[IWDEE but all games i guess] Strength Bonus to Darts

dockaboomski

In PnP, strength gives hit and damage bonuses to all weapons except for crossbows and bows (unless they are composite). If this could be replicated for all items or, at the very least, for darts, it would be pretty nice.
For example, a player in my campaign has 18/83 STR and gets +2 to hit and +4 to damage when using darts, getting 3 APR and doing 5-8 damage per hit.
Fun fun fun
EDIT: I only noticed this in IWDEE, and I'm assuming it's the same in the BGEE series.

TheArtisan

Yeah this is universal between the games - they don't have a strength bonus in BG either.

To be honest I'm mixed about this. The way darts work means that any sort of damage bonus will boost their damage tremendously to the point of doubling, tripling or even quadrupling it, for example, a half-orc 19 strength would be doing 1d3 + 7 damage three times per round, and with darts being one of the easiest weapons to get 5 APR with you could be outputting an average of about 30-40 damage every round even in BG1, that is absolutely ridiculous. Hell, as a Blade I use darts over str-dependent ranged weapons just because Offensive Spin adds +2 to damage. This would massively overbuff darts unless you could somehow reduce the strength bonus on them, which isn't possible to mod at the moment.

On the other hand, I'd love to see strength bonuses for composite longbows. This would boost their viability as late game ranged weapons tremendously (assuming weapons like Heartseeker or Taralash count as composite).

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Dee

There's really very few things that can totally wreck the game's balance. Letting the player add their full Strength bonus to damage with a ranged 3 APR weapon at level 1 is one of them.

(Throwing Daggers and Throwing Axes are pretty potent as well, but they worked that way fifteen years ago, so presumably the game was designed to accommodate them.)

I can't speak to what Beamdog will do in the future, but those are my thoughts on the balance implications with this request.

dockaboomski

I was just hoping to bring the games closer to their pen-and-paper roots. I know first-hand that it's a broken option, it's one of the things about 2e that is always funny. A level 13 fighter specialized in darts gets six attacks per round. Six! I totally understand the aversion to putting it in the game.
But it's in the player's handbook, so...

AstroBryGuy

Be careful what you wish for when asking "to bring the game closer to their pen-and-paper roots". By PnP, a fighter can only be specialized in ONE weapon (i.e., no grand mastery in multiple weapons) and spells take 10 minutes X spell level to memorize (e.g., an 18th level wizard takes over 23 hours to memorize their full complement of spells - AFTER an 8 hour rest). I'm sure we don't want the devs implementing those PnP rules.