Aetrimonde

Having discussed the balancing of attack bonuses and defenses in today’s first post, the last major, overarching point of balance to discuss is damage vs. health.

Choosing the Point of Balance

The underlying decision here is not how much damage I want characters and monsters to be able to take, but how many turns it should take a party of PCs to bring down a “typical” enemy with “typical” attacks.

In my experience, a typical TTRPG campaign involves 4-6 players. I’m going to balance Aetrimonde around having a party of 5 players, and I think it would be appropriate for a typical enemy to be defeated if all 5 players hit it with a “typical” source of damage.

Typical Damage

What, then, is a typical source of damage?

This is something that is already pretty much nailed down: a character will typically be making attacks that use their highest ability for attack and damage rolls, and I’ve already benchmarked that at +4. What about the dice?

I’m going to treat a typical damage roll as using 1d8 dice.

• This is the damage of a one-handed weapon with +2 precision (which I’m treating as the typical weapon) and no other notable qualities.
• I can make this the damage of non-weapon-using powers.

So, a typical damage roll will be 1d8 + 4, averaging 8.5 damage.

Setting Hit Points

I want hit points and damage to be symmetrical, meaning that typical characters and typical monsters have similar hit points and deal similar amounts of damage. But, there are going to be varying types of character (from fragile wizards to mighty warriors) just as there are different types of monster (from fragile skeletons to hulking zombies). I’m going to break them down into four categories of toughness, and assume they have different levels of CON and armor resistance:

Example Class	Example Monster	Typical CON	Typical AR
Wizard	Imp	+0	0
Rogue	Skeleton	+1	1
Artificer	Satyr	+2	1
Fighter	Zombie	+3	2

What remains to be set is each category’s base hit points and how CON translates into additional hit points. I’m going to start by defining a single increment: the difference between adjacent categories is the same as the difference +1 CON makes. Let’s call this increment H, and the base hit points of the Wizard/Imp category B. Then typical hit points will be:

Example Class	Example Monster	Typical Hit Points	Typical AR
Wizard	Imp	B	0
Rogue	Skeleton	B + 1H + 1H	1
Artificer	Satyr	B + 2H + 2H	1
Fighter	Zombie	B + 3H + 3H	2

Averaging out the four categories (and assuming each category to be equally likely…) we find that the typical character or monster will have B + 3H hit points, and 1 AR.

With 1 AR, the actual damage taken from a typical attack will be reduced to 7.5 points. We want a character or monster to be taken out by 5 typical hits, meaning that they survive 4 and are taken down only by the 5th. So this typical character should have between 30 and 37.5 HP.

Now to pick B and H. I don’t want the most fragile characters to die in a single hit, so setting B = 0 is right out. But, I want the differences between categories to feel significant. The difference between each pair of categories is 2H; let’s make that difference roughly equivalent to damage taken from one typical attack and set H = 4.

That makes the typical character’s hit points B + 12, and we want this to be between 30 and 37.5. B could be set at either 20 or 24, which would both be a nice multiple of H. Let’s take a look at what each option would do to typical hit points:

Example Class	Example Monster	Typical Hit Points (B = 20)	Typical Hit Points (B = 24)	Typical Damage Taken
Wizard	Imp	20	24	8.5
Rogue	Skeleton	28	32	7.5
Artificer	Satyr	36	40	7.5
Fighter	Zombie	44	48	6.5

I like the B = 20 option more. It puts Wizard-tier creatures solidly in the middle of the range where it takes 3 hits to bring them down (17-25.5 damage) and puts Fighters in the range taking 7 hits (39-45.5 damage).

So I’ll go with that. One last adjustment I’ll make is to include the expertise bonus in hit points: for reasons of scaling that I’ll cover in a later post, the way I’ll do this is by adding double a character’s expertise to their hit points. And to compensate, I’ll reduce base hit points by 4 (double a level 0’s +2 expertise bonus). So to sum up:

Example Class	Example Monster	Base Hit Points	Typical Hit Points
Wizard	Imp	16	20
Rogue	Skeleton	20	28
Artificer	Satyr	24	36
Fighter	Zombie	28	44

Relaxing Assumptions

Now, let’s at least consider that there will be some deviations from the assumptions I’ve made.

Firstly, I don’t actually expect every Wizard to have 0 CON and every Fighter to have +3. But, based on observations of player behavior, I think that in practice, many Wizards will have around +1 CON, and many Fighters will have only +2. This is just going to tighten the range of hit points, not affect the “typical” character’s hit points.

Secondly, I don’t expect every fight to feature characters throwing around “typical” amounts of damage. In fact, I’d be disappointed if it did. Some players will be using higher-damage powers, either because they have heftier weapons, or they chose high-damage powers, or their class gives them some additional damage with appropriate powers. Others will be using low-damage powers because they focus more on supporting allies, or applying nasty conditions, or attacking several enemies at once; these types of powers tend to do less damage. Again, I think this will balance out.

The one thing that I want to double-check here is greater powers. Many greater powers deal increased damage compared to a lesser counterpart; how likely is it that a character breaking out a greater power can take out an enemy just with that one power?

A typical single-target, damage-focused greater power might deal 3d8 damage instead of 1d8, and a damage-focused character would likely belong to a class giving them additional damage with their powers (let’s call that 1d8, for the sake of argument). How much is 4d8 + 4 damage, in the grand scheme of things? On average, it’s 22 damage: just enough to take out the absolute most fragile tier of character in one shot. It could get up to 36 damage at its absolute maximum, so it could also take out the next two tiers with a lucky damage roll or a critical hit. But, it’s unlikely to take out a Fighter or comparable character in one blow, which I think is a good place for it to be.