So I had a pretty long and involved fight where I tried out some mob rules and pushed my level 5 party hard with a big old fight in the game. So in having this big old fight the group cast Haste on the fighter and supported the fighter to great effect. Bitsy is a greatsword wielding orphanage manager. She’s actually really sweet and kind to the kids while being a 6 foot and change blond, beat you into pulp with her sword, kind of woman. She just doesn’t get to do it very often. Because of Haste and an Extra Attack feature and a Berserker feature she was getting five attacks a round. It was fun but I think it’s just too much and slows the game down a lot. So I’ve endeavored to figure out how to solve that problem.
I had two weapon fighting in the game and a bunch of things that could provide extra attacks. I had to go through and get rid of a lot of it so getting an extra attack felt special.
Making the Extra Action Feel Special
The Fighter has an ability called Go Time which gives them an extra action. I kept that because it needs a Rest to reset and can work in other action oriented scenes. It also gives the Fighter something that only one other class can do. The Haste spell from the Magic User works in a similar way. So now only two places give an extra action. I’m ok with that. Makes it special.
Dealing with Two-Weapon Fighting
Next was the two weapon fighting piece. I like the concept of two weapon fighting but I don’t want the extra attack roll unless it’s fast and easy to adjudicate. This is my solution for now.
If you take the attack action while wielding a Light weapon in your off hand you can use your quick action to try and hit with it, Roll 2d6, on a 7+ you also deal the off hand weapons harm. If either weapon has the Thrown tag, you can throw the weapon instead. If either weapon is a ranged weapon you can fire one or both of them but reloading certain weapons requires two hands.
Removing the Extra Attack
When it came to the concept of the extra attack I still needed to replace it with something to make it feel like you had more control over a situation as a fighter. This game has a keep best 2 dice from a dice pool style mechanic so I figured why not let competent fighters be able to manipulate that dice pool some more when making attacks. In the Streets of Avalon game I have very few rules where you can reroll dice because the threat of a critical failure is on double 1’s at any time. So being able to reroll dice after the initial roll is a huge benefit. So I replaced a lot of the extra attack rolls with concepts similar to this:
You may reroll any dice you’ve rolled when making an attack. You can do this a number of times equal to your training bonus. This ability refreshes with a rest.
There’s some variations on that concept for different iterations but most extra attacks now are changed in their language to be reroll dice after the attack roll. I have added some harm to abilities to push the damage output up a bit. Then I looked at a few numbers and realized it fixed some of the scaling problems I was having with enemies and how to keep things in a reasonable space for survivability of bad guys opposed to the harm they put on characters at the higher levels.
I’ve already let my players know about these changes and now am looking forward to seeing how it feels at the table.