Author: Ray Otus

Sooooo. How useful would it be to have the bestiary monsters on a deck of cards? Not that useful? Very useful? What else would be handy to have on cards – debility markers? I’m just thinking, it’s surprisingly easy to print playing cards these days.

My last thoughts on the subject of damage dice in Dungeon World. I have shared my spreadsheet in the previous threads. Below is the thing I will put on a bookmark or GM screen for my own use. It shows the median (rounded) in the middle, with a standard deviation on either side. If you go out two deviations, you are basically looking at the min/max of the die size. Knowing that, you have five no-roll damage options for each monster min, light, average, heavy, and max damage. My impulse would be to apply average damage on a 7-9 player roll and max damage on a 6- player roll, and to actually roll the damage only when it could reduce the player to 0 HP. I will likely use the light damage when it makes sense narratively: a monster is getting its ass kicked and is on its heels, is beset by multiple foes, or in combination with one of the monster’s moves. Regardless, the graphic gives me an at-a-glance way to tell how much damage a damage die configuration (especially the best of 2/worst of 2) would likely do.

Originally shared by Ray Otus

[New & Improved.] This is a calculation of median damage, deviation, etc. for all damage types in Dungeon World. 

Why? I wanted a quick way to decide on a damage die configuration when making up monsters on the fly and the progression of damage dice in DW is not necessarily intuitive. For instance, the worst of 2d12 is typically worse than a d10 or the best of 2d8. 

Explanations:

1. There are two sets of tables, each is primarily sorted by the column highlighted in orange.

2. The “Med. w/Mod.=” section displays the median damage with all the modifiers used in the DW bestiary, ranging from minus 2 to plus 9! Note the jump to odd numbers at 5 (…3,4,5,7,9).

3. Draw your attention to the green-topped tables labeled “Default Damage” (DD). I have added DD because I wanted the option to only roll damage dice when it was dramatic to do so (e.g. when a player’s hit points are low enough to hit 0 if I roll high). This number is the rounded Median. Next to it is a plus/minus column which is the rounded Deviation. So if a monster does b[2d6] damage I could assign the DD of 4 or figure the most common range is 3-5 (4 plus or minus 1) and go light, 3, or heavy 5. If I wanted to be extreme, I could go up or down two deviations.

Originally shared by Ray Otus

I compiled all the various damage types in Dungeon World and made a chart for myself. When making monsters on the fly I wanted a better handle on how to pick damage dice. The best of 2/worst of 2 math is non-intuitive. See the grids below (sorted by the column highlighted in orange.) The first is sorted by die type (worst of 2d4, d4, best of 2d4, worst of 2d6, etc.). The second is sorted by median damage. The order of the damage die types in the second chart is a little eye-opening. Definitely not intuitive. 

Some notes:

1) Not every type of damage die appears in DW. For instance, there is no straight d4 or d12 damage roll in the bestiary. I filled in the obvious holes.

2) The modifiers in the DW bestiary are all over the place. Not every die type appears with every modifier, obv. If you want a list of all the ones used, ping me and I will produce it. For this charat, I stuck modifiers off to the right and included all the ones that are in the bestiary. Note the jump to odd numbers at 5 (…3, 4, 5, 7, 9). 

3) I realize I should have deviation in here. Otherwise items like the difference between b[2d6] and d8 (4.47 vs. 4.5) appear to be trivial. But d8 will “obvioulsy” have a much higher deviation.