Daggerheart's Damage Problem
Daggerheart’s combat has a great idea that is also an enormous problem, damage thresholds. On the one hand limiting damage to 3 max makes balance easy (theoretically1). It lets you can break enemies down into how many average hits it should take. The associated book keeping is the issue. In order to get a result of 1-3 you need to take your damage roll, compare it to the targets armour, go over any damage reduction effects, and then you finally have a number. This could be so much quicker.
The issue here is an over-attachment to brand name D&D’s use of all the kinds of dice for damage. What should be a slimming down of damage instead balloons it to a ridiculous procedure. Instead every weapon should be using d3s (d6/2 for those of us without DCC dice). Bigger weapons have more d3s and your highest die is the damage. Now it is just one roll and you still get the same effect, weapons only every doing 1-3 damage!
Want more levers to pull, you little lever obsessed freak? Why not make armour reduce the highest die by 1? Now armoured enemies can avoid taking 3 damage, but if a player rolls one 3 and a bunch of 2s they still feel effective. How about to replace the level scaling mechanic of DH, players add their level in die to attacks? Now everyone scales nicely without the damaged focused classes suddenly pulling ahead.
It’s basically a far less clever version of Mythic Bastionland’s combat. Hell you could probably just nick that instead, then you don’t have to change the level scaling mechanic or the weapons. Not that I think this would really work with the rest of Daggerheart really, but one can’t help but imagine what a more rules light, but still story and meta-currency focused version of it would look like. Honestly might be worth a bash around by a smarter designer than me.
See my Daggerheart review if you want to see the issues I have with the games balancing ↩︎