The current designs for attack bonuses focus on the "class dice" with the bonus essentially being a non-stacking "typed" bonus. What this means is that while you might have one of each class dice bonus (and you can roll all of them) you only actually use one of these dice as your attack bonus -- the rest are used as a damage bonus.
The way I've decided to iterate on this idea (for whatever follows after TNP) is to instead use d6s for this bonus; only the highest d6 would be used as the attack bonus, but all of the d6s will be used as a damage bonus. With the designs pivoting towards d4/d8/d12 as the "weapon damage dice," I am also considering using this roll as a bonus to the attack roll, which can be used instead of the d6 bonus. The basic idea would be a stripped down version of the TNP class dice bonuses: the d4 would be added to the attack; the d8 would be added to a miss, and; the d12 would be used in place of the attack roll (and probably crit if both the attack roll and the d12 would 'hit'.)
Now, a while back, I was looking at potentially replacing the d20 mechanic with a 2d6+mod system. The interesting thing with this, is that it essentially required that all of the modifiers be positive, in order for the mechanic to produce suitable ranges under a DC10 paradigm. This sparked a connection in my brain, since the skill mechanic in TNP essentially has "skill rank bonuses" that likewise have to be positive -- but they're a d6 bonus, rather than a flat modifier.
Building off of this idea, and porting this latest d6 mechanic onto it, I got an entirely new idea rolling. Generally skill ranks were capped at 3, but in some cases it might be possible to get it as high as 4 or even 5 (particularly with knowledge skills.) In the ethos of "extra damage dice," TNP was likewise capping at 5d6 or 3d10, both with a maximum of 30 damage.
What if we devised a system where the skill rank bonus and the attack/damage bonus were keyed off of the same modifier?
For example, a +2 DEX attribute would let you roll 2d6 and keep the highest, as a bonus to your skill checks (1d10) using that attribute. However, a Rogue might also get a perk when using suitable weapons/attacks, where they would be granted a d6 'sneak attack' bonus based on their DEX attribute; +2 would grant 2d6, with the highest roll being added to the attack roll, and both dice being added to the damage. Barbarians could do something similar with their STR attribute while raging, as another example.
I quite like how this design ethos is shaping up. The one misgiving I have is whether weapon damage dice are a meaningful enough design space, or whether the whole thing could fire off of d6 and d20 alone; would we even need/want to keep d10 for skill checks?
I also think by breaking out of the "class dice" paradigm, it allows this kind of a system to be a lot slicker, more unified, and potentially run a lot faster. I think it would benefit from standardizing on something like 10 reserves for each class, and possibly even 10 HP per character (if enemy damage is scaled back accordingly) -- rather than necessitating that these things be extrapolated off of class dice, or a constitution score. This also allows for the possibility of unifying under d6 as being the bonus die for all rolls (attacks, saves, checks, initiative, and damage) rather than having a mix of d6, d10, and class dice, as in the current ethos; this seems like a meaningful quality-of-life improvement, especially if this can all be neatly tied back into attributes.
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Time for summer break! This blog should return by the start of August, or possibly sooner (as mentioned in the previous post.)
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