When you succeed on an attack roll against an adversary, you then make a damage roll to determine how much damage your attack deals, and thus how many Hit Points your target must mark. A damage roll is composed of two parts: your Proficiency and damage dice.

Proficiency

Your Proficiency reflects how skilled you are at wielding weapons. You start at 1 Proficiency and can increase this value to a maximum of 6 over the course of a campaign. Your Proficiency determines how many damage dice you roll on a successful attack with a weapon, though other abilities or spells use Proficiency as well. This value is not weapon-specific, and does not change or reset when you equip a new weapon.

Tip: The effects of a spell or an ability might allow you to increase your Proficiency beyond the maximum of 6.

Damage Dice

The damage dice used to make a damage roll are determined by the weapon, spell, or ability you’re using to make the attack. If the attack uses a weapon, you roll a number of your weapon’s damage dice equal to your Proficiency. You can find your weapon’s damage dice in the “Active Weapons” section of your character sheet. If the attack is coming from a spell on a domain card or class feature, the text tells you which damage dice you should roll.

Any time a move tells you to deal damage using your Proficiency, you roll a number of dice equal to your Proficiency. Any time it tells you to deal damage using your Spellcast trait, you roll a number of dice equal to your Spellcast trait.

As with action rolls, if you want to add a bonus to your damage roll, you must decide to do so before you roll.

Calculating Damage

After rolling your damage dice, add their values together, then add any modifiers to determine the result. The GM marks Hit Points based on that damage.

Tip: In Daggerheart, there’s a difference between damage and Hit Points. Damage is the result of your damage roll, including your damage dice and modifiers. Hit Points reflect how hard that damage affects the creature who’s taking it. The number of Hit Points a creature marks depends on factors such as their damage thresholds, armor, resistances, and immunities.

Damage Without Modifiers

Some damage rolls tell you to roll a certain number and type of die without any modifiers. For example, “1d8 physical damage”. In this case, you simply roll as indicated and the result of that roll is the amount of damage you deal.

Damage with Modifiers

Some damage rolls come with modifiers, such as “2d6+2” or “3d8+5”. In these cases, you roll the dice, add their values together, then add the modifier to that total. This modifier is not affected by your Proficiency.

Critical Successes and Damage

If your attack roll critically succeeds, your attack deals extra damage! Start with the highest possible value the damage dice can roll, and then make a damage roll as usual, adding it to that value.

Multiple Sources of Damage

Whenever damage would be applied more than once to a creature during a PC’s move, the damage is always totaled before it’s applied to the adversary’s damage thresholds. For example, if a PC with orc ancestry makes a successful attack against a target in Melee range and decides to spend a Hope to use their “Tusks” feature (which gives them an extra 1d6 damage on a damage roll), they would roll their normal weapon damage and add a d6 to the result, then deal that total damage to the adversary.

If this orc then decided—with the table’s consent—to keep the spotlight and make another attack, this is considered a separate move. When this attack resolves, its total damage is counted separately from the damage of the orc’s first move.

Damage Types and Resistance

Sometimes other circumstances affect how much damage a creature takes. Use the following rules to determine whether special circumstances affect a damage roll.

Damage Types

Weapons, spells, and abilities deal one of two damage types: physical damage (phy) or magic damage (mag). Some mechanics interact with damage types to affect how damage is dealt or received—for example, a spell might double magic damage, a condition might make a character resistant to physical damage, or an adversary might be immune to a damage type altogether.

• Physical damage is dealt through mundane physical blows, usually without the aid of magic. Most standard blades and bows deal physical damage.
• Magic damage is dealt through magical means. Most harmful spells deal magic damage.

Direct Damage

Direct damage is physical or magic damage that Armor Slots can’t be used to reduce. For example, if a character is Poisoned by a creature’s attack, they might take 1d10 direct physical damage each time they act, which their Armor Slots can’t be used to reduce.

Resistance and Immunity

Some abilities, spells, items, and other effects grant resistance that reduces damage, or immunity that prevents it. If the text doesn’t specify whether resistance or immunity applies to physical or magic damage, the effect applies to both.

When a creature has resistance to a damage type, they halve damage of that type before comparing it to their damage thresholds. For example, when your character deals 26 physical damage to a creature with physical resistance, the creature only takes 13 physical damage.

If multiple features grant the same kind of resistance, they only count as one source of resistance. For example, if two different spells both provide a character resistance to physical damage, incoming damage is still only halved.

When a creature has immunity to a damage type, they do not take any damage from an attack that deals damage of that type.

If your character has resistance or immunity plus another way to reduce damage (such as marking an Armor Slot), apply the resistance or immunity first. You can then use other methods to reduce the damage further. If an attack deals both physical and magic damage, you can only benefit from resistance or immunity if you are resistant or immune to both damage types.