Need a math check on a Centaur Charger archetype Cavalier


Rules Questions


One of our PC's is playing a Centaur as a lvl 4 Cavalier with the Charger Archetype, and he rolled a natural 20 on a charge and then rolled 11 for damage. He has Spirited Charge (x3 dmg with a Lance while charging) and Natural Mount (charger archetype, x2 dmg with a lance while charging) so this should be essentially x4 dmg on a charge. So with a non-crit, he should do 44 damage.

Here's my question: does this 44 damage become tripled to 132 damage on a crit? Or does this damage become 44 + 22 = 66 damage on a crit?


I think by rule it’s 44 damage total for that crit. Natural Mount doesn’t stack with the charge doubling associated with mounted lance charging: centaur lancers are never mounted, so they never normally get even double damage from lance charging. The Natural Mount class feature just gives them a substitute for that functionality. Problematically, as written it doesn’t appear to work with Spirited Charge. I think house rules generally would allow it though.

Anyway, the rule for multipliers, such as critical hits and lance charges, is that you kind of add the multipliers together. So RAW, he has a X2 (one extra multiple) from Natural Mount and a X3 (2 extra multiples) from the critical. So 11 x (1 base + 1 chargelancenaturalmount multiple + 2 crit multiples ) = 11 x 4 = 44. But house rule Spirited Charge to work gives 55.


So first lets look at the way damage multipliers work in Pathfinder.

First, X2 damage doesn't mean X2, it means "+100%". Likewise X3 actually means "+200%", X4 means "+300%" and X5 means "+400%". Normally this doesn't matter, but when you combine multiple effects the diffence between multiplication and addition gets pretty noticable.

Next, we'll look at the Lance.

Lances have a X3 crit multiplier (read: +200% on a crit) and deal X2 damage on a charge (read: +100% on a charge). When you add these together that becomes +300% (or 4X) damage if you crit on a charge.

Next, we add Spirited Charge.

Spirited Charge basically adds +100% to these numbers, so you deal 3 X damage on a charge (+200%). A crit is still X3 (+200%), which means when you add this together you get +400% damage (or X5 damage).

Natural Mount just lets him use a Lance as if he were mounted.

So for the example you gave, his 11 damage would multiply to 55 damage.

As a side note, the actual dice are supposed to be rolled 5 times. For a Lance you wouldn't roll 1d8+D and then multiply the result by 5, you would instead roll 5d8 and add (Dx5) - where "D" is the static damage bonus.


Here's another way to think about it.

You determine the multiplier by removing 1 from the 'x#'. A x3 crit adds two to the multiplier, for example.

Time to add multipliers together:
Lance bonus damage + Lance critical confirm + Spirited Charge
...or...
(+1 multiplier) + (+2 multiplier) + (+1 multiplier) = +4 multiplier

Now we add 1 to the total multiplier to represent the base damage die, and that's how many sets of weapon die we roll. To save time we can even add the extra damage now. If he had 16 strength with the two-handed lance to add 4 strength modifier with no other bonuses, you'd do this:
(1d8+4)*5 = 5d8+20

Test roll!: 5d8 + 20 ⇒ (5, 4, 4, 8, 5) + 20 = 46

If you wanted to simply multiply and not roll all those dice, then you'd have:
Hit with the lance: 11 damage
After adding the multipliers as before, we just add 1 to them for the before-multiplier damage and then multiple the damage rolled:
(4+1)*11 = 55

This ends up in a less randomized result, but saves time.


Pathfinder does not follow the normal rules for mathematics when it comes to multiplying damage. There is no cumulative property in pathfinder. Basically what you are doing is multiplying the base damage and adding it together. So he does 11 points of base damage. Charging means he does an extra 3x the base damage for an additional 33 points. The critical hit does another 11 points of damage for a total of 55 points of damage. the algorithm would be damage x (1+ (crit multiplier -1) +(1-charge multiplier))


Awesome, thanks guys :)

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