[Feat] Damage Supremacy

Rules Discussion House Rules
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Damage Supremacy (I-IX)

Cost: 2 Points
Prerequisites:
Tier 1-9: None
Description:
Be it ammunition that explodes on impact, searing hot blades, or a combat style that ensures you get the most out of each attack, when your hits connect, the damage they do is devastating.
Effect:
When you take this feat, select one weapon or attack type. Whenever your attack roll surpasses your target’s Defense by 3 or more, roll additional dice to add to your attack roll. These dice are added after all levels of advantage and dice explosions of the original attack roll, and do not count toward the threshold of making the attack an Exceptional Success. The amount of extra dice added to the attack roll are determined by the tier if this Feat.
• Tier 1 – 1d4
• Tier 2 – 1d6
• Tier 3 – 1d8
• Tier 4 – 1d10
• Tier 5 – 2d6
• Tier 6 – 2d8
• Tier 7 – 2d10
• Tier 8 – 3d8
• Tier 9 – 3d10
Special:
In addition to purchasing multiple tiers of this feat, you may take this feat multiple times and select a new weapon or attack type each time.

I really feel like this one should cost 2,5 feat points, and I’m looking to play around with it some.

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I dislike it simply on the basis that it adds dice. It adds complication to dice rolls and goes against the spirit of OL.

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@ucffool is right, but I’d like to add some extra thoughts here. This seems ludicrously powerful at first glance, as in Tier 1 is significantly better than Attack Specialisation and it only gets more and more overpowered from there. I’d strongly discourage you from using this effect, but if you decide that you can’t use the extremely similar Attack Specialisation for some reason then this is worth a minimum of 3 feat points per tier

Also, your description really doesn’t match up with how combat works in Open Legend; the reason there’s no “damage dice” in OL is that there’s not really a meaningful difference between a hit and a near miss. The searing hot blades you mention could do more “damage” by swinging wide over the target’s head than a mace might by slamming into someone’s chest. From the Core Rules:

Your hit points (HP) are an abstract measure of your character’s ability to ignore pain, avoid deadly blows, and maintain a presence on the battlefield in spite of wounds or exhaustion.

When your HP goes down, it could represent you taking a glancing blow, or it could represent you straining to dodge, being demoralised by how close you just were to death, or being tired out by the constant fighting. This is why “having a really dangerous weapon” is usually represented by increased advantage even if the chance of it hitting doesn’t increase at all. Attack Specialisation has you covered for the effect you want here.

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Also, it’s not much different from Persistent Damage (except better and you can get it sooner since no pre-requistes).

And with some of the description, you can accomplish this via Craft Extraordinary and do expendable items and augmenting items.

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It adds complication to dice rolls and goes against the spirit of OL.

You are confusing complication with complexity. Some people like complexity, and they are very irritated by Open Legend’s apparent lack of it. If this is your benchmark, Advantage levels add complication and shouldn’t be in the game because they add dice. It’s a shit argument.

What you also seem to be forgetting is that, for a player, rolling extra dice because they succeeded at something is fun. I don’t care about design elegance if it means my players get to have less fun.

Also “this does not add up to what I personally believe Open Legend should be like” is not an argument at all. I am not designing stuff for the core rules of Open Legend, I am designing stuff for myself and am looking for opinions on how to balance it. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. Saying “it goes against the spirit” is 100% subjective and akin to walking into a Thai Restaurant only to tell the chef that you do not like Thai food and will not be eating there.

Tier 1 is significantly better than Attack Specialisation
[…]
Attack Specialisation has you covered for the effect you want here.

It has an entirely different effect than Attack Specialisation. Attack Specialisation increases the chances of a damage being dealt to the HP of a character, and also the amount of damage being dealt, while this explicitly does not do that. The whole reason I designed this in the first place was to allow characters to deal more damage while not increasing their chances of surpassing an opponent’s defence score. Attack Specialisation does not do that and is thus not the same. “You could use something that is similar but mechanically unfit to represent what you are trying to do and therefore you should not do this” is a shit argument.

your description really doesn’t match up with how combat works in Open Legend

Actually yes it does. I understand how combat works in Open Legend. It’s narrative focused, and there is a significant difference between a hit and a non-hit. With a non-hit or glance, the most you can get is 3 damage. This is a situation in which you sprain your ankle dodging, or crap your pants because you saw a bullet go right past you. You can also have this be the effect when players do more damage, you’re just a little more limited as a GM creating the narrative when they have this Feat, as you should be when indulging players and their character concepts. That is why the effects of this Feat only apply when you do more than minimum damage.

Maybe you shouldn’t be concerned with what HP loss could represent, but what it actually does represent. Taking this Feat marks a narrative decision by the player to create a character a certain way, and arguing that a character could also have been created in a different way is a shit argument, because the character was de facto not created in a different way.

it’s not much different from Persistent Damage

It is not at all like Persistent Damage. You either did not read the feat description or you did not understand what I wanted to convey, in which case I should have been clearer.

you can accomplish this via Craft Extraordinary and do expendable items and augmenting items.

So I can accomplish this effect in a more complicated way? Great reason. How about we remove Martial Focus from the core rules because you could accomplish a similar effect with Attack Specialisation? I mean sure, the effect is far from identical, but you could do it. You see how that’s a shit argument?

The only actual constructive criticism in this entire thread was:

[This Feat is too cheap. It should coast at least 3.]

I mean sure, it was worded in a way that suggested this is a finished product, which it explicitly is not, but if you peel back the dismissive attitude, that is the valid criticism you are left with. But instead of explaining your reasoning and offering solutions to the balancing problems at hand, you write a dissertation on the nebulousness of narrative, and how that is a good thing, as though the nebulousness of narrative wasn’t something one has to cut through with concrete narrative during play. Yes, it could be these other things, but it isn’t.

What is it with this community and its fear of people openly adapting a game system explicitly designed to be open and adaptable? Every time I see anyone posting anything they made, the main criticism seems to be “this shouldn’t exist because it goes against muh spirit of the game.” Sometimes suggestions on how to make it work follow, but never without an arrogant diatribe. Unless something can be exactly achieved with rules that are already in the game, the reason a new element of play should exist is because someone saw the need to make it exist.

Praising a nutrient bar because you can flavour it with anything only to then scold anyone trying to actually put flavour in for sullying the purity of the product suggests that you are too caught up in the potential flavours the nutrient bar could have that you have forgotten how bland it actually tastes.

I find it ironic that, of all the gaming communities I have been a part of over the years, the one around the gaming system defined by its open-ness to a person’s taste is the one with the most closed-minded purity fascists. The community around the system that proudly says “everything players do matters!” will, instead of helping people make things work, declare their ideas sacrilege and thereby make their work not matter.

If homebrew goes against the spirit of Open Legend, then that spirit will wander Limbo forever.

The survival of Open Legend as a system is 100% dependent on homebrew at this point, and yet the community seems incapable of treating those willing to put in the work with anything but imperious condescension occasionally followed by good critiques packaged in haughty sneers. It is this attitude that will ultimately spell the doom for Open Legend as a system and confine it to the grave of irrelevance. I for one am no longer interested in contributing anything to this game, because all I get for trying is a shower of arrogance. I know I am not the first one to do this, and I also know I am not the first one to be put off the whole system after browsing the forums. There are a lot of good people here, but the atmosphere in this community is one of creative asphyxiation.

Goodbye.

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Looked at the feat here, it looks cool! I get where some GMs might not want to use it as it’s pretty powerful to get extra damage but for my group it would be a really good feat. I have one player who would love this feat and the group could use the extra damage.

I do think this should be three feat points and to make it less powerful you could have each tier give you 1 dice tier less than the attribute scores and maybe cap it at tier 8? With exception of the first tier which the lowest dice is 1d4.

You could have a prereq of Agility or Might (or maybe tier 1 attack specialization in the weapon you’re choosing?) too if you want raise the cost without adding feat points.

Now, I know I don’t know as much about the balance of the rules as the moderators, but if you want to use this as a house rule, do it! It sounds awesome, and if your players say its overpowered or you find it to underpowered, have them help you scale it down or up. As long as you tell them you added it and it may be subject to modifications you’ll be fine. If you do modify it, please up date the page because my players would love this feat.

Another thought, if you find your players killing things to fast and easy with this feat, up the NPC hit points whenever you use this feat.

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You’re right @Burgerkrieg, and I’m sorry for my response. It was needlessly rude and condescending. It can get a little frustrating having watched over this community for so long and seen similar ideas come up repeatedly without understanding what they’re doing. Your post clearly wasn’t like that, and I shouldn’t have treated it as if it was.

Homebrew does not go against the spirit of Open Legend, and I’m sorry if it seems to come across that way. We experience a lot of people trying to “fix” OL with homebrews, and damage dice is one of those things that has been coming up for a long time - since before the moderator team even existed - and it was always met with a resounding no from Brian. It caused more than a few heated arguments about how the system worked with people who were trying to correct the creator of the game on how OL should do combat, so those of us who have been around since then have some bad associations with the concept. I apologise for the strong reactions, it should have been clear from the way you were suggesting it that you weren’t trying to say combat was being done wrong as it is.

Homebrews are allowed and encouraged, but often not needed. Most of the time when people come to us with ideas like this they’re just not seeing the existing solution. You’re of course allowed to run your own games how you like, but adding complexity for no reason is poor game design; if you can achieve the same narrative effect without having to add and balance a homebrewed feat, then why would you? That doesn’t have to be a rhetorical question, but it does need a clearly explained answer to stop people who know the system from telling you your homebrew is unnecessary.

To explain my criticism in a clearer and hopefully less condescending manner: more damage when you hit was supposed to be covered by Attack Specialisation and the description of how HP works. Exploding bullets are scary even if they’re only hitting the ground around you, so they do more “damage” than normal bullets even if they don’t “hit”. An actual hit from a weapon like that would inflict some serious injuries, so it’s usually saved for either the killing blow or lethal damage (depending upon how tough the target is of course).

When making the “one roll combat” system the idea of damage dice was explicitly thrown out, we’re saying that it goes against the spirit of OL because it’s a very strange thing to want to add to a system that already handles the narrative effect you want without any house rules at all. To use your food analogy, it’s like going to a vegetarian restaurant and bringing along your own steak to add to the meal; valid, but a little weird and guaranteed to get you some strange looks from the majority of people who are there to get away from that kind of thing.

I hope you can forgive the outbursts, and I hope that you come back to this system. Thank you for the response, it’s definitely made the mod team rethink our method of handling suggestions we don’t like. In future, we’ll strive to explain potential problems without being so rude about it. Whether you intended it or not, I think you’ve had a positive impact on this community.

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There is room for HomeBrew within OL. What you’re doing is trying to make OL into Savage Worlds or GURPS or some other system. I was direct and honest and I was okay with it coming across rude. I wasn’t making an argument, I was stating an opinion which you can choose to disagree with (as can others who read it, else what’s the point of posting it).

for YOUR players.

Because the system is young and the largest problem (which I think you demonstrate clearly here) is that OL was designed with a specific mindset around rolling and simplicity without losing uniqueness. Many come and struggle to change their focus to understand this and get stuck feeling the need to Homebrew something that can already be handled by the system if you just see it from the PoV of the system’s design. It personally took me forever to switch from a D&D5e mindset of rolling to OL and then get it. So @SamWilby, @Great_Moustache, and many others spend time to try and explain it (to much success) to newcomers.

Here’s some more opinion: your players are looking for Savage Worlds or another system. They want to roll damage dice and have the complexity that SW (as an example) adds to ranged attacks (Rate of Fire, 3-Round-Burst, Full Auto, etc).