Weapon damage and base

[Azngalahad]

I was wondering if anyone knew what the base damage meant under the weapons or spells damage meant?

For instance a long sword did 1d6 + base or something similar to that

I was wondering why it didn't use something else like str or dex (which I assume is the bonus from the ability score)

[OneSidedDie]

I believe base assumes str for melee attacks and dex for ranged attacks. If you need something different you can specify the stat to use in the expanded details.

[ddavison]

Correct. Base should work for 95% of the cases, but you can override it to use something different if your character has a special ability that allows it.

[Zacchaeus]

Actually things are even more sophisticated than that. If you equip a Finesse weapon and your DEX is higher than your STR then the action tab will use the DEX modifier when it calculates the to hit value. In the main however the base value will use STR for melee and DEX for range as stated above. As also pointed out it isn't fixed, since there are plenty of cases where a character can use a different stat for attacks, for example a Monk can use DEX instead of STR for his unarmed strikes and monk weapons so you would need to go into the action tab and change base to DEX.