Old School Monsters

[phiwum]

Originally Posted by Bill_in_IN

Sound reasoning.

The only open issue to resolve is the damage.

You could simply double the results of a 1d-2 for two attacking together or give it a straight 1d+2 for both. The later has a higher average but the same maximum.

The 1d-2 for a single Blood Hawk attack makes sense per the reasoning that you presented. Since they are described as being particularly fierce, a reasonable compromise would be 1d-1. This would be standard dagger damage as opposed to a sling.

Two 1d-1 attacks at DX 9 do an average of 2 damage, which is less than a single 1d+3 at 2.59. With leather armor, the two attacks do an expected damage of 0, while the single 1d+3 does 0.59 points.

But expected damage isn't a perfect measure. Every 1d+3 attack gets through leather armor and there's a 60% chance of such a hit within two turns. The average damage after such a hit (subtracting for armor) is a healthy (?) 4.5 pts (ignoring 2x and 3x hits, which don't change matters much). With two turns of attacks, the average number of successful attacks is 1.24 for 2x(1d-1) and 0.75 for 1x(1d+3). I'll reconsider the damage, I think.