I'm in love with megadamage
I normally hate my old writing, but nearly a year later, I still think that I cooked with the Terasque. Immediately after writing it I got thinking about how I'd have written it for a regular glog homebrew instead of a goncharov-style fake lost media game. That got me thinking about megadamage, which got me writing about giant robots. (I still have the remaining 3 giant robot classes that I promised nearly fully written and just waiting on me to do the final editing and art btw.)
I think megadamage is awesome. I like that naturally d10 weapons have a 10% chance to deal 1 megadamage and d12 weapons have a 25% chance. I like rolling snake eyes on a 2d6 attack and looking up at the players and going "yeah that still does 20 damage." I like that to make a normal creature giant you don't need to add some complicated formula to its stat block, you just say that it takes and deals megadamage now.
For those who don't know: if something that takes megadamage would receive normal damage, divide it by 10 and round down. If something that takes normal damage would receive megadamage, multiply it by 10. Otherwise, megadamage and normal damage function identically.
Sometimes it uses a different factor, like in a system that uses a standard damage dice, it'll be the size of that dice. I've heard 100 before also. I don't know. That's kind of scary. Sometimes instead of just multiplying by 10, each point of megadamage becomes it's own d10 of normal damage. If you like rolling a ton of dice you can go ahead and do that, it probably gives a lot more granularity, allowing the heroes to get just nicked by the giant's sword or whatever.
I've included megadamage in my personal GLOG rules. (I might share those one day.) It helps set the stakes and signal to the heroes that they're out of their depth. I think every dragon should use megadamage, I don't think I'll ever run a non-megadamage dragon again.
Other things that can use megadamage:
- armies and warbands (literally just take the Mausritter rules - test Cha at a village to rile up a warband to go fight whatever giant monster that's too big to fight alone)
- giant robots and spaceships
- regular ships too
- siege weapons and fortresses
- any monster that's really really big
- anything that's had Giant Growth cast on it, or drank a potion or whatever
- a god smiting a mortal
- a magic sword, maybe
- magic spells when they roll triples???
(Ok we have now entered the slushpost zone i think)
Also like the idea of a sledgehammer or other demolition weapon dealing normal damage to normal things and megadamage to mega things.
I need a better term than normal damage. Mundane damage? Common damage?
For scaling common damage to megadamage, I'm inclined to consider each die individually. So a 2d6 attack still can't nick a megadamage creature, you need those d12 weapons, or an actual solution like an army. But maybe it's just too much friction, it would go way smoother to divide and round down the final sum. I don't know.
Monster idea: a warband of pixies, who would normally deal microdamage but together deal common damage.
True megadamage, which has a factor of 1,000,000 as the mega- prefix implies.
I think it would make sense if critical hits against megadamage creatures ignore the conversion scaling. Hitting a dragon in the eye is pretty much like hitting any other creature in the eye.