Step 1: Roll The Damage Dice and Apply Modifiers, Bonuses and Penalties
Your weapon, spell, or even a magic item determines what type of dice you roll for damage and how many. For example, if you’re using a normal arming sword, you’ll roll 1d8. If you’re casting a 3rd-level fireball spell, you’ll roll 6d6. Sometimes, especially in the case of weapons, you’ll apply modifiers, bonuses and penalties to the damage.
When you use weapons, you add the same modifier as used for the attack roll to the damage. A spell tells you which dice to roll for damage and whether to add any modifiers.
As with checks, you might add circumstance, status, or item bonuses to your damage rolls, but if you have multiple bonuses of the same type, you add only the highest bonus of that type. Again like checks, you may also apply circumstance, status, item and untyped penalties to the damage roll and, again, you apply only the greatest penalty of a specific type, but apply all untyped penalties together.
If the combined penalties to a damage roll would reduce the damage to 0 or below, you still deal 1 damage. Sometimes there are other considerations, described below.
If a spell or other effect deals damage to more than one target at the same time, then roll the damage once for all of them. For example, when a wizard casts Fireball or a cleric casts Flame Strike, the spell’s damage is rolled once for all creatures caught in the blast.
Increasing Damage
In some cases, you increase the number of dice that you roll when making weapon damage rolls.
Natural 20
For every die in the dice pool of your attack roll that rolls a natural 20, you deal your maximum possible rolled damage. For example, if you are attacking with a maul and one of the dice in your dice pool rolls a natural 20 (and all others would miss), then you deal 12 damage, rather than 2d6, and then add your relevant ability modifier.
Critical Hits
When more than one die in your dice pool would hit the target’s defence, after adding your attack modifier, then you have scored a critical hit. For every die, beyond the first, that hits the target’s defence, roll the attack’s damage dice an additional time. For example, if you are attacking with a maul and two of the dice in your dice pool hit the target’s defence, then roll 4d6 for the damage, rather than 2d6, and then add your relevant ability modifier.
These effects stack. For example:
- If you are attacking with a maul and one of the dice in your dice pool rolls a natural 20 and another would hit, then you deal 12+2d6 damage, rather than 2d6, and then add your relevant ability modifier.
- If you are attacking with a maul and three of the dice in your dice pool hit the target’s defence, then roll 6d6 for the damage, rather than 2d6, and then add your relevant ability modifier.
- If you are attacking with a maul and two of the dice in your dice pool rolls a natural 20 (and all others would miss), then you deal 24 damage, rather than 2d6, and then add your relevant ability modifier.
Choosing to be Hit
Sometimes, an attack might miss you when you wanted it to hit. You can choose to allow a miss to hit you (no action required). If you do so, the attacker deals the maximum amount of damage instead of rolling.
Persistent Damage
Persistent damage is a condition that causes damage to recur beyond the original effect. Like normal damage, it can be doubled or halved based on the results of an attack roll or saving throw. Unlike with normal damage, when you are subject to persistent damage, you don’t take it right away. Instead, you take the specified damage at the end of your turns, after which you attempt a DC 15 flat check to see if you recover from the persistent damage. See Conditions for the complete rules regarding the persistent damage condition.
Doubling and Halving Damage
Sometimes you’ll need to halve or double an amount of damage, such as when the target of your attack is vulnerable to the attack’s damage type, or when you are missed by a spell. When this happens, you roll the damage normally, adding all the normal modifiers, bonuses and penalties. Then, you double or halve the amount as appropriate (rounding down, if you halved it).