage, contact points, center of mass, etc. in the latter case into one simple, easily-remembered rule each, there's no reason why things like natural fires or throwing object have to be any more complicated.

This got me thinking. How should damage reduction work in 5e? Should it be like 2e, which gave outright immunity? 3.0, where it gave massive damage reduction? 3.5, with its low damage reduction values but resulted in the golf bag of swords made out of different materials? Or maybe 4e, which did away with most physical damage reduction save for a handful of resist all monsters?

I'm hoping that some monsters will be resistant but not immune to normal weapons (half damage), and do away with material based damage reduction. What do you think?

As Draz mentioned, the 2e system was bad for rendering fighters without the appropriate weapons useless. I dislike the 4e system of no physical damage types, because from the monster side it's nice to be able to differentiate blunt and non-blunt damage for oozes (since it's easier to smush Jello than try to poke it to pieces ), piercing vs. non-piercing damage for heavily-armored creatures (find the hole in Smaug's scales!), and so forth; from the player side, it's nice to be able to key feats and other features off weapon damage type for more options there.

So the 3e version is a good compromise. The main problems with DR in 3e, particularly armor-as-DR, are that it penalizes multiple attacks because it's applied per-attack and chargers/snipers attackers usually had much higher static bonuses than TWFers/volleyers. and that it doesn't scale well--DR 10 is amazing at level 1, chump change at level 20.

Given that martial classes in 5e are much more dice-based than modifier based (i.e. 10th level fighters are rolling 1d8+3d10+5, not 2d6+30) and there isn't a big divide between single-attackers and multiattackers, I think there are two approaches that could work. The first and simplest is proportional damage reduction: you might have something like resistance (take 1/2 damage) and improved resistance (take 1/4 damage), or whatever easy multipliers you want to use. This worked fairly well with those 2e and 3.0 monsters that basically had DR/50%, but doesn't give you the main benefit of plus-based 2e damage immunity or high 3e DR, which is preventing mobs of commoners from taking down dragons with lucky hits and basically saying "You must be this powerful to take on X."

The second and slightly more granular is per-die damage reduction: DR 1 means -1 damage per die, DR 10 means -10 damage per die, so you can go from "slightly resistant" to "almost immune" without either rendering DR useless or rendering certain weapons useless. This scales very well and gives you that "must be this tall to ride" effect since DR 6 or 7 would take care of commoners with Str 10 and d6 weapons, but it would require a bit more math on the players' part which isn't necessarily a good thing.

Either way, I don't think 3e's flat DR is a good idea in 5e, since low amounts of DR just stretch out combats without much other impact and high amounts of DR would encourage expertise dice users to go for damage over fancy tricks which is not something we want to encourage. I also think that DR types should be drastically reduced from the 3e smorgasbord; cutting it down to just slashing/piercing/bludgeoning/magic would be good, since alignment is a module (so DR X/good wouldn't be a good idea without those modules). Things like cold iron vulnerability for fey and demons or silver vulnerability for werewolves would be best served by something besides DR, like "werewolves don't heal while touching silver" or "touching cold iron sickens fey" or the like, so it's more interesting and allows non-martial types to get involved instead of cold iron weapons being basically "+X damage to fey" and that's it.