Maybe it’s because my roots lie in wargaming but it’s curious to me just how attached I am to the idea of the damage roll in my roleplaying games.

I’m not sure when I started to come across the idea of fixed damage in combat but the first steps in that direction were early on in my experience. Certainly by 1995, when I came across Fudge, the idea that a weapon might deliver a fixed amount of damage wasn’t a new one. What made Fudge palatable was the idea that the degree of success with the attack would add or subtract from that fixed value.

Where I noticed a strong sense of balking against fixed damage was when Dungeons & Dragons added the fixed average numbers as a quick way to adjudicate damage from an attack. That was possibly Third Edition but is definitely a feature of the modern…