Sunday, March 27, 2011

Quick Draw benefits for throwing weapons

3.5 Edition Rules:

If your would like to play a character that throws daggers or other weapons, then you should have your character take the Quick Draw feat.  Not only does Quick Draw allow you to draw a weapon as a free action, it provides a secondary benefit of allowing a character to throw one weapon per his number of attacks instead of being limited to throwing one weapon per round.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Apply your sneak attack damage to all your attacks

3.5 Edition Rules:

We applied our sneak attack damage to a rogues first attack for a long time.   We finally discovered that we were playing it wrong, and immediately our rogues became must more dangerous in combat.   The correct method is to apply sneak attack damage to all rogue attacks that qualify for a sneak attack.   This means that an 8th level rogue, with a Base Attack Bonus of +6/+1 and wielding two weapons and thus getting 3 attacks (2 from his primary hand and 1 from his off hand) gets to apply sneak attack damage to all 3 attacks.   If he hits with a long sword in his primary hand twice and a short sword in his off-hand once, the damage would be (d8+ 4d6) + (d8+4d6) + (d6+4d6). That is potentially a lot of damage.
Source: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/rg/20040217a

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Overcoming Damage Reduction with a Sneak Attack

3.5 Edition Rules:
Many situations were not clearly addressed in the 3.5 edition of books.  One case is how to treat sneak attack damage when attacking an opponent with Damage Reduction (DR).  Fortunately for us, this case is specifically addressed on the Wizards site in one of the excellent "All about..." series.  In "All About Sneak Attacks (Part Three)", Skip Williams tells us that the damage from a sneak attack does count toward the amount needed to overcome DR.  Therefore, if your rogue deals 4 points of weapon damage against a creature with DR5, and includes 7 more points of damage from the sneak attack, the total damage of 11HP is enough to overcome the DR5 and the creature will take (11-5)=6 points of damage from the attack.

The Best Way to Roll for Hit Points

Here is my favorite approach to rolling Hit Points, especially for 5E.   Per the 5E rules, you can roll the dice or accept the "standar...