D&D 5E Poll on the Reaper: is damage on missed melee attack roll believable and balanced?

[pemerton]

If an attack is competent enough to deal hit point damage to a defender, it should not be described as a "miss". It translates to "this reaper guy always deals damage", which completely tramples over my believability meter as no one should absolutely always hit.

Of course, 4e had a mechancially elegant solution to this - Reaping Strike is just one of several powers the fighter will have, including encounter powers that s/he will use from time to time, and so there will be occasions when the fighter misses.

Another solution to the problem is a narrative one - some of those "hits" that are not fatal can be narrated, in the fiction, as misses ("You swing your axe, almost cleaving your foe's skull in two - but at the last minute he rolls out of the way, and your axeblade leaves a deep groove in the timber floor.") No physical injury is dealt, but luck/divine favour etc are depleted.

I wouldn't expect this narrative treatment to satisfy those who don't like Reaper - the point of putting it forward, rather, is to try to show that there is no default narrative (such as "this guy never misses") that Reaper brings with it. Rather, it depends upon whether or not the mechanics of the game (attack rolls, hits and misses, hit point depletion, etc) are seen as process simulation or not.

 

[Deadboy]

You've got your information wrong.

It has already been proven, and quoted, that hit points "do" represent physical contact and other abilities such as luck.

So I'm not sure where you get this "long standing assertion" from.

From 3.5:
HIT POINTS
Your hit points tell you how much punishment you can take before
dropping.

I view 3.5 as a bad source. How about 1st edition: "...The majority of hit points are symbolic of combat skill, luck (bestowed by supernatural powers) and magical fources." Straight from the mind of Gygax.

The Moldvay Basic book actually declined to define it at all, just refering to it as the "amount of points of damage a character can take before dying."

Is damage / killing on a miss not silly to you?

Whatever. I've played (A)D&D since 89, if you miss on your attack you don't damage thing and you especially don't insta-kill kobolds just because of your background.

Well, since hit points are more a measure of skill and luck, apparently the kobolds did not have enough of either to prevent the Slayer from killing it, as the Slayer is just that badass.

One attack? No.

Six attacks in the same combat against weak opponents at level one? no place. This happening at the end of a dramatic combat, where the slayer after three misses against the death knight, that scourge on the land for centuries, ends up getting himself killed in the way of a slapstick scene? No place.

Also consider this: A first level slayer shooting at a rat at maximum range with a crossbow will always kill it. Is that really alright?

I'm not going to throw DDN into the "Do not want bin", just because of a handfull of such abilities.

But I find it jarring and that won't stop. Others find it jarring to, some far more than me. Many others don't find it jarring at all, that's fine, but understand that for those of us who do, it can be detrimental to the game experience and won't stop being so.

I find the designers should be mindful of that.

You're looking at it the wrong way with the Death Knight. If the Death Knight has so few hit points left that the Slayer's miss damage could kill it, the clearly the Death Knight has been so battered down and the momentum of the combat has swung so against it that even a blow that should have been easily avoided is enough to kill it. Because the Slayer is just that badass.

The rat part, I actually agree with. The slayer ability shouldn't work on ranged attacks.

I voted No to both Believability and Balance.... Actually, I voted incorrectly. It's just believability I have a problem with; balance is fine.

While I understand the arguments about hit points as an abstraction, I have to ask, is that how you really think of it when you're playing? When I'm playing, I think a hit is a hit and a miss is a miss, and if you hit, you damage, and if you miss, you fail to damage. I see hit points as flesh and blood - even if we're just talking scratches.

My point is that whether hit points as an abstraction of luck, endurance, and skill does not matter; what matters is how people really think and play the game.

Yes, that is totally how I think about hit points. I find it ridiculous that every hit point has to some how equate to a bit of flesh and blood. In medieval times, injuries often resulted in infection - if every successful hit equated to an actual physical injury, I'd find it totally unbelievable that the characters would survive beyond the first few levels.

 

[Dannager]

P.S. (added) @Dannager - I've recieved notification that you've quoted me a few times in later posts. However, I am unable to read those posts as you're on my ignore list. I only responded to the above because I saw it quoted in someone else's post, and I felt it was important to address. I'm mentioning this because I don't want my lack of response to your quoting me to be seen as rudeness or tacit approval.

Oh man, and here I was thinking you were either being horribly rude by ignoring someone on the internet, or were just silently agreeing with everything I said! Good thing I know better now!

 

[Herremann the Wise]

So call it a "sort-of hit" or a "almost missed" or a "minor time-space occupation discrepancy". I don't care. But you're at the point where you're trying to argue that something that is nothing more than a personal semantic hang-up should influence the design direction of a game directed at millions.

In terms of design, surely it is best that your language makes sense to anyone reading it rather than directed to those who have developed this D&D semantic filter from 30plus years of play.
Clear language.
Clarity.
It really is not asking for that much surely?

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[Dannager]

In terms of design, surely it is best that your language makes sense to anyone reading it rather than directed to those who have developed this D&D semantic filter from 30plus years of play.
Clear language.
Clarity.
It really is not asking for that much surely?

From my experience with new players, they are almost never the ones who get hung up on semantics. It's the guys who have been playing for 30+ years (who really ought to have that semantic filter in place) who get hung up on things because they're convinced that they should work a certain way because that's how they've always worked (a mentality that only becomes more and more ingrained and closely-held over the course of 30+ years of insular, comfortable play).

 

[jadrax]

When?

/em rolls a d4, gets a 2

Second edition, yeah 2nd edition totally did that.

 

[pemerton]

I honestly don't know how difficult it is to properly design something like this. Surely it is achievable though?

Well I gave a suggestion upthread about how it might be done by tweaking the dying rules: there could be an optional rule that any killing strike requires a successful attack roll to be made - so Reaper couldn't kill, Magic Missile would require an attack roll to be made in this one special case, etc. A variant on this would be to allow a saving throw against any auto-damage that would kill.

Probably this rule wouldn't be satisfactory either, though, because it would get in the way of magic missile and fireball auto-kills, whereas autokills are exactly what many people want out of those spells (especially fireball).

Which then, once again, raises the question "does magic always get to be better because it's magic?" I mean, just as you express incredulity at the Reaper guy never missing, I could express incredulity that of all the hundreds of koblod warriors that have been fireballed over the years, almost none have survived (in classic D&D kobold max hp 4, a fireball of 7 or greater damage will autokill (I'm assuming a round up of 3.5 to 4), odds of 6 hp on a 6D fireball are 1 in 46656, and odds of a kobold saving are, I think, 1 in 5 (17+ on d20 required), meaning that fewer than 5 in a million kobolds have ever survived a fireball from a wand of fireballs).

If magic is allowed to have autokills for free, however unrealistic, and martial/mundane is not, that will cause its own issues!

Hence my view that perhaps an inclusive design, with the appropriate options, is possible - but it strikes me as pretty tricky, because so many apparently conflicting preferences are in play (of which "gritty martial but gonzo magic" is only the most obvious).

 

[pemerton]

Oh man, and here I was thinking you were either being horribly rude by ignoring someone on the internet, or were just silently agreeing with everything I said! Good thing I know better now!

I would like to be able to XP this delicate and understated reply!

 

[CleverNickName]

/em rolls a d4, gets a 2

Second edition, yeah 2nd edition totally did that.

Hmm, I didn't know that. I never played 2nd Edition. I stayed with BECM until 2000, and then switched to 3rd Edition. I switched again to 3.5E, and still play it. I tried Pathfinder but didn't care for the power creep, and I tried 4E but I didn't care for the style.

 

[Uller]

It seems fine...I didn't enjoy the power, however. It just seemed kind of boring, especially when fighting weak monsters and you didn't even have to roll...That's fine for magic missile...but I'd rather see the reaper get some sort of 1X per encounter surge in damage, away to gain advantage on the next attack or some such