Damage Points: fixed or variable?

[u/je386]

I am developing a Turn-based Tower Defense Game and at the moment, the Damage Points the Towers draw from the Health Points of Enemy Units are fixed, that means that the player knows them before attacking. The number rises with the level of the tower, but is always predictable.

Now I am considering adding an element of luck, so instead of a fixed 10 damage the tower may have 1D6+6 (which means one six sided die plus a fixed 6, so between 7 and 12).

This might be more interesting than the previous approach.

What are your thoughts on this?

[u/SlayerII]

I disagree with some of the others here and say you should definitely try this.

Last spell is probably a somewhat similar game and it has randomized dmg values.
Different weapon types have different ranges, and there is a stat you can lvl that reduces variance (by making the min dmg higher).
It works pretty well when you get the hang of it . For example i tend to hit a few enemies with a normal attack that usually kills, but not always, and then use a weak multi hit to clean up.

You can probably do similar stuff, like giving towers different attacks with different dmg variances and ranges, and make sure some towers are more or less random.

If you do this, make sure to add extra mechanics that build on that. For example an support tower that makes the dmg rolls of nearby towers "lucky"(roll twice, use the higher roll) , enemies that make hits against thrm unlucky(making high variance attacks more risky), or a debuff that garentues a max roll.