So if you hit on a 9 that's a 60% chance to hit, doing 13.33*0.6=7.998 average damage. applying GWF it becomes a 35% chance to hit doing 23.33*0.35=8.1 something damage. whereas if you need a 10 to hit, that's 55%, doing 13.33*0.55=7.33, applying GWF it is a 30% chance to hit doing 23.33*0.3=6.99 so no longer worth it.
I think it works here
@goodguy5 what do you mean though? you always need to account for both to hit and damage and strength is probably changing both
@kviiri Well, statistically speaking, no. The average damage is actually higher than similarly-classed ranged weapons like Shortbows (3.5) or Longbows/Light Crossbows (4.5) or Heavy Crossbows (5.5).
But it does make individual rounds more frustrating because there's a high chance your attack fails to land. And a high chance to deal 20+ damage from an unmodified attack.
Two ideas from 13th Age I really like is guaranteed damage from attacks and escalation dice. I like them so much actually that I'm considering adding them to all my DnD-ish games
@goodguy5 Well the "dice" (or actually "die" since there's just one) is technically not a very good name since it's just a number customarily tracked by a die... in its simplest use it's just a flat bonus to attack rolls that increases by one each round
> Escalation Die The escalation die represents a bonus to attacks as the fight goes on. At the start of the second round, the GM sets the escalation die at 1. Each PC gains a bonus to attack rolls equal to the current value on the escalation die. Each round, the escalation die advances by +1, to a maximum of +6. Monsters and NPCs do not add the escalation die bonus to their attacks If the GM judges that the characters are avoiding conflict rather than bringing the fight to the bad guys, the escalation die doesn’t advance. If combat virtually ceases, the escalation die resets to 0.
But it also ties into some class mechanics: you can do this or that when escalation die is at certain values, and IIRC some class had an option that temporarily sets the die to a high value and then resets it low again.
My experience is that fights tend to wind down towards the end. Like, you start with 10 large skeletons surrounding the PCs, and then by the end, you're kiting 3 or 4 of them back and forth through a Moonbeam, barely ever taking hits.
The guaranteed damage thing is also nice but harder to hack in to DnD effectively... the basic idea is that characters always do some damage with the attacks they're good at, even if they miss, reducing the "wasted turns"
Meanwhile, the most dangerous part is right at the start, when your druid, who is out of position due to the initiative order, gets hit for 80% of their health before they have a chance to shapechange/disengage and get to a better position flanked by their allies instead of their enemies.
Yeah, DnD combat is, IMO, at its finest when there's a medium-large body of monsters with some interesting positioning and all... and gets tedious when there's fewer monsters remaining.
@goodguy5 That works for most cases, but eg. in DnD 4e it's not as simple because almost everything is an attack and one'd want to adjudicate it so that missed encounter powers retain some trace of their original characteristics even when missing
And some attacks already have on miss -effects, which might require rebalancing now that it's no longer unique to them... etc
@Xirema In a boss-ish encounter, the last enemy standing is often something that has far more HP than everything else, and taking that down is still a bore though
Even though it could be mechanically... hard? Challenging might be the wrong word, but there's a clear chance of losing despite getting rid of the boss's minions.
DnD just isn't very good at solo mobs. Never was, by what I've heard.
@kviiri Valid point. I think it's been a long time since I've been in a fight with a BBEG. Most fights I'm in have involved enemy parties of 6-10 creatures.
@kviiri I don't know if 5e introduced it, but it does have Legendary Actions/Lair Actions/Legendary Resistance to try to make boss monsters properly threatening.
Basically, a solo boos is supposed to be the equivalent of five ordinary monsters, right? So just make them that and flavor the five monsters as parts of the single boss.
Fighting a dragon? Each round it gets one turn each for its head, body, wings, legs, and tail. And your attacks have to choose which of those to target.
There's also the JRPG boss-in-stages. You know, you beat a boss enough, it changes form. It's not as exciting as multibody, IMO... but you can have both :-)
also, reactions that are like pseudo legendary actions. •when the boss is reduced below 50%, it can do X •if the boss is hit with a critical hit, it can do y •when the boss is brought to 0 hp, perhaps w
@kviiri I once had a 4e villain who the PCs killed, so he came back as a vampire later, and they killed him, so he came back as a ghost who could possess the PCs and force them to attack each other, and they killed that so he immediately returned as a wraith.
@ColinGross However, I think you should be somewhat open-minded about villains growing in power as they suffer injury... it's a very common trope in fiction that both heroes and villains perform very well under duress!
Sometimes, it's not exactly made prominent... other times, it's explicitly chalked up to "force of emotion", "desperation" or whatever :)
@kviiri Depending on the ecology and intelligence of the enemy, they start with some of their upper end abilities and spells. If some adventurers actually get to them, it's likely they're going to start with some pretty potent fire. Reserving one or two high level or expensive things in case the situation takes a turn for the worse.
Or a Humvee Balor, which is probably also a Decepticon.
@goodguy5 Reactive actions were awesome for 4e bosses.
My favorite example is a mind flayer who had a cultist that dealt minimal psychic damage to each PC within sight at the beginning of the PC's turn, and the mind flayer could reactively teleport to a square adjacent to anyone who took psychic damage.
So each turn, the mind flayer was in the face of whoever's turn it was.
makes my head hurt thinking about it. The spell clearly can only affect creatures, but how they perceive time is something I haven't thought about before
getting into theoretical physics and relativity there
I recall some Angband variant have "Time seems to move around you faster" as a message for the player slowing down, and the logical equivalent for when the player was magically hasted
...and another variant which inverted those.
Makes me wonder, if it's confusing either way, can't they just say "You slow down/speed up"?
Seems like more evidence that spells which were imported from older editions of D&D had less consideration for the Great Flavor/Mechanics Merge that took place.
Because in 3.5, a line like "The flow of time around you is altered" is just fluff. In 5e, that could actually have mechanical consequences.
is there anything anywhere in pathfinder that actually states you get an extra attack in a full attack for every off-hand weapon or just lots of pages of forum argument about it (for creatures which have more than two hands)
IIRC, two-weapon fighting gives you two attacks (each at a malus to your attack rolls) and then you can get iterative attacks for each of those if your BAB is high enough.
because it qualifies you for improved/etc. twf which would give you extra off-hand iteratives
which you could do with different weapons
but regardless, it is heavily implicit that extra arms = extra off-hand attacks with manufactured weapons, and multiarmed monsters seem to be written that way
I agree that it makes the most sense as far as consistency goes
but I'm wondering if paizo has ever actually explicitly said that's how it works
First look up Girallon's Blessing
It's a level 3 spell you can find in Savage Species 66 or Spell Compendium 106 (they have major differences, so make sure you look at both of them), and grants multiple extra arms based on caster level and size. It has limits and restrictions, but sets useful pr...
BTW, re the mention of swarm mechanics above, I really like the "weight" mechanic in Fate of Agaptus.
Normal-sized folx have weight 1; extra-big monsters have higher weights; extra-small creatures have 0 weight and only count toward weight when swarming. Swarms have variable weight depending on their size.
If one side of a fight outweighs the other by 2:1 or more, every time the heavier side rolls the dice they can turn one die to +.
If the heavier side outweighs the other by 4:1, they can turn two dice to +.
You can also use weight in social conflicts; a student vs a panel of professors, for example.
(A swarm of protesting students could outweigh a whole academic institution if you get enough of them.)
can anyone find that Crawford tweet about whether Two-Weapon Fighting (5e) just requires at least one attack within your Attack action to be made with a light weapon (rather than all your attacks in the Attack action)? just want to make sure I didn't imagine it
