Unifying the Mechanics: First Attempt

I'm loathe to just post untested mechanics, because I often end up having to revise them later on. But right now, I'm just going to lay out the basic conceptualizations and math for what I think the weapon dice mechanics might look like, in the TNP sequel.

I had mentioned previously that weapon attacks would use either your STR mod or DEX mod as a damage bonus, but that the mechanics would try and steer d12 weapons towards favouring STR; for example, it might be the case that only classes with features that favour STR would get proficiency with d12 weapons, while other classes would not. I'm currently pointing the designs in a different direction.

So, the idea with the attributes currently is that you'll probably have one +3, either one or two +2s and the rest would be +1s (keeping in mind there are 5 attributes in total.)

My idea is this:

• d4 weapon damage rolls add the lower of your STR or DEX
• d8 melee weapon damage rolls do not add a modifier
• d8 ranged weapon damage rolls add the higher of your STR or DEX
• d12 melee weapon damage rolls add your STR

Now, in order for this to work, I've calculated the "weapon dice bonuses" as follows:

• d4: can be added to a miss; crit on a tie -- assuming +2 mod, average damage = 3.6625
• d8: can be added to a miss; crit on a tie -- assuming no mod, average damage = 4.4 (melee)
• d8: can be added to a miss; crit on a tie -- assuming +3 mod, average damage = 6.8 (ranged)
• d12: can be used in place of a miss; crit on a tie -- assuming +3 mod, average damage = 7.85

The idea was to have 1d4/1d4 two-weapon fighting be slightly worse (3.6625 * 2 = 7.325) than the d12 "two-hander" option, with 1d4/1d8 TWF being slightly better (3.6625 + 4.4 = 8.0625), and 1d8/1d8 (4.4 * 2 = 8.8) being outright better than d12 (albeit limited to very select classes.) Likewise, d8 ranged attacks were intended to be a little stronger than d8 or d4 melee attacks, but not stronger than d12 melee attacks. (Note: the assumption being that d4 weapons can be thrown, functioning as both "ranged" and melee weapons, and able to make 2 attacks in either case -- in practical terms, this is exactly how daggers function, in 5e.)

It's probably worth mentioning here, that the difference from this ethos compared to TNP, is that TNP assumes a baseline damage of 1d8 (or at least something in that ballpark) with 1 class die bonus being added to it; in the sequel math, the damage die and the bonus die are always the same die, meaning the base damage die isn't always the same, and thus the bonuses have to be calculated accordingly. So instead of one static baseline with multiple (5) possible modifiers, there are 3 static baselines but also 3 static modifiers.

Now, as you can see, the "unifying" aspect of these mechanics is that the weapon dice bonuses function off of the assumption of "crit on tie" being part of the dice trick, for all three. In TNP, the d4 could be added to a hit or a miss; this has been changed not only to make the math work (and to unify the mechanics a little better) but also because the assumptions are more like:

• weapon damage dice can "always" roll a number that will change a miss into a hit (or crit)
• the "d6 pool" mechanic does not have the above functionality, but it is going to be able to be added to a miss or a hit (much as the d6 bonus can, in TNP)

In this way, these mechanics (I think) serve to better compliment each other; the d6 pool is the more steady/reliable bonus, whereas the weapon dice bonuses are more for the "hail Mary" situations. I'm also leaning towards the idea that the weapon dice can always be used as damage and as an attack bonus, but a d6 that is used as an attack bonus cannot also be used as damage; the attack bonus would still be limited to one die (as in TNP) meaning you could not use both a weapon die and a d6 from your pool to modify the attack -- it would have to be one or the other.

The other aspect of these dice bonuses is that the overall hit/crit chances are fairly closely comparable, but not identical; working from the baseline of 50% hit/5% crit, these bonuses improve those odds, as follows:

• d4: 62.5% hit / 10% crit
• d8: 70% hit / 10% crit
• d12: 60% hit / 10% crit

You can kind of see from this that we end up with fairly balanced math, but a lot of the uniqueness of the class dice bonuses has been lost. You do kind of have the option of attacking more (d4), hitting more (d8), or hitting hardest (d12) -- all of the little fidgety bonuses are gone, so it's a lot cleaner, but also more... well, sanitary would be a good word to describe it.

Anyway, I had the idea to use the "STR mod as damage bonus" as the way of steering d12 towards favouring STR, and the rest of the experimentation and resulting math just sort of flowed from that assumption. Hopefully this will help the rest of the system to likewise come into focus. I may also apply similar ideas towards spell damage, offering different bonuses whether INT or CHA is used.

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That's all for October! Assuming we get back on track, the next post is scheduled for November 10th.