As was established in a previous post, the baseline of 1d8 + any one of the 5 class dice bonuses produces about 7.3 damage per round (DPR). Now, the d12 bonus is the outlier in that it does not produce any additional hit or crit chance; this became a concern of mine when I started to look into the interaction of hit and crit chance, with the stacking of extra damage dice. We'll set that aside for now, but I'll come back to that at the end of this post.
Now, coming back to our monster math expressions, we know that standard monsters should have about as much HP as a PC, and that our encounter budget allows for 2 standard monsters per 1 PC. So what does all of this actually mean?
Let's start with the HP: how much HP do PCs have? Since we now calculate HP as "the maximum possible result of your initiative roll [including initiative bonus]" this gives us a range between 24 and 32. This is the same range as in previous iterations, the difference being that we're using initiative roll instead of "basic roll" (i.e. 1d20 + class die, which became muddled once the change to two class dice was made.) Initiative rolls use a d20 + a bonus based on one of your class dice: 1d4, 2d4, 1d6, 2d6, 1d8, 1d10, or 1d12.
What this means is that a team of 4 PCs should deal something like 192-256 damage per encounter, in order to kill off the 8 standard monsters (having between 24 and 32 HP each.) Following the ethos of 4th Edition D&D, ideally combat should be somewhere around 3 or 4 rounds of combat. If we average out this total over 4 rounds, this results in 48-64 damage per round, as a team of 4 PCs.
Now, let's assume that each 'striker' in the party is expected to produce 1 kill per round (KPR). This translates to 24-32 damage per round. Assuming our baseline of 7.3 damage (as mentioned at the start) this means that the striker needs to produce an additional 16.7-24.7 DPR to hit this benchmark. Since the party needs to achieve 48-64 DPR, and if 1 KPR = 24-32 DPR, this means that the remaining 3 party members only need to account for half of the remaining DPR requirement. If we take 24 HP and split it 3 ways, we come up with 8 -- not far off of our benchmark of 7.3; once we add in things like combat mastery from status effects or tactical considerations, this should be easily doable.
So how do we get strikers up by that additional 16.7-24.7 DPR?
Let's look at the proposed baselines we're dealing with, in terms of "extra damage dice." First, it's important to remember that a change was recently made whereby these dice always have mastery applied to them; this increases the average of each d6 to 4.33 and each d10 to 6.4
Now, if we calculate out 5d6 and 3d10, we get averages of 21.65 and 19.2 respectively.
At this point, we have to stop and remind ourselves that this is damage, and NOT DPR -- and we MUST calculate the DPR in this instance. The baseline hit chance in TNP is 50% (a 10-19 on the d20) with a 5% crit chance (natural 20.) So, we'll do 55% of this damage, per round -- plus the maximum damage of these dice (30, in either case) an additional 5% of the time, since crits deal the rolled damage plus the maximum value of the damage dice.
(21.65 * 0.55) + (30 * 0.05) = 13.4075
(19.2 * 0.55) + (30 *0.05) = 12.06
As you can see, when added to the baseline DPR, this still leaves us far short of the damage necessary for 1 KPR. For the sake of argument, let's increase the hit chance and crit chance, by applying the d4 class dice bonus to it; this bonus increases the crit chance to 17.5%, which changes the calculation as follows:
(21.65 * 0.675) + (30 * 0.175) = 19.86375
(19.2 * 0.675) + (30 * 0.175) = 18.21
Now when we add in the baseline DPR of about 7.3, these numbers only just barely break the minimum threshold of doing the 24 damage needed to achieve 1 KPR. Now, imagine if this example were using the d12 bonus (where there is no increase in hit chance or crit chance) rather than the d4 bonus, and you can see where the problem arises. This is why I recently gave some consideration to boosting all of the dice bonuses; I've been prototyping some changes to the d4, d8, and d12 which would increase the baseline DPR to about 8.8 and crucially would add an increase in hit chance for the d12 bonus. The problem is that it's still significantly smaller than the d4 or d8 bonus, meaning it still doesn't scale well w/r/t extra damage dice -- unless the baseline DPR with the d12 bonus is increased to something closer to 9.3
The other question then becomes, do we simply dispense with d6 and d10 bonuses, and only use those dice for extra damage? I've contemplated it, but it really does leave the Paladin (d6, d10), Rogue (d6), and Occultist (d10) classes in a lurch -- unless you compensate them with some unique +hit mechanics, or just boost their extra damage dice beyond the cap, high enough to outpace their lack of a hit booster.
Now, one thing I've discovered in going over all this, is that most classes (in fact) aren't attacking only once per round. At a bare minimum (depending on things like subclass) everyone will at least be doing some kind of two-weapon fighting routine, if not a flatout AoE against an entire maelstrom, or some other form of multi-attack. As such, I think I'm just going to power through, with the bonuses from the most recent draft of the rules intact; it's far too late in the game (no pun intended) to really consider a major overhaul to the base mechanics.
...
As with things like the decision to axe advantage on base damage, the new class dice mechanics I was tinkering with will basically be filed (at least mentally) in my "list of things for the NEXT next project."
Hopefully this deep dive into the math was illuminating for those of you reading out there.
Check back for the next post on September 10th!