Re: Well, we haven't talked about Killing Attacks in a while...
I like that the old stun lotto is gone, but i really don't like the new stun multiplier, I hit that point in the pdf and had to stop and do all sorts of OCDish math. I did come up with a sort of statement of principle, killing attacks and normal attacks are both 5 points per dc, so they should be similar in effectiveness. Old killing attacks blew that since a 5x stun mult pretty much clobbered the target, but I think the new 1d3 stun mult goes way to far in the other direction. 62% of the time a killing attack with a 1d3 multiplier will put 0 stun past defenses of 2.5 X the dcs of the attack.
After much poking at numbers I've come to believe that a flat multiplier of 2.5 hits the stun results I'd like to see (less stun than a normal attack, enough stun to do some past the defenses I expect, and no "whoops they just oneshot the bad guy"), but as a play mechanism I'm hesitant to go with 2.5x, as it feels kind of bland, and multiplying by x and a half is slightly annoying. My other though is a stun mult of 1d{1,2,2,3,3,4} which also has a nice curve (ok a nice scatter graph), but calls for some custom dice.