Scattershot (Beta 4)

I'm a little behind on my blogging, but I don't really have enough material on any one topic to make a solid post, so I'll just touch on a handful of things instead. Hopefully they can each be expanded upon down the road.


Subclasses/Archetypes
In the interest of allowing classes to be broken down into smaller bites, and thus less front-loaded, I've been making some tweaks here and there regarding Archetypes. Wherever possible, I'm making it so that choosing an Archetype is optional; where this does not work as well, I've changed the archetypes to instead be called Subclasses, which are mandatory.

This leads to the classes being somewhat asymmetrical, but also kind of gives a clearer indication as to which ones are straightforward, and which ones have more customization.


Combat Math (roughly)
The basis for the damage/HP calculations roughly originated from one of my earlier playtests. I hadn't crunched the numbers that closely, but expected classes to do around 10 damage per round (DPR). In practice, they were doing closer to 15 DPR, so that's been the benchmark for average damage, that I've been aiming at.

With the intent of keeping damage roughly equal, the smartest thing was to work from the biggest class die (d12) and see how best to fit the other dice into it. The best starting point was to assume that d12 classes would be doing 2d12 of damage on their turn (a maximum of 24) which obviously is hard for d10 classes to fit under. This is alright, since d10 and d6 classes are expected to have a slightly higher damage output; essentially we want each class to have a maximum damage output (aside from critical hits) in the 24-30 range. This gives us a couple of possible expressions for each class die:

• 6d4, 7d4, 1d4+1d20, 2d4+1d20
• 4d6, 5d6, 1d6+1d20
• 3d8, 1d8+1d20
• 3d10, 1d10+1d20
• 2d12

So using things like Advantage, Expertise, and "double roll and stack," we can bump the average damage of individual dice without increasing the maximum range. (This is something that D&D typically doesn't dabble with, instead using +1s to increase minimum, average, and maximum damage.)

For example, the Acrobat gets to double roll and stack the damage of their specialty basic attacks (and basic attacks also get Expertise.) So by being able to make basic attacks as both a standard action and a minor action, they're effectively doing 4d4 damage (before adding in things like Power Attack.) However, their average will be much higher than a Wizard doing four individual 1d4 attacks with their Magic Missile iconic attack, because the Acrobat is more likely to do maximum damage with each die.

I'm in the process of slowly crunching out the actual DPR of each class' attack sequences, to make sure they actually hit that 15 DPR benchmark; as such, some classes have already been given a few damage perks or additional attacks.

Housekeeping

I'm still going to try and keep up with posting 3x per month. I've been keeping a change log of any edits to the classes and core rules, so I'm hoping I can use that as the 3rd post of each month.

The remaining posts due for this month will hopefully be able to be done on time.