As someone new to the 2d20 system I’m liking the overall rules for rolls and actions, but the one thing that is kinda putting me off a bit is the damage dice. They’re interesting on paper but they seem to add lots of extra rolls and slow down combat (especially when playing on Tabletop Simulator which is what we got nowadays since we’re all living in different cities.)
Recently when reading the Dishonored 2d20 rules I noticed that damage is fixed in that game (a weapon with 4 damage always does 4 damage, if I got it right).
I read someone suggesting somewhere just making the number of damage dice into the total damage (since probabilities would put that really close to average rolls), and every 3 damage you’d apply 1 effect from the weapon.
I was wondering if anyone ever tried something like that, since I don’t have enough experience with the system to see all the ramifications of the change. I know for example that some talents and abilities allow you to re-roll damage dice, and I’m not sure how that could be handled with fixed damage.
The overall system granularity, the level of detail, in Conan and Dishonored is vastly different.
Dishonored is a very coarse-grained, low-detailed system where such simplifications fit in, as the characters are not defined in much detail.
Conan is the total opposite, it belongs to the three earliest 2d20 RPGs which have the highest degree of details, are fine-grained and make important distinctions on many levels.
If you really want to play in the Conan setting, why not simply take the Dishonored rules and create Conan-like characters using those?
Or look at the 2d20 SRD for some ideas?
Simply pulling out the low-detail damage system from Dishonored and putting it into Conan will make a lot of equipment and - more importantly - a lot of skills and Talents - useless.
Or you will have to re-work all those to fit with the new damage system, which will be a major effort.
It would be much simpler to create Dishonored characters with a Conan “look and feel” and use that to play Conan-like adventures. (And even the “magic” works easier in Dishonored than in Conan - so that might be more attractive for players interested in playing a sorcerer.)
In general I like the Conan system of attributes, skills and talents better than the oversimplification of Dishonored. I get that it fits the storytelling type of that particular game, but I think Conan characters using that entire system would tend to feel “samey”. I think the distinctions, as you said, in the Conan system are more fitting to define who’s good at what in a sword and sorcery setting than “I do things the sneaky way / I do things the bold way.”
I don’t dislike the idea of the damage system in Conan per se, but the amount of dice rolled does make combat rounds quite slow (especially playing on Tabletop Simulator).
That’s why I was wondering if anyone with more experience ever came up with an alternative, something like the fixed damage in Dishonored or maybe rolling a d6 or d8 for total damage, etc. And taking into account some conversions for how the talents and weapons would work.
In practice I haven’t felt it takes any longer to roll the dice pool than it does to roll single dice and do math. I suppose worst case you could give weapons average damage (0.83333 x number of dice) but you’d also to account for high Attributes, Loads, Vicious etc.