I agree that the doing the Shake/Unshake Tango every round does get pretty tedious. My players will get frustrated if they keep hitting and can’t hurt, but if they have trouble hitting at all they’ll knuckle down and get cunning. For this reason, I’ve been focusing my NPC buffing more on Parry scores rather than Toughness, and this seems to working okay so far. This ties in with the main topic of having too much distance between hitting and hurting – I’m trying to shrink this distance, but push the hitting threshold farther away.

The average damage dice for most PCs will range from 2d6 (e.g. longbow) to 2d8 (e.g. d8 Str & longsword). Thus the average damage is 7. Now add the “crit” 1d6 for an average of 3 more damage = 10. Now factor in that any of these 3 dice can “Ace” and you roughly have another 50% chance of 3+ more damage. (My PCs got lucky and often Aced 2 or more dice during damage…).

This will kill most “Extras” outright. Even Ogres and Great White Sharks get shaken! Which points out the critical flaw in the SW damage system: the game does not handle “the solo monster” scenerio. Ultimately, with 3-4 PCs attacking a single monster, one attack will damage (as shown above). Thus the monster is shaken (and can’t act). This makes for a pretty dull encounter as round after round the PCs continue to ‘stun’ the huge dragon. Eventuall someone will Ace his damage so high that it results in the creature’s death.

Good comments on the rest. I am going to try E – Free No Mercy edge. It seems to be a popular option for those who have some of the same perceptions with combat that I seem to have.

- Op. A – some high Toughness creatures need an ace on the damage roll to get a high enough result to hurt them; using averages takes away the ability to ace and with it the chance that weaker PCs can do any damage in these situations.

- Op. C – I like this, but maybe the player should have to declare in advance whether they are going to take the avg or roll for damage (ie no rolling snake eyes then saying “Crap – I’ll take the avg”)

- Op. E – I like giving players interesting choices, and any time they have to decide whether or not to spend a benny is an interesting choice, because it could cost them their lives later on. This option is empowering for players, but takes away a bit of the risk of failure and therefore combat suspense, IMO.

Another option would be that a raise on your attack roll gives you a flat +3 bonus (avg of the bonus d6 die, rounded down) to your damage roll; this way, you can still fail but it’s less likely. With this variation, it attack roll bonuses don’t have to be capped at one raise – you could make 2 raises +4, 3 raises + 5 etc if you wanted.