One thing that derives out of the new ethos for bonuses, is the necessity of keeping the dice for attack rolls and damage rolls separate from each other. This is a little unintuitive for me, since I tend to roll them both together (when I'm playing D&D) to speed up play just slightly.
Since class dice are used for the functions of both attack bonuses and base damage, it's important to know which dice are for what, when you're physically rolling them. One thing I wrote into the most recent draft of the rules is that it's a good idea to have at least two trays to roll dice into, in order to help facilitate this.
In one of my recent posts, I hinted at possibly removing the advantage mechanic from base damage. If we were to take it a step further, allowing mastery on base damage to apply to extra damage, this would make it possible for all damage dice to be rolled together -- without the need to delineate between the types of damage rolls. Since base damage is always going to be 1 or 2 dice, but extra damage can be from 1d6-5d6 or 1d10-3d10, the application of mastery separately to each expression seems valuable, to keep damage from spiking. On the other hand... does it really make sense to have "mastery on extra damage" as a separate mechanic from "mastery on base damage"?
The most likely application of mastery on base damage would come from combat mastery; this is attainable from positional mechanics (like targeting prone creatures in melee) as well as status effects (a.k.a. debuffs, conditions, etc.) such as a target being Incapacitated. So where would mastery on extra damage come from? This seems like an obvious bit of design space for class features (much like mastery on initiative bonus, for example.) It's just a question of whether having separate instances of mastery for the two damage types is worth the added overhead; there would be something of a 'quality of life' improvement if the damage could all just be rolled together, and have mastery apply to everything.
The problem with this is that it creates an exception to the general rule, whereby mastery on a given type of roll does not extend mastery onto the bonus dice for that type of roll. This is particularly important for saving throws and skill checks (where there is the potential to stack multiple dice bonuses) because adding mastery would significantly skew the math, in unintended ways.
There's also an argument to be made for not allowing mastery to apply to extra damage at all. In short, the mechanic changes the average damage on a d6 from 3.5 to about 4.33, and on a d10 from 5.5 to 6.4; this means that the average damage on 5d6 is over 2 points higher than 3d10, once mastery is applied to both. Again, this 'solution' would still mean extra damage ends up being the 3rd roll in the attack sequence:
Attack roll + bonus dice -> base damage -> extra damage
It might also be the case that the break between calculating base damage and extra damage has some value -- sometimes the extra damage might just be overkill. It's probably worth mentioning here that since monsters such as swarms and minions have a number of "hit dice" (rather than "hit points") they actually take damage based on the number of damage dice inflicted on them, rather than the exact value of the dice rolls. So, if you hit one of these creatures, you only really need to know whether your base damage does 1 or 2 dice of damage, and how many dice of extra damage you would apply (as well as any bonus dice which are able to be used to deal damage) -- effectively only needing to physically roll the attack die and its bonuses.
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Check back for another post, between the 25th and 28th of May.
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