D&D Lite Revisited – The Fighter

This week I ran a classic module as a one-shot: G1: Against The Giants. Does the ‘G’ stand for ‘Giants’? No one knows.

The version I used is the one from Tales from the Yawning Portal, which scales down the amount of giants a bit – but there’s still quite a few left! I also had a look at the modern reimagination of the ‘G’ series: Storm King’s Thunder, which has its own Den of the Hill Giant Chief, but there are even fewer giants in that one so it didn’t make the cut.

For future reference and because this is called Random Tables, here’s a table of how many giants are in each:

To be honest the Yawning Portal version has some fake hill giants that use ogre stats, but still.

I wanted to use my homebrew, but I also wanted the game to be balanced. As you reach double digits it becomes hard to figure out how strong PCs actually are, and the adventure with its unfair “room full of giants” encounter doesn’t help. So join me as I math out how strong my simplified character classes should be. Today, the fighter!

The Fighter

Let’s use the simplest of classes, the Champion, as a yardstick. I believe that WotC themselves use this template to measure player options. How much damage does a Champion deal? We’ll incorporate the following:

• Our Champions starts with 16 Strength
• He wields a greatsword with great weapon fighting
• He will have extra attacks
• He can take an extra action once per short rest
• He rolls a crit on a 19 (or even 18 at higher levels)

Great Weapon Fighting

If a Champion attacks six times, he will roll: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. In case of a 1 or 2, he will reroll and keep the result. On average, that reroll will result in a 3.5.

3.5 + 3.5 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 divided by 6 = 4.16.

Since we roll two dice for a greatsword attack, the average damage is 8.33.

Action Surge

Action Surge doubles our damage. But how often do we use it? According to the DMG, there are 6-8 encounters between long rests, and two short rests. That works out to 2.33 encounters per short rest.

We also want to know how many rounds an encounter lasts. The DMG helps here too, in the section on creating monsters: “If a monster’s damage output varies from round to round, calculate its damage output each round for the first three rounds of combat, and take the average.”

So the average combat lasts for three rounds. That means that an Action Surge doubles your damage output once every 7 rounds of combat.

Champion Damage Table

Adding all of this together:

Why AC13? ‘Cuz that’s the armor of a giant of course!

As expected: damage jumps at levels 5, 11, 17 and 20, what the PHB calls the “tiers of play”.

The Champion also gets survivability goodies: Second Wind, Defense, Indomitable, and Survivor. We won’t go into details on these and just say that our lite Fighter should probably get to roll a d12 for hit points instead of a d10 to compensate.

The Lite Fighter

Earlier we landed on the following progression: +1 Stat, +1 Stat, +1 Proficiency, +1 Attack, repeat. The hope is that having a few more attacks than our Champion makes up for all the bells and whistles. Let’s see.

Results

Tier 1

The Lite Fighter deals less damage than the Champion, but while -21% may look bad, the actual value in terms of hit points is 2. This is fine.

Tier 2

Here’s where our Lite Fighter lags behind, reaching a peak of -35% damage. When we get our third attack at level 9 we catch up and even beat the Champion.

Tier 3 & 4

Our extra attacks start to come through and after a bit of a dip at level 11 and 12 we stay within 10% of our target.

Analysis

In aggregate, this Fighter can keep up with a Champion. The dip in early tier 2 is a shame, but hard to fix.

The problem with 5e’s leveling system is that the “jumps” happen every 6 levels while the proficiency increases are on a 4-level cadence. I like the simplicity of “stat, stat, prof, attack” too much to try and emulate this. Especially because it will work so nicely with the Thief later on!

Summary: The Lite Fighter

Fighters they share an unparalleled mastery with weapons and armor, and a thorough knowledge of the skills of combat. They are well acquainted with death, both meting it out and staring it defiantly in the face.

Hit Die. d12

Leveling Up. When a Fighter gains a new level, in addition to adding another Hit Die, apply the next bonus in the following progression. When all bonuses have been gained, restart at the beginning.