Using the environment in combat: Throwing bricks and mud

    So you come here to train yourself in the art of using the battlefield to your advantage! Very well, then LISTEN because this is really motherfucking important:

-------------------------------------------------COMBAT ADVANTAGE----------------------------------------

So combat advantage is the name which we give to situations where one person has a clear advantage over another. An example of this would be stealth. If you are stealthed then you would be able to attack an enemy without rolling against their AC.

    * Height advantage! Whenever you have the jump on your enemy you will have an advantage, helping you succeed in your attacks and hit HARDER! If the height advantage means that the enemy cannot see you, you will not have to roll against their AC (not applicable to other players). If you have any height advantage, regardless if you are seen or not you will roll your weapon die as though you critically hit.

    * Stealth advantage! If your opponent cannot see you, for example stealth, then you do not have to roll against their AC. This does not apply to players.

    * Preparation advantage! Ok, not actually using the environment, but it fit here. You may your your major action to "prepare" for the next turn. When prepared you gain the ability to counter their attack in their turn. This means you basically get a free hit. Counter attacks deal half damage compared to normal attacks, and preparing increases your AC by the roll of your weapon dice.

    * Blinding advantage! If you can make your opponent stare into the sun, throw sand in their eye, or whatever, then they will be blinded and have a -5 to AC.

    * Know your surroundings! If you happen to know there is a giant pit of doom at the right, USE IT! If you are in a forest, BURN! BURN! BURN! Always make sure to know where you are, the only situation where that is useless is if you are floating in the middle of space, and we all know that's impossible

    * Throw ALL THE THINGS! Some times, a rock might be the best weapon EVER! It is incredibly versatile, you can improvise with it and there is a ton of the damn things!

    Now onto the technical details of the bullet points i just said:

    *Using the surroundings: Also know as contextual combat, the example given: You have you and foe, you are fighting in a forest, in such situations you have a plethora of advantages, use your imagination! Some creative solutions while fun might be not really effective, or they could work amazingly well on the situation, like climbing a tree in order to escape and get a height advantage, to go by an area with a lot of roots above ground, thus causing your foe to trip over them, falling to the ground giving you combat advantage, there are plenty of solutions, grabbing stuff from the area or interacting with it, say you have a gun, and there is a beehive nearby, you could fire to it making it fall, thus causing the bees to go angry and attack your foe, distracting him in order to give you other advantages.

   *When using the environment to attack there are 2 main rolls by the player, a made up number by the DM, a roll from the enemy and the distance which the object is moved/thrown. Hold onto your hat because this actually is a fairly complicated formula but after about 2 hours of testing i am happy with it.

distance thrown/moved = "dist"
player strength (stat, not mod) = "pstr"
player dexterity mod = "pdex"
player roll = "proll"
enemy dex mod = "edex"
enemy roll = "eroll"
minimum value required to pick up object = "minroll"

distmod = (pdex + proll)/(edex + eroll + (dist / 6)/2)
damage = ((proll+pdex)-minroll)*pstr/10*distmod*(minroll/6*minroll/6)/9

yeah.....
trust me though, this does actually seem to work fairly fine.
If you use python, i wrote a program to test things. Try it if you want and tell me if there is anything which i should change which you have tested using this program.

I won't really explain much about this because you won't have to use it really. But basically you check for picking the object up, then check against their dexterity saving roll to see if you hit them. If you do then it does some maths to give you the damage depending on the distance, and how heavy it is. How heavy it is is decided by the roll required to pick it up.

Basically the heavier an object is, the higher the average damage is (ignoring when you are unable to pick it up), and the larger the range of values which you get is. The difference in average damage isn't that much, but if you remove most of the really low damaging values like 0.2 or 0.4 then you are left with a fairly large difference, because of the larger range with heavier objects.

Basically if you feel like gambling, go with a heavier object. It can hit harder.

Program pastebin: http://pastebin.com/1r3Agiy9