Proposed Hero System Damage houserule

[cthulhu]

So my friend wants to run a Heros system game, and chop out the separate damage roll in favour of pre calculated damage values.

So if you hit by:

* 4 or less -> you get damage equal to 3.5 * the number of damage dice you would roll (round up)

* 17 or less -> you get damage equal to 4 * the number of damage dice you would roll

* 18 or more -> you get damage equal to 6 * the number of damage dice you roll

Originally he was going to have a 'graze' category (2 damage per dice for exactly hitting), but this is a serious nerf to big bruiser types (after some analysis) so we took it out

I made a big spreadsheet and it seems to indicate that this is a marginal buff (approximately 7% to OCV and 3% to damage dice, approx, see footnotes), which doesn't seem game breaking. Can anyone see any obvious issues with this?

To me only concerns are:

*Odd damage dice are better

* It is a modest buff to high to hit characters vs bruisers (you're getting 4% more for OCV on average, but reality is this is highly dependant both in this proposed house rule and the base game on where you are in the RNG, so I doubt this effect is even noticeable.)

Any other thoughts on this?


Footnotes

It appears ranging over the entire RNG up to 50d6 damage, that it's 7% and 3% to OCV and damage respectively, but it's a 4% / 4% buff at Dicepools of 25d6 or less)

[UmaroVI]

How does this interact with Area of Effect attacks?

If you're going to do this, I would suggest ruling that AEs always get 3.5 per die, period, otherwise you will have some problems. It might be a good idea to increase the cost of OCV and CSLs to compensate.

I don't think you really are getting much out of this aside from not having to roll dice - why not just go with 3.5*number of dice?

[UmaroVI]

I should add that any system involving fixed effects like this is going to primarily favor defense over offense, because if you get just a little more defense than average you can push your average damage way down compared to a rolling system. You will also want to have some pretty strict defense caps.

[cthulhu]

The sole objective is to minimise resolution time, because some of the people involved take for fucking ever to add up d6s.

However, yeah, the fixed defence thing is a major issue. Fuck bins. I'll have to do something different.

[Ice9]

Wait, do you mean rolling a 17/18, or actually hitting by 17/18? Because I've never seen a HERO game with divergent enough CVs for that to happen, considering that +/-5 CV puts you at "natural 20" territory and +/-8 takes you off the RNG entirely.

I've used a rolled multiplier in the past. You can adjust the chart based on how variable you want the damage to be. So for instance:
1-2 = 2.5 * DC
3-4 = 3.5 * DC
5-6 = 4.5 * DC

Another method, if your players are decent at multiplication, is to roll some fraction of the damage and then multiply it. Rolling just one die makes things super-variable, so I prefer 2d6 * Half DC (roll the odd die separately if there is one). So for example:
12d6 -> 2d6 * 6
11d6 -> 2d6 * 5 + 1d6 (use a different colored one)

Finally, not very exciting but actually probably the closest in terms of variability, you can go with partially-rolled damage. Turn every 2d6 into 7 until you have only 2d6 or 3d6 left. So:
12d6 -> 2d6 + 35
11d6 -> 3d6 + 28

[Vebyast]

For the defense problem: if you're willing to crunch numbers and you know some basic probability, you could probably build a table of defense versus attack roll that produces the correct expected output. It'd be a lot nastier than just some .5s (in fact, you'd probably need a calculator to do the multiplications), but it's doable.

(disclaimer: I have no idea how Hero works; I'm assuming that defense works like DR does in DND. My suggestion probably still applies if that assumption is incorrect, but it also might not.)

[Ice9]

Defense is just subtracted from damage. In theory, this means that taking an average result is a disadvantage (since you can't go lower than zero). In practice, rolling 10 or 12 dice puts you so close to the average that the difference in expected damage between taking the average result and rolling it is fairly miniscule. I did the calculations once, and IIRC it was a 1 point or less difference on 12d6 vs 25 DEF.

For killing attacks, where you're only rolling 2-4d6, there's a bit more difference (still not that much), so you probably want to roll.

[Vebyast]

That makes sense. I've seen systems (mostly bad video games) where DR is subtracted from each die, rather than from the total. In those systems the calculations are actually kind of involved. If it's just subtracted off the total, though, averages would work for the kinds of big rolls in question.

[Josh_Kablack]

The sole objective is to minimise resolution time, because some of the people involved take for fucking ever to add up d6s.

The traditional HERO fix is to make them sit them next to the people who are fast at it.


Potential Issues with suggested houserule:

• Interaction with AoE Attacks should be spelled out
• This is a buff to Flash, Entangle, Darkness, Invisibility, Maneuvers with a "Target Falls" element, and the other ways to cut target's DCV in half or drop it to zero in the system. Depending on the CV ranges in your game, the buff could be severe enough to make these potentially abusive.
• This makes blowing up vehicles and buildings a lot easier.
• This could remove the threat of an above average roll on an attack posing at least a risk of injuring or KOing a character, effectively changing "Nigh-invulnerable" into "Totally Invulnerable"
• This could influence the balance between the effectiveness of Normal and Killing attacks.

None of those is a deal breaker for me, BUT I don't see the upside as worth it. You are not gaining all that much simplification here. You're removing two mutli-die addition steps (count body and count normal) and replacing with a table lookup and multi-digit multiplication. So unless this is an online game where everyone has a calculator handy (most gamers cannot do multi-digit multiplication in their heads during a face to face game session) I would not recommend. And if this is an online game, why aren't you using one of the automated HERO die-rollers out there?

*****

While probably not what you want for your game I did have some success running a 40-active point HERO game with a Feng-Shui inspired "Mook rule" instituted to make the lower-powered characters feel beefier. In that game any character who did not have a name automatically took maximum damage when hit by any named character. This did work to both keep the dice pools low and streamline damage calculations on the popcorn fights. Plus it provided genre enforcement as even with their mere 8d6 attacks, the PCs had to pull their punches to avoid maiming run of the mill thugs.

[UmaroVI]

If your goal is to just not have to wait for 10 minutes while people slowly count up 16d6, might I suggest a better idea?

Odd number of dice = 3d6+(# of dice - 3)*3.5
Even number of dice = 2d6+(# of dice - 2)*3.5

So 15d6 = 3d6+42
10d6 = 2d6+28

Now, this still does slightly alter the probability table, but it won't fuck with game balance in any particularly noticeable way.

EDIT: Well, shit, Ice9 suggested the same thing above.