Following on from the dice math, a little thing I’m still playing with: Chorus’ equivalent of a critical hit, tentatively called “Bullseye!”
So before we get into the reason it looks the way it does, a more important question: why have critical hits? Why should one kind of hit be more of a hit than other hits?
Lots of reasons I could give, but the real reasons are that I came up on games which included them and find the thrill of there being a certain number you can roll that will automatically kick someone’s ass to be something which adds a subconscious bit of excitement to the proceedings. Phwoar, what a thrill that is when the d20 comes up with that natural/unmodified 20.
But we’re not using a d20. Indeed, we’re using three different rolling systems.
So, how to make that really slick feeling?
Well, first we admit that nothing will feel as good as a natural 20. I hate to admit it, but the nat20 and the celebration surrounding it followed then by the roll for damage with the hope that it’s gonna be high (and, thus, twice as high) is just too good, but also involves complicating the combat rolling situation.
So, then, four design challenges:
So here we go.
Because of the nature of the dice at hand and the fact that the to-hit roll and the damage roll are combined, we have a weird problem because if we try to emulate the nat20 mechanic, we find ourselves double-dipping while punishing the characters who are flat-out better at fighting.
So not only is it less-likely some players will ever hit that max damage, any bonuses we put to it will feel rather like gilding the lily because they’re already doing the maximum damage roll.
So, what do we do instead?
My thought was that since the combat is about overcoming a certain score that will be known fairly quickly, we could instead reward hitting the exact defense number, simulating hitting the enemy in a weak spot in their defense. A crack in the armor, a drop of the guard, a momentary distraction, that sort of thing.
According to OmniCalculator (which seems generally reliable, but what do I know), the odds of the dice hitting an exact figure is going to vary according to the figure and the combination of dice, but go up as you approach the average roll of whatever combination.
That said, there’s a pretty pleasing sort of number, even as it’s rather higher than the 5% of a nat20.
The odds of the dice hitting values between 5-9 (the currently-imagined spread of defense scores for most enemies you’ll be fighting this way) look about as follows:
We find that as we approach the average figure for the dice, the probability goes up in a nice, orderly way, and then drops down at a similar rate. Proper math people will not be interested in this but it’s fascinating for me.
And, of course, this is before we take into account any character’s bonuses, which skew the results, but that’s a complication for later pondering.
Some of these figures are worrying, but also they tell us that the critical hit is going to be decently common, particularly for the person rolling 3d4, which might mean scrapping the whole project, but at the same time, it adds a certain mechanical flair and rewards the DPS player (which is also a penalty, as you’ll recall from the discussion of schism) while also making the dice reflect back to us the story we want to hear, which is that the people who are very good at fighting are very good at fighting, but also excel at enemies of a level similar to their own. We can call this whatever we want, but it creates an interesting something to me without ever going lower than the d20′s 5%.
So in spite of some minor concerns and things which we’ll attempt to manage as we go, I think that actually sounds quite acceptable. In a game meant to last years with a lot of homebrewed monsters, it’d get pretty difficult to design for, but in one that’s maybe a season, with a lot of constraints in enemy design that’s meant to be as much about pondering a feeling, this sort of thing feels the right level of rewarding and risk/reward without making things overwhelming.
Because we want to step away from the association between “critical hit” and the natural 20, I want to give it a different name. This is, as you might guess, the “bullseye” under discussion. It feels evocative to me and also feels like it would give the players the chance to smirk and say “bullseye.” in a cool way or get up and shout it (”BULLSEYE!”) in a stressful moment.
Here’s the rub because it’s where we have to take the (relative) ease with which the players can make the roll and also keep in mind that the damage roll and the attack roll are the same.
So, clearly, the“double the damage” could work, but it’s not quite big enough as for the most part, the doubled damage would be around (sometimes less, sometimes more) than if they just rolled better, which makes it feel a bit “so what” and also adds in the complication of if we’re doubling the damage or just the damage on the dice or any number of other concerns.
To this end, the thought was that we just wipe all that aside and make it a simpler if/then.
If you hit the bullseye/then you treat the roll as if you rolled 12 (aka maximum possible).
And while that sounds good, it lacks, I don’t know. Flair.
We could say it does whatever arbitrary other number, thought about saying 24, which would just be maximum times two, but that also feels a little thin while also possibly doing too much. Is there really such a thing as too much in a game like this? Probably not, but I think it’s mostly that it’s boring to me and I'm the designer here, so neener.
So what wouldn’t be boring?
Another go.
If I’ve done things right, the rolls should be relatively quick so this wouldn’t take a ton of time while still letting the player feel awesome for a second while giving them an opportunity to use a different one of their combat abilities.
So when you hit the bullseye on the enemy’s defense, you do max damage and get another combat roll.
Now, this is going to necessitate higher classes of monster having metric tons of hit points, but that’s to be expected and will hopefully make the encounters more interesting as the higher-tier monsters should have interesting things they do on top of just hitting you. We’ll get into that later.
I mean. Yeah. And probably more than I can list here, even.
The most obvious one is that, given the relatively high odds of hitting certain numbers with the dice, there’s a chance one player could just keep going until everything’s dead. And while that’s awesome in a movie or video game, it’s less so in a collaborative game, even once we add in the penalties associated with high levels of damage, it takes the breath out of things.
So, clearly, we need to impose a kind of soft limit: only one new combat roll when hitting the bullseye per turn. You still treat the roll as 12 if you hit the number again, but only the once.
The next-most obvious one is that any bonuses to combat will throw off the math a little, but the odds remain high and given how many opportunities there are to find your combat penalized, it’s going to be a crapshoot no matter what, so for the moment, it’s if the combat roll, not just the dice but the whole combat roll (dice+bonus(es)) hits the bullseye, THEN they get the damage bonus and the single extra turn.
Probably other things will happen, but it still feels like a pleasant enough setup.
Another flavor of unintended consequence that’s a bit more fun to talk about is that what we now know about how this could work is use it to affect other things in the game.
As noted above, enemies of certain tiers (more about that in another installment) will need to have a lot of hit points because these bullseye hits can go hard and in fairly quick succession. Not taking any bonuses into account, a single character could (isn't likely to, but could) do 24 points of damage, not taking into account any other character abilities or quirks. That’s... pretty decent even in D&D, but does mean that the enemies need to be able to stand up to that kind of damage.
It also suggests a mechanic for The Berserker where we can make them more than just someone who Fites Guud. Not sure how to implement it yet, but just something to the effect of as The Berserker deals out damage, they can use the extra attack more than once per turn with the caveat that once all the enemies in an area are dead, as long as they keep rolling the right numbers, they come after other members of their party. After all, this would be why they’re not merely The Barbarian or The Heavy Fighter or anything like that. They are The Berserker.
So we’ve found interesting ways to play with dice math, found ways to add a little extra oomph to certain rolls, and even figured out some ways to keep the game interesting as we go.
Seems like a mechanic worth rolling into the main thing.