The Role of the Dice (2023 Edition)

 As we harken back to the previous post with this title, it is important to remember that each die within The Next Project has to serve multiple different functions. It isn't just about weapon / spell damage -- the dice have to do everything.

Setting the Criteria
With that in mind, today we're going to talk about how the class dice are going to be used as bonuses to attack and damage. When working on the previous slate of bonus mechanics, their utility was evaluated/balanced by using a score, which was generated by calculating the total hit chance that the bonus provided, plus triple the crit chance it provided (since crits were assumed to do roughly 3x the damage of a regular hit.) 

When evaluating the updated mechanics (which will be presented here today) I instead calculated the expected damage output of the bonus, based on the average rolls of the damage dice; a “base damage” of 1d8 was used as sort of a placeholder, just to crunch everything out. For context, by using this metric, each bonus produces an average damage of roughly 7.3 (taking into account hit chance and crit chance.)

• d4 bonus: 7.33125
• d6 bonus: 7.2875
• d8 bonus: 7.275
• d10 bonus: 7.29
• d12 bonus: 7.325

Axing Advantage
There were also two things that I identified from previous drafts, which I wanted to change.

Firstly, the existing class dice bonuses didn’t provide as big of a boost as Advantage did. Secondly, I wanted to remove Advantage from the designs as much as possible, including axing it for attack rolls at a bare minimum.

Basically, the interaction between stacking and/or cancelling one or more instances of Advantage or Disadvantage can become a confusing mess (for some people) which I just wanted to avoid. I also wanted more of a unique mechanic, rather than just continuing to borrow 5e's shtick. As such, in order to get rid of Advantage, you need to have a competitive replacement, which is why the class dice bonuses were beefed up. Further, having a bonus and a penalty that don’t directly interact or cancel one another is something I saw as a valuable improvement. By having class dice as the bonus mechanic and Disadvantage as the penalty mechanic, there is no longer a question of which one overrides the other -- both can always be applied.

Dealing the Dice

Another reason for building around bonuses that use class dice, is to encourage diversification within party composition. One of the early comments that TNP received was, “Well why wouldn’t everyone just play d12 classes? They’re obviously the best!” So, if you’re allowed to have 5 class dice bonuses, but only one of them is allowed to be a d12 bonus, you have an incentive to balance your party around being able to get as many different bonuses as possible.

The other consideration was just that rolling 1d20 to hit, and dealing 1dX or 2dY for base damage simply would not output enough DPR. The base of 55% hit rate (or 60% with mastery) just wasn’t going to cut it; both the hit chance and the damage needed to be beefed up. With the designs moving more towards "roll X and keep 1" mechanics, I didn’t want unused attack bonus dice going to waste; letting these dice be added to damage would also help with the overall objective of raising the damage benchmarks.

For example, using standard monsters with 28 HP, applying any one of these dice bonuses would result in the monster being dropped to 0 HP by the 4th round of combat:

(7.3 damage/round) * (4 rounds) = (29.2 damage)

By getting the party to stack multiple bonuses, the number of rounds can be reduced even further.

Attack Bonus vs. Damage Bonus
Now, the important thing to remember is that even though there can be up to 5 bonus dice applying to each attack (one for each class die) only one of those dice may be used to modify the actual attack roll. The general rule is that the die which is used as the attack bonus cannot also be used as a damage bonus -- but there are exceptions, as will be laid out below. The player is allowed to roll all bonus dice alongside the attack roll, and choose which bonus die to use as the attack bonus after seeing the result of all of these rolls (attack roll and bonus dice.)

(It's worth mentioning here that when Combat Mastery is said to apply mastery to the "attack bonus die" it is referring to whichever die is chosen to modify the attack roll; essentially, this only matters if one or more of your bonus dice rolled a 1 -- so keep an eye out for those.)

d4:

As an attack bonus: the d4 can be added to a miss (1-9 on the d20) or a hit (10-19 on the d20)

As a damage bonus: the d4 can be treated as having mastery (i.e. a roll of 1 is treated as a 4 for the damage bonus, but not for the attack bonus)

Special: the d4 result can always be used as BOTH an attack bonus and as a damage bonus

d6:

As an attack bonus: the d6 can be added to a miss (1-9 on the d20) or a hit (10-19 on the d20)

As a damage bonus: the d6 can be added as bonus damage

Special: the d6 result may be used as BOTH an attack bonus and as a damage bonus, only if the attack was a miss (1-9 on the d20)

d8:

As an attack bonus: the d8 can be added to a miss (1-9 on the d20)

As a damage bonus: the d8 can be added as bonus damage

Special: if the d8 result is equal to the result of the attack roll, you can treat the attack roll as being a critical hit; this counts as using the d8 as an attack bonus

d10:

As an attack bonus: the d10 can be added to a hit (10-19 on the d20)

As a damage bonus: the d10 can be added as bonus damage

Special: the d10 result can be used in place of the attack roll, if the attack was a miss (1-9 on the d20); this counts as using the d10 as an attack bonus (i.e. a 10 on the d10 can be used to turn a miss into a hit)

d12:

As an attack bonus: [none]

As a damage bonus: the d12 can be added as bonus damage

Special: on a critial hit, the d12 can be treated as having rolled its maximum result, regardless of the natural result of the die roll

Summation
As you can see from this, I sort of consider d4 to be the best “support” die -- it just always works. The d8 is another good support die; it's not as flexible, but it has a greater ability to turn a miss into a hit, just because it does have a bigger number range than the d4.

I tinkered quite a bit with the d10 before finally settling on this version. The 'special' feature seems a bit niche (indeed, it’s effectively a [10% chance on the d10] * [45% miss chance on the d20] = 4.5% increase in hit chance) but this little bump was needed to keep the damage math in line with other bonuses.

Now, I had wanted to have this sort of “use the class die in place of the attack roll” mechanic be part of the d12 bonus in some form. However, I just couldn’t get it to work without the overall bonus being too damn high. This would in turn require another round of increasing all of the other bonuses --  a task made nearly impossible by the fact that the d4 has effectively already maxed out its possible applications. After tinkering around with the numbers, I felt satisfied with using the bonus damage on a crit -- and allowing the d12 mechanic to just be something simpler than the others. These bonuses also serve to create a distinction in playstyle, between the "2d6" tanky classes and the "1d12" tanky classes, which I think is a valuable bit of design space to explore.

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Next post is scheduled for January 21st, so be sure to check back then!