[Meta thread] Iron's PokeRole Adventure: The Skull Ruins

[Dragonstrike]

...so I guess we are houseruling that Super Fang outright does half HP damage guaranteed (like in the games) instead of rolling for it like the book says to do?

The book is unclear. "The damage roll is five" should mean the RESULT is five. Compare to other moves like Nightshade. Or under Super Effective damage - it deals +1 dmg even if the damage roll is 0.

"Roll" is different than "pool" or "dice," but sometimes the book seems to forget that.

Mmmmmm...not sure I agree on that, tbh.  If the book says a move does a fixed amount of damage/HP recovery, there's a dedicated graphic that says as much.

For comparison, Aftermath, Dragon Rage, and Sonic Boom, which outright say '1 or 2 automatic damage', and don't mention rolling or dice or similar at all when talking about the move's damage. And they have a graphic that says they deal exactly that much damage, too.

To me, when the book says 'roll', I kinda expect something to actually be rolled, tbh.  The move's text saying there's a cap of 10 sounds to me like Super Fang also can't have more than 10 dice in that damage pool/roll, as well.




I'm still cool with Super Fang acting more like its game counterpart regardless and just outright doing half of the target's remaining HP, tbh, as it is the only move (minus Nature's Madness and Half Life, neither of which we're likely to see very often in Skull Ruins as far as I know, if at all) that has that particular effect.  

But given that almost all fixed damage moves (Seismic Toss, Night Shade, Psywave [which could be viewed as either a buff or a nerf, tbh, as its damage range was condensed to make it more like Seismic Toss and Night Shade], Flame Burst's splash damage, Fire Pledge's effect, etc.) were converted into having variable damage you need to roll for with the sole exceptions of Dragon Rage and Sonic Boom, I was kinda thinking Super Fang was given a similar treatment.



I think the part where the book's unclear is they don't really clearly define what 'damage pool', 'damage roll', etc. all mean. Or if they do, it's in a kinda obscure location that's lost among all the other important information in the book.

EDIT: And looking at it again, some other moves use 'damage roll' in their terminology, too, which seems to imply to me that it was intended as an addition to/reduction from the damage pool, not the final damage. Acrobatics, Grassy Terrain (which specifically mentions adding 1 extra die to Grass moves' damage rolls), Ice Ball, Facade, Flail, Frustration, Helping Hand, Retaliate, Return, Round, Smelling Salts, Weather Ball (a move which I use, obviously. Do I get two extra dice when there's Weather, or do I just do 2 extra damage automatically? We've been using the first interpretation so far), Trump Card, Wring Out, Rollout...generally, if a move has variable power or can alter a move's power in some way, then they use the term...as long as they don't use Damage Pool instead. It'd probably make a little more sense if the terms were a bit better defined, tbh...