Since the summer break, I've been trying to figure out a solution to the problem with the d12 bonus. What it comes down to is that because d12 is such a large damage bonus, it has to be a relatively small attack bonus, in order for the DPR to be balanced against the other (smaller) dice bonuses -- to wit, in the current iterations, the d12 does not provide an attack bonus at all. This creates a problem, because it does not bestow the multiplicative effect to "extra damage" that dice bonuses with an attack bonus offer. I came up with a fix, but in the process I realized I should also clean up some of the nomenclature a bit.
Class dice bonuses are bonuses to attacks, which use class dice; they can be bonuses to attack rolls and/or to damage rolls. When used as a bonus to an attack roll, the class dice bonus is referred to as an attack bonus, and when used as a bonus to a damage (i.e. base damage) roll, the class dice bonus is referred to as a damage bonus (or bonus damage, depending on grammatical considerations.) Extra damage is something entirely separate from bonus damage; extra damage is only ever represented by d6s and/or d10s, can only be used for damage (not for attack bonus), and is in addition to both base damage and bonus damage.
Now, it's important to remember that while all 5 of the class dice bonuses may be applied to a given attack, only one may be used as an attack bonus -- and you can choose which one to use, after rolling all bonuses. Some of the class dice bonuses have special functions that work "as an attack bonus," meaning that in order to benefit from said bonus, no other attack bonus may be applied. Specifically, the d8 bonus when it ties the attack roll (d20), or using the d10 roll in place of the d20 (i.e. a 10 on the d10 being used to make a hit.) Remember this for later.
The general rule is that a class dice bonus can be used for an attack bonus OR a damage bonus, but not both -- however, there are exceptions (which is partly why to simplify things, one of the reworks I was considering was to just allow all dice to be used for attack bonus AND damage bonus.)
As I had said from the top, the d12 bonus:
a) does not have an attack bonus component, and;
b) does not properly scale with extra damage dice
So how do we fix this? Well, what I've come up with is this:
"As an attack bonus, the d12 bonus allows all extra damage dice to be treated as having rolled their maximum value."
Essentially what this does, is take the base hit chance (50%) and crit chance (5%) without an attack bonus (or, when applying the d12 bonus, which has no attack bonus component) and instead of multiplying those chances by the random roll of the extra damage dice, you're multiplying them by the maximum value of the extra damage dice. The result is that the extra damage scales up, more in line with the other class dice bonuses.
As mentioned in a previous post, since each class dice bonus (with a base damage of 1d8) produces a DPR of about 7.3 we then need the extra damage dice to work out to at least another 16.7 DPR, in order to hit our "1 KPR" number of 24 DPR. By using the d12 bonus this way, we're multiplying the maximum value of 5d6 or 3d10 by 50% (hit) and taking double that amount, multplied by 5% (crit):
(30 * 50% = 15) + (60 * 5% = 3) = 18
So this means that with the d12 bonus in play, the DPR from extra damage can be increased to 18, finally putting it just about on par with the other bonuses.
Now, this may seem a bit unintuitive and weird, since objectively the roll of the d12 is doing nothing to provide the actual attack bonus. But we do need to treat it as an attack bonus, to keep other attack bonuses from being applied in addition to this one. Since the ~7.3 DPR from the d12 bonus comes entirely from damage, this also means that the rule for the d12 bonus must be that it can be used for attack AND damage, in order for this math to work out.
Essentially, I think of attack bonus and damage bonus more and more like two separate buckets, that can each be filled in specific, different ways. Attack bonus is more like a "typed" bonus, in the sense that, for example, a "feat bonus" to attack can be stacked with a "power bonus" to attack, and a "circumstance bonus" to attack... but not with another "feat bonus" to attack; if every class dice bonus to attack is considered a "feat bonus", then only the highest/best would apply. Bonus damage is more like an untyped bonus; all of them can be stacked (unless they specifically don't apply, such as when using one for an attack bonus prohibits using it as a damage bonus.)
...
Anyway, hopefully that doesn't muddy the waters too much; it was the simplest fix to the class dice problem, short of reworking the whole scheme from scratch.
Next post should be up on October 30th, so check back then!
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