"Mega Damage" (but just x10) for D&D

[OgreBattle]

I like the general idea of mega damage in Robotech n' RIFTS, having a multiple that sets human scale combat apart from vehicles, but x100 was too much.
I've seen various house rules where it's 1MD = 10 normie damage.

I'm thinking... this could work for D&D as a threshold of what is 'how I imagined the sword fights in Lord of the Rings to be like' damage and what becomes 'superhumans with stone-cutting magic swords fighting supernatural castle wrecking monsters'

Humans and human sized natural critters tend to have less than 10 hit points so 1 point of MD is gonna paste 'em.

The idea is... after a certain hit point threshold, supernatural monsters become megadamage and only take damage in 10's, anything less than that is ignored.
A 'realistic gritty protagonist' human wielding a greatsword that deals 2d6 still has a chance if they roll 10-12 damage, they just deal 1 point of MD.

So a 200hp dragon is 20MDC. You deal damage to it in MD's. This seems easier to track hp and damage numbers.

Of course the most clean solution is hitboxes and a "degrees of success over TN", but this is to fetishize the idea of hit points and x10 damage MD

[Thaluikhain]

Deca damage?

It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure I've grasped the point of it. It looks like an unusual form of armour (discount the first 9 points of a hit, and then the second 9 if it's 20 or more).

How would that make hp easier to track, though, you've just skipped a decimal point? You've also made it so one 11 point hit is better than a thousand 9 point hits, which seems odd.

[erik]

DR serves the same function in D&D. Probably better since adding/subtracting is easier on people than multiplication/division.
Edit:fwiw decadamage in rifts was a pretty common house rule as I understood it (tho anecdotal especially since internet wasn’t what it is now)

Edit 2: and I used quad damage in my Nexus game which bears some similarities to rifts with a Shadowrun(ish) engine.

[Zaranthan]

It only seems odd for a moment, though. A lot of people are happy with Smaug literally ignoring a battalion volley of ordinary arrows that literally blot out the Sun, only to fall to a single shot from somebody with a last name. I'm certainly okay with it, especially if it's something that fits into the elevator pitch so my players know they need to deal 11 damage per hit to Big Nasty Things.

[deaddmwalking]

It only seems odd for a moment, though. A lot of people are happy with Smaug literally ignoring a battalion volley of ordinary arrows that literally blot out the Sun, only to fall to a single shot from somebody with a last name. I'm certainly okay with it, especially if it's something that fits into the elevator pitch so my players know they need to deal 11 damage per hit to Big Nasty Things.

In the movie, the 'black arrow' was a piece of artillery, so it was more than a normal arrow. In the novel, the 'black arrow' had a lineage, which seems to imply that it was likely magical in some regard, though the exact nature was unknown. Whether due to the accuracy of the shot or another reason, it did ignore DR, and probably counted as a critical hit; and in earlier edition terms may have counted as 'massive damage' with a failed save. Effectively, there are ways you could model that hit without mega damage.

As far as 'dividing', you don't have to do that. You just treat the 10s place as the total damage. If a dragon has 50 hit points, and someone does 20 damage, you subtract 2 hit points and you move on. Whether that's actually easier than applying DR or using 500 HP is questionable, but in the specific example it isn't difficult. If you intend to have different damage thresholds for different creatures (ie, a manticore needs 5 hp for one MD and a dragon needs 10) it would be bad. And it might be easier to just give weapons a damage in MD (0, 1, 2) and allow a STR component (+0, +1, +2). So Conan wielding a BIG AXE (MD 2) with MASSIVE STRENGTH (+2) does 4 damage per hit; that would certainly be easier than 2d12+24 which does 2, 3, or 4 depending on the roll.

[Leress]

Wait are doing this exact like RIFTs were if I could deal say 25 damage with a swing of a normal sword at a monster with 2 Mega damage it wouldn't do shit since I'm not using a MD weapon?

[erik]

Wait are doing this exact like RIFTs were if I could deal say 25 damage with a swing of a normal sword at a monster with 2 Mega damage it wouldn't do shit since I'm not using a MD weapon?

Even in Rifts if you dealt over 100 SDC in a hit that would count as 1 MD per 100, rounded down.

[DrPraetor]

What are you trying to accomplish with this?

When we were hacking up rules for our own Shadowrun game, we tried variants on vehicle damage (one of which was meant to go into After Sundown, based on a conversation about how vehicle damage rules were basically missing from Feng Shui...) but the upshot was:
[*] If you make vehicles reasonably tough, then they can be immune to small arms fire (especially in variations of shadowrun that have some kind of damage level gating from armor; vehicles just ignore stun damage).
[*] If you make anti-vehicular weapons especially lethal, people will use them against infantry and the infantry will get red-misted.

Being tough has been a marginal ability in many iterations of Shadowrun to begin with, and you really don't need a higher-tier of lethality for rocket launchers.

The proper action-movie answer is that rocket launchers are big enough to get past the gating of tanks and armored cars, but when you shoot them at people, people are caught in explosions and get all beaten up but not vaporized.

Feng Shui really did need rules for shooting at cars and helicopters (and Feng Shui II has them but it's a train wreck... get it?) So I started to mock up rules like that for After Sundown and we rapidly concluded that you actually didn't need or want rocket launchers to be a higher lethality tier.

I'm guessing your goal is not to make a game with the game balance and ease of play of Rifts... it's hard to advise unless you specify what you hope to accomplish?

[OgreBattle]

Goal: Create a solid tier distinction of what is 'normal mundane human stuff' and what is castle crushing dragons being slain by mythical heroes... while keeping D&D sacred dogma like hit points.

The "9 does nothing to big dragon but 11 deals 1MD" is a feature not a bug, to create a 'tier' of damage.

To establish a=a range for mythical combat and siege warfare we also need a range of hp for what's "normal mundane stuff"

5-10hp is normal for a human who's not fighting ogres
10-20hp for a 'Lord of the Rings tier' adventurer, a gorilla, a brown bear

When characters start gaining MD is when they're no longer an Aragorn but a Lu Bu.

---

Should a character have both hit points AND MD? Could represent a badly wounded dragon being finished off with a sword through the eye, Zack Fair fighting a bunch of helicopters and finally succumbing to bullets of Shinra infantry.

[erik]

I’m still not seeing the improvement over Damage Reduction.

Also will this stack with other existing mechanics like resistances?

It looks like you’re replacing a mechanic that does the job with one that does worse at the same job.

[Username17]

I’m still not seeing the improvement over Damage Reduction.

Also will this stack with other existing mechanics like resistances?

It looks like you’re replacing a mechanic that does the job with one that does worse at the same job.

Exactly this. If you want things to scale, you can give level dependent damage reduction. If you want things to scale proportionately, you give non-linear damage to attack power that gets through damage reduction. Like, 1st Edition Shadowrun already exists and came out in 1989 - this is a solved problem.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Yes that’s was mentioned in the first post:

Of course the most clean solution is hitboxes and a "degrees of success over TN", but this is to fetishize the idea of hit points and x10 damage MD

This is a thread to see if megadamage mechanics have anything going for them

[erik]

I think the point is nobody has shown that doing x10 does have anything going for it in a system where DR exists.

You have to change about half the monsters. You probably have longer combat rounds as the math is slightly more difficult. DR even has more flexibility for damage types and damage breaks other than x10. And there’s absolutely no benefit for the costs inherent in changing mechanics. Whatever gain you have from smaller HP numbers is lost to the confusion of different types of HP numbers.

[deaddmwalking]

This is a thread to see if megadamage mechanics have anything going for them

Not really. In earlier editions, there were a lot of creatures that didn't take damage from non-magical weapons (or weapons of less than +3 or whatever).

You either had a weapon that could hurt them, or you didn't. If you didn't, there was nothing you could do.

3.x giving a damage threshold that you could potentially overcome was generally a positive development.

In this case, you're just counting damage by 10s rather than blocking out classes of weapons (non-mega damage weapons) so a hit that does less than 10 does nothing; a hit between 10-19 is exactly equivalent, etc. The only POTENTIAL benefit is that you can subtract small numbers of hit points from your monsters, so your math is a little easier (subtracting 2 from 50 is marginally easier than subtracting 19 from 194).

[FatR]

Edge of the Empire does mega damage x10.

The problem is of course in the fact that in Star Wars being on foot and being in a spacecraft are two relatively distinct states, and the setting does pretty good job preventing a party from just using vehicular weapons to paste all opposition. In DnD, unless you sharply restrict PCs abilities (which never went well so far) and put giant monsters in a different tier, there's a gradient from common footmen to heroes who can giant monsters hand to hand, and even if the latter are still forced to keep the low profile, that won't prevent them from keeping most of their abilities ready to use.

[Dogbert]

Wasn't that what Damage Reduction and Immunities already did in 3E? What would your megadamage accomplish that they can't? Both are equipment-based (because it's dnd, and magic items make the man).

[jt]

If both the attacker and defender are on mega damage scales, it's simpler to track than DR, since it's the same as no mechanic at that point.

If you're on the borderline between mega and regular damage, it's also simpler to track than DR. "Does this damage roll beat 10" is simpler than "subtract 10."

If you're trying to deal amounts of regular damage greater than 19 to a thing with mega HP, then what the fuck are you doing. Now you have division in your damage calculations.

This implies that you need a pretty sudden breakpoint as you go to mega damage. It's okay to roll 2d6 or 3d6 regular damage, but you can't do 4d6 without having to potentially do division, so that's out. And what are you upgrading to instead, 1d2 mega damage? That's still a bit of a jump, and involves resorting to dorky small dice. Everything that lives at the lower end of the mega damage scale has to use this sort of thing, which makes distinguishing them hard. And some of these low-end-mega-monsters have to also work as the season 1 final boss, which the party barely can damage, and is their last hurdle before they make it into the big leagues.

I think this all can work if you're baking some sort of major tier change into your setting. And in that narrowly defined case it's a better system than DR. But it'll be messy for continuous advancement or anything else.

[Koumei]

Back before I said "fuck it", I dicked around with replacement rules for MD in Rifts (TM) and about the best I came up with (without actually re-writing the whole thing to have damage scaling ala Shadowrun or whatever) was to have Mega, Regular and Variable as tags for your HP and your damage.

Mega Damage is your typical MD - just short of "all attacks you will ever see". Mega HP is basically MDC - robots and supernatural creatures.

Variable Damage is stuff like Phase Blades that "deal MD to MDC targets and SD to SDC targets". Variable HP is stuff like Psi-Stalkers which "transform briefly into MDC creatures" or undead that "take Mega Damage as SDC", but I'd also move "has a whole tonne of SDC" things like Juicers into this and then reduce the number.
Standard Damage is for those things that don't deal MD, like... um... normal human unarmed attacks, I guess? Pre-rift firearms? Standard HP is for the majority of SDC creatures.

Mega Damage is rolled normally against Mega HP and Variable HP. It deals its maximum value against Standard HP and if it takes them below zero HP they are all kinds of fucked. But this still means rolling 1d6 MD is only 6 damage to a normal guy.
Variable Damage is rolled normally against everything and does the normal Coma/Death rules against everything.
Standard Damage is rolled normally against Standard HP and Variable HP. It deals its minimum value against Mega HP and if it takes them below zero HP they automatically stabilise, they're just not in a good state and you can take a moment to perform a Coup de Gras later. So if your heavy machine gun that still doesn't do MD would rattle off 6d6 damage for a salvo, the dragon takes 6 damage and promises to bother noting that down.

As I said, I ended up just straight-up not caring, and abandoned the idea. But it didn't involve doing any kind of math (although when you're specifically multiplying and dividing by 10, that's not a slow thing, and is probably quicker than adding and subtracting: "add a zero on the end" and "cross out the right-most digit") and helped pretend everyone was on the same scale.

But just like the answer to Rifts (TM) is "don't bother fixing the rules in some grand way, just play it mostly as-is, agree to go Maximum Bullshit, and drink a bunch in the process", the answer to other games is absolutely not to "incorporate Rifts (TM) elements".

[Dean]

What about something that accomplishes Damage Reductions "you must be this tall" effect but without the complication of subtraction. Say you had Damage Threshold 10 where if 10 damage or less was dealt to the monster they'd count that as nothing but if you dealt them 11 damage they'd take 11 damage. This would allow you to remove the subtraction step and keep HP by level assumptions unchanged without DR fiddling with that math. It would be very easy to give people Damage Threshold 20, 30, so on as monsters leveled up. It would also be nice for giving creatures like a fire mephit Fire Damage Threshold 10 as a way to make it totally immune to mundane fire sources (which all deal 1d6 or less I believe) but still totally killable with fire based attack spells.

It doesn't solve your problem of people having 600hp at the levels they have to have 600hp but it does get rid of an extra math step and it does keep level by hp numbers on track.

[deaddmwalking]

What you're saying is they have DR, unless you overcome the DR, in which case they don't. So if you make the fire hot enough, it burns a Mephit as if they didn't have Fire Resistance versus the current situation where if you make it hot enough it only hurts a little.

That's more complicated to explain, but it does have some nice results.

If a mephit has 10 hit points, and you hit it with a 12 point fire attack, it dies. If you hit it with a 3 point fire attack, it ignores it. It's like an overflow effect where if you exceed the defense, the defense ceases to apply.

[Dean]

Exactly. And you could totally do the thing where Werewolves had Damage Threshold 15/Silver where silver damage automatically gets through their damage threshold. That way low level people need to care more about special resistances. So Shield agents have to load up with silver bullets when a werewolf is on the loose but Thor can just hit one with Mjolnir without fear that he's losing out on lots of damage.

[Mord]

Is Shadowrun-style exponential damage scaling something that's remotely appropriate for D&D? This can't possibly be the first time a Denner considered implementing dicepool mechanics in a D&D heartbreaker.

[OgreBattle]

Is Shadowrun-style exponential damage scaling something that's remotely appropriate for D&D? This can't possibly be the first time a Denner considered implementing dicepool mechanics in a D&D heartbreaker.

That’s what people actually want when they say their campaigns are realistic low magic