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View Full Version : Help Fixing Spell Bombardment (5e Wild Magic Sorcerer)



Legimus
2018-05-01, 02:32 PM
I'm currently writing a minor re-work of the Wild Magic sorcerer to make it a little more fun and competitive with the other origins. My goal is to only make a more fun version of the Wild Magic origin, not to seriously redesign it thematically or mechanically. I think that the mid-level features—Tides of Chaos, Bend Luck, and Controlled Chaos—don't need much tweaking, so I'm leaving them largely untouched. I've changed Wild Magic to be less at the DM's discretion, but am also keeping the core of it intact. So what's left is Spell Bombardment.

Spell Bombardment is, in my opinion, one of the weakest features in the whole game. All of the other level 18 features that sorcerers can get are very strong, potentially game-changing. By contrast, Spell Bombardment adds a minuscule amount of damage. Its fundamental flaw rests in relying on rolling a specific number on the damage die. This means that no matter what level you cast the spell at, the chance of rolling maximum damage with a single die remains the same. If you cast Magic Missile, you have a 1-in-4 chance of getting max damage. If you cast it at the 5th level, rolling 5d4, there are 20 different combinations that can be rolled (5 x 4 = 20). Of those 20 combinations, 5 will contain at least one die that rolled 4. You thus have a 5-in-20, or 1-in-4, chance of rolling the highest possible number (4) when you cast the spell. No matter what level you cast a spell at, the probability of triggering Spell Bombardment stays the same. And the average damage for each damage die is roughly the same, too. Although average damage goes up for each damage die, the chance of hitting the max number goes down. So no matter what damage die you're using, the average damage increase is between 0.5 and 0.6. You'd get more mileage out of a feature that just said "The damage of all your spells increases by 1."

So already it doesn't trigger often, and when it does the extra damage is middling at best (since you get it so late in the game). Suffice to say, I'm looking to make this feature a little more illustrious. In line with my goal, I want to keep true to the mechanics and theme of the Wild Magic origin, and I want the new version to fulfill the same role (increasing damage output). But I'm having trouble coming up with a good feature that raises spell damage in a way that's rewarding, somewhat random, and fun. My first thought was to let Spell Bombardment be used multiple times in one turn, but that just doesn't feel like the fix this feature needs. Any ideas?

Composer99
2018-05-01, 04:23 PM
If you want a simple fix, what about letting the sorcerer re-roll any one die when rolling damage for a spell once each turn?

That might not be enough to make it a game-changing feature, but it could be a start.

GreatWyrmGold
2018-05-02, 07:40 AM
If you cast Magic Missile, you have a 1-in-4 chance of getting max damage. If you cast it at the 5th level, rolling 5d4, there are 20 different combinations that can be rolled (5 x 4 = 20). Of those 20 combinations, 5 will contain at least one die that rolled 4. You thus have a 5-in-20, or 1-in-4, chance of rolling the highest possible number (4) when you cast the spell.
Your math is off on two counts.
1. There are not 4x5 different possibilities, but 4^5 or 1,024.
2. There are five ways for exactly one 4 to show up on 5d4. If my math is right, there are 3^5 or 243 ways for no fours to be rolled, and hence 781 ways for at least one four. So there's about a three-in-four chance of getting a die with maximum damage.
Of course, magic missile is the best spell in this regard, since small dice (obviously) have a higher chance of rolling maximum damage. For instance, a 5th-level fireball does 10d6 damage, for 6^10 or about sixty million combinations, 5^10 or almost ten million of which don't have any sixes, for only a slightly higher chance of triggering spell bombardment despite rolling twice as many dice.

That said, while spell bombardment triggers more often than your math indicates, it's still...unimpressive. A 70-80% chance of rolling an additional die is still, on average, only 2.5-3 damage...for spells which deal 13-35 damage. Compare that to other "capstone" Origin powers, such as charming or terrifying nearby creatures, healing half of your hit points once per day, or shared flight combined with two elemental immunities.

One possibility would be to simply grant straight exploding dice—that is, if you roll maximum damage with any die, you reroll and add them all, potentially rerolling the same die multiple times if it keeps coming up 6. My calculations suggest that this would increase average d4 damage by 1/3 (to 3.3/die) and average d6 damage by 1/5 (to 4.2/die). An extra 20-30% damage on average isn't going to be game-changing (unless you roll a series of exploding dice at just the right time, of course), but it's about the best you're going to get while sticking close to the original ability.



If you want a simple fix, what about letting the sorcerer re-roll any one die when rolling damage for a spell once each turn?
That might not be enough to make it a game-changing feature, but it could be a start.
That would increase damage less than the original ability, more frequently. I'd say it's about the same. Worse, it makes the wild sorcerer's spells less random, not more!

Legimus
2018-05-02, 09:05 AM
Thank you for the math check. As I've kept looking at this, I got more and more confident that my math was just wrong.