Now. Dice are wonderful things that allow us to randomize the experience of play, so that we're able to have experiences with a bit of randomness injected into them, much like real life. Things don't always happen just according to plan. In fact, most of the time a plan never survives contact with reality because of circumstances that have incomprehensible complexity, which the randomness of dice-rolling simulates.
However, dice are not completely random. They do have average ranges that they will roll, and that's what we need to balance off of in a game. For example, the 20-sided die, which was determined to be the main way to determine the success of various actions in this system in the last post, has an average roll of 10.5. Now, you can't actually ever roll a 10.5, but if you roll a ton of d20's, then you'll come up with an average roll of about 10.5. But with our average, we have a deviation of 5.77. This means that any roll is most likely to fall within 5.77 of 10.5. This isn't terribly important, but it helps us understand how to make a task difficult or easy. If we want a task to be extremely easy for a character, then we put the level of roll we need the character to at least make over 5.77 below 10.5, making it very, very likely that the character would be able to hit that mark. If it just needs to be easy, then put it about 5.77 below 10.5. If it needs to be averagely difficult, then we put it as close as we can to 10.5. And then so on and so forth for the harder things.
This applied to the damage dice, as well. For example, if we have a 4-sided die, the average is 2.5, while the deviation is 1.12. That's a fancy way of saying you're going to deal about 1 to 4 damage with it. It's most likely, however, that you're going to deal 2 or 3 damage with it (unless you step on it; there's a reason most people call d4's caltrops). So, that's that.
With a d6, it's 3.5 with a deviation of 1.71. With a d8, its 4.5 with a deviation of 2.29.
Anyway, now that I've collected and explained most of this information, I think I'm going to move onto working on damage some more.
While I would really like to consolidate the damage dice, but from what I've been looking at, the deviation between amounts of damage on different categories of weapon would be too much for the system to balance out with non-random damage. However, I've decided that three different dice, which each larger one having 2 more sides than the one smaller than it, would work just as well.
Now this is going to dip into both character abilities and the weapon system a bit. Yeah.
So, most characters are going to be doing damage through their weapons, but others are mainly going to rely on their class abilities to do damage. It doesn't make sense for the guy who can call flame from his fingers at will to go around using a stick trying to bop people over the head. He's got his fire fingers for that. So, this means that damage must be consistent across class abilities and weapons, and it must scale properly on both weapons and class abilities.
Scaling damage is easiest when working primarily with constants, rather than variables. Adding a new damage die can increase damage by a huge amount or barely any at all, depending on what you end up rolling for damage. Plus, the span between increases in damage are considerable, as you have to work on the basis that characters are probably going to be dealing an average of X amount of damage, but you still have to take into account the extremes of damage dealt by the die, which puts you at actually gaining the damage later than you would with simple constants. Another reason to mainly use constants is that it moves the majority of math to character building or non-combat situations. The plain fact is that most people aren't good at adding figures in their heads (including someone like me, who is rather good at math) and trying to do so slows down the real-time pace of combat too much.
However, constants are boring. So, while it is harder to do the math, and much more time-consuming to do it over and over and over again, the variability that dice add to damage makes it really exciting to do damage. When you get five 6's out of five d6's, you grin uncontrolably and probably spend the next seven years telling stories about it. However, you don't seem to remember a whole lot about the times you end up with all five ones staring at you..... Hmmm...
Anyway, the point is that there needs to be a balance between damage gained through dice and constants. So, for class ability-based damage, dice are going to come from the times that ability actually "levels up", such as an ability which says "this ability deals 1d6 + ability score damage at first level, and gains a 1d6 damage at levels 4 and 7". The constant damage is going to come from "modifier options" or "perks" or whatever I end up calling them. So, for options that add effects or damage to a class ability, that is going to mostly be constant damage. For weapons, the dice-based damage is going to come from "leveling up" the weapon. That's probably going to be talked more about in the actual weapons section. And the constant damage is from purchasing damage and will also be talked about more in the weapons section.
The main dice for damage purposes are going to come in three flavors. The d4, d6, and d8 are our main dice, and I'm going to try my best to keep it within those constraints. The discrepancies should be easily enough repaired with extra constant damage or different pools of perks or abilities to add on top of damage.
So. With that, I'll leave you, and next time, I'll come back with the first bits of classes or weapons. Probably both on the same day.
Song of the Post: "Polyhurt" by Com Truise
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