Whenever You Role a 1 or a 2 Damage Roll Again

Do you want to Ask the Angry GM a question? It's easy to practise. Simply email your Brief question to TheAngryGameMaster@gmail.com and put ASK Angry in the field of study. And include your proper noun and then I know I can brand fun of yous, your name, your question, your disability to proofread, or your poor understanding of the concept of a Brief question using your proper appellation. And yes. Consider that a alert. If yous want politeness, become inquire the Hippie-Dippie-Sunshine-and-Rainbows-and-Bunny-Farts-GM.

Could yous please go there? That is to say, could you elaborate on how the damage curl may exist out of place in D&D? Furthermore, if you were to remove the damage roll, and being the solution-oriented GM that you are, what would you lot supplant information technology with?

You're really not the first person to inquire this, but you're the almost recent, so you win LTRFTW. Yous become the credit. But information technology'due south credit with a slap in the face. Considering if you'd Really read the article carefully, yous'd already take the answer.

The modernistic d20 system is built effectually this very simple idea of using a unmarried die roll to determine success or failure. That'southward why some shrieking elitists phone call it a "binary system" like that'due south some kind of insult. D&D doesn't care how much you succeed or fail. It doesn't track progress. It'south concerned with the result of unmarried deportment. You state an action, the activeness succeeds or fails, end of story. Everything else – that is to say the actual consequences of the outcome and how the world changes as a result – is added by the DM.

Just the damage gyre is actually a roll for progress. It'due south a role to meet how successful you were. And people will argue that "well, that's because y'all can't have a single assault roll kill someone or else gainsay becomes a mess." And I certain practice agree. Only that assumes the effect for an attack is either KILL or NOT KILL. If you assume, instead, that an attack either INJURES or DOESN'T Hurt, you tin can of a sudden see how the thought of numerical progress is weirdly out of place. Even if a task takes a long fourth dimension, in D&D, we don't track the progress. We don't track how many points you demand to pick a lock, fifty-fifty though y'all certain could. Information technology'due south an extended task that could take multiple actions and you could realistically set a "health" on the lock and determine how much "damage" lockpicking did. Information technology'd be abstruse, but information technology could be done. Same with searching a room. Imagine if things subconscious in the room were hidden at sure "thresholds." Each menstruum of time you search the room, you roll a roll for thoroughness and that determines what you lot discover. You can keep rolling until yous've added up enough points to find everything, with each coil eating upward a certain amount of time. That'south substantially what hit points and damage rolls are in their virtually abstract. It's a progress indicator on a task that can't be completed with ane action.

The funny affair is that D&D flirts with other progress indicators from fourth dimension to fourth dimension, and they never actually catch on. For case, crafting in 3.five worked similar this: translate the toll of the detail into SP, roll a craft check, and based on that bank check, marker off some SP. When you lot've "crafted" enough SP, the item is done. Each craft check cost time and materials. And no one liked it or used it. And it went away.

Skill challenges in 4E were basically another effort to exercise the same thing: create an extended chore and give it a certain threshold for success. Each cheque moved you toward success a certain number of steps. When you had enough success steps, the chore was completed. Only skill challenges were very divisive and a lot of folks didn't similar them and the implementation kind of sucked.

Only if you want to encounter the real weirdness of the damage roll in D&D, wait at the rules for breaking things. The current rules, in 5E, which you can reference on PHB 185, run similar this: if you want to break an object, you tin make an assail curlicue and the DM will set an AC and HP for the object and when it takes enough damage it breaks. Or the DM can set a DC for a Strength check to intermission and object. And if you succeed, it breaks. Now, I understand the basic point. If you're trying to hack through a door with a spell or weapon, it should accept hitting points. Because you're really trying to destroy the object. But if you're trying to bust a door open up, well, that's a one-and-washed sort of thing. Simply it leads to some real weirdness. For example, if you lot try breaking a door down with a rapier, you're probably going to terminate up with a shattered rapier. Seriously. They weren't made to exist thrust into solid objects. They bend and snap. And what about unarmed attacks? Certain, I can burst a door open up by smashing into information technology. But what if I want to concoction it down with unarmed attacks? What if I'g a monk? Shouldn't that piece of work? I'grand not arguing that the game shouldn't rely on a GM'due south mutual sense. Because information technology totally should. What I'm pointing out is a spot where the binary system and the harm whorl system rub up against each other in weird means.

But I was also but trying to make a point about weird little vestigial things that don't vest in the system and manage to endure. There's no reason, if y'all invented D&D today, to have impairment rolls in there. Imagine if you lot invented the d20 arrangement and you had 1 dice roll that pretty much did everything. And suddenly, someone said, "we should too add v other die just so that, for this one state of affairs, we can tack a 2d die scroll onto the first to see how good information technology works?" Information technology'd be a weird proposal. Kind of similar the critical hit thing. And I wasn't proposing that we remove them. I mean, in Thinking Critically, I came to the conclusion that it was okay to take crits and we could probably just leave them alone considering we'd never be rid of them. Same with harm rolls. And, just like with crits, I personally LIKE damage rolls. To the point where I had a whole Twitter rant against a blogger who suggested I simply use the static impairment given in the Monster Manual.

But fine, as an exercise, let'due south pretend we decide that harm rolls have to get. What could we do in the d20 organization to leave them around?

Well, the most obvious answer is just give everything a fixed damage. A longsword does 4 + Strength modifier impairment on a hit. A greataxe does vi + Strength modifier on a hit. And so on. Or, if we're talking about D&D 5E hither, you could even adjust for level. Like a longsword does 2 + Forcefulness modifier + Level damage. Or whatever. I'm just spitballing. That's just the most obvious solution. Merely the damage doesn't vary.

If varying damage is something important to you, only you even so want to get rid of damage rolls, what if damage was based on the divergence between the modified attack curlicue and the Armor Grade. If the orcs AC is 14 and you roll a xix to hitting, you exercise 5 impairment. Or some base damage plus 5.

Or, honestly, you lot could practise away with damage altogether. And I'm going to bring up Savage Worlds here, even though it technically DOES accept a damage roll. Because that damage roll is COMPLETELY unnecessary. The system for damage could be used to get rid of the stupid damage curl. Permit me explicate.

In Savage Worlds, afterwards you hit a target, you roll a special examination called a harm roll. Information technology'southward rolled confronting a target number, just similar any other curl. If you succeed, the target becomes Shaken. Y'all hit it hard enough to cause it distress. If the target was already Shaken, yous kill it instead. That's it. Either yous hurt information technology or you don't. If you hurt information technology and it'southward already recovering from some other accident, yous kill it. Done and done.

PCs and powerful villains in Savage Worlds, though, add together a footling bit more to that. If you hurt a PC or villain, it becomes Shaken. If y'all striking it again before information technology recovers, information technology suffers a Wound. The fourth Wound volition kill annihilation. Simply the idea is the same: either y'all injure it or yous don't.

There's no reason y'all couldn't take a system like that. A hit causes an injury. If a brute suffers a certain number of injuries, it dies. Basically, every hit always does exactly one hitting point. Think of how much easier that would exist to rails.

There'southward really a footling more to Savage Worlds than that, but the betoken is the damage scroll is just another type of success roll in the game. Information technology works the aforementioned way as everything else. And it does have some degrees of success, but and so does every ringlet in Savage Worlds. So information technology is possible to hit an opponent and kill it outright or deal multiple wounds in i shot.

Merely, thing is, I don't actually consider the damage curlicue to be a problem. Again, that was just an idle remark. I was trying to illustrate a point. And I'm not clamoring for its removal. Merely, I'll bring up some other parallel between crit systems in that article and the impairment gyre. Remember how I said the iii.5/Pathfinder system of confirming a disquisitional kind of sucked because all it always actually did was rob you of a crit. Well, in some sense, damage rolls exercise the same matter. When you miss, y'all miss. Washed and done. Only when you lot hit, you either do solid impairment OR you might scroll such sucky damage that you barely hit the creature at all. And that second thing is a pain in the a$&. You roll a actually good hit, correct when yous need it, and you roll a 1 on the harm die. Sucktastic. And, while you can argue that the reverse is true, that y'all tin can roll high damage when yous need it, I've pointed out several times that human brains overvalue losses compared to gains. Rolling depression damage feels like more of a screwjob than rolling loftier impairment feels similar a success. But the outcome probably isn't strong enough to care about.

That said, IF I WERE MAKING AN RPG, I'd probably dispense with the damage roll from the beginning and find a better mode to make damage follow logically from the assail roll. That is to say, if you roll a skillful, solid hit, it does good damage. If you barely succeed, you barely practice any damage. And, if you miss, you miss. Something similar that. Ideally, IF I WERE MAKING AN RPG, there would really just exist i type of dice roll in the entire game and EVERYTHING would follow the aforementioned basic rules.

Simply, I'm not saying I'1000 making an RPG.

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Source: https://theangrygm.com/ask-angry-its-okay-to-have-damage-rolls/

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