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While GMing Heroes of Undarin (no spoilers), I noticed a problem: it took my group significantly longer than before to get through combat. The fact that everyone was rolling 4 dice for damage slowed down play by at least 20%.
Don't even get me started on criticals, either. The archer ranger had to roll 8d6 + 2d10 for damage. He was a ranger, and had only brought a couple of sets. It took way longer than it should have to roll all those dice, add them up, and get a number from my players.
I understand that there are pros and cons to the high-number play PF2 is going for, but I really think that damage should increase by a flat number (at least partially) instead of just adding dice.
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This is my experience too. Average damage would be nice after a certain number of dice are rolled.
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If the crit rule stays the same, I would expect a sidebar in the final book saying that when you crit, you can choose to just take the average of all the extra dice instead of rolling.
But even better would be if crits just maxed damage instead of doubling everything, because that would be a lot less swingy and they could be more lenient on modifiers.
Rolling max (on the same dice) instead of doubling the number of dice leads to a lower average damage.
+12 vs. 20 AC with a longsword (2d8+5) is 11.2 damage on average (for your first attack) under the current system and 10.9 under an "always max" system.
Taking average (and doubling the dice) keeps the same average (unsurprisingly). The difference is ~2 damage (2d8+10 maxed is 26, average of 4d8+10 is 28).
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I really like the idea for maxing damage on crits. That's a really elegant way. No more swinginess, but still feels awesome.
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I have already started to see the effects of the problems mentioned in the first post (though we usually do our playtesting via roll20.net), my personal preference would be to either reduce the number of dice in general or just let people take the average for anything but the first few couples of dice.
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I have already started to see the effects of the problems mentioned in the first post (though we usually do our playtesting via roll20.net), my personal preference would be to either reduce the number of dice in general or just let people take the average for anything but the first few couples of dice.
Here's an idea:
Roll your regular damage. If you crit add the average of the unrolled dice.
So the 2d8+5 longsword mentioned above would crit and deal 2d8+19 damage (the "5" doubles to "10" and then the additional 2d8 averages to 9).
That bridges the gap between "too swingy" and "too static" (what if I already rolled the 2d8 and they were really good?)
I find an elegant solution as follows: when a crit is scored have the player roll their normal damage, then add the maximum they could have rolled to it. This way a crit will always do more damage than a normal hit, and could potentially deal twice as much.
But I like rolling lots of dice and I bring enough to roll everything at once, so either way works for me.
I don't like the new "lots-o'-dice" paradigm because it's too swingy for my tastes. I'd much rather hit for 1d8+4 than 2d8. I wouldn't mind just hitting for 9, but that might be too far for some.
I don't want my die roll at mid to high levels to account for more than maybe 20% of my damage.
Honestly, I don't see this as any slower than the fighter having to add up all those conditional bonuses to figure out thier damage. Things like hammer the gap, etc were common culprits in having a player sit there for five minutes adding power attack, buffs, conditional modifiers for each attack.
Rolling lots of dice is easily solved by the player or gm bringing lots of dice or players sharing dice. But I'm a little biased as I came from a WoD background where dice pools were the norm.