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

[Drowbane]

My main problem here is it presumes incompetence on the part of the defender when such incompetence is not a given. Our 1st level ability whether against a lowly kobold or an epic level combatant, they are still taking x hps damage from a "miss" and they are still possibly being killed by it. There are too many corner cases here where this simply will not make sense in the game. That this foolhardiness, clumsiness, accidental happenstance, and self-inflicting incompetence happens around this guy so consistently makes it unbelievable in the long run.

Fine for an advanced wahoo module for those like you who love this sort of stuff and for those who it does not bother, but please not in the core rules where it is defining such play for everyone.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

Herremann is wise.

 

[CleverNickName]

Considering it's not a theme limited to the fighter why does it need to be seen in the fighter scops only?

Sorry, I meant to say "sets the Slayer up." I'll fix it.

 

[Dannager]

My main problem here is it presumes incompetence on the part of the defender when such incompetence is not a given.

No, it doesn't. If your attacker is so skilled that he leaves you with no options except to a) be sliced in twain, or b) to slam yourself into a wall to avoid the blade, a proficient defender does the latter. Let's please not act like our narrative is in manacles. It's like some of you are being purposefully uncreative as though that will help you drive your point home.

 

[Dannager]

No. He sees a failure of the narrative of the ability.

And I think you may want to start paying closer attention to how you're saying things. Most people consider it rude to make personal statements about what you think they are failing at or not.

Apparently unacceptable when directed at someone who is actively arguing with you, but perfectly acceptable when directed at game designers with accounts on these forums.

 

[Herremann the Wise]

I like how my style of play is wahoo, but staunch adherence to some make believe standard of realism is gold.

Use the "cinematic" euphimism instead then if you prefer. My primary point is that the core rules should not have any polarising style of play whether it's your cinematic play style or my grittier play style embedded in the core rules. The core rules should be such that an advanced rule module can satisfy and support both our styles of play (neither of which are doing it wrong).

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[herrozerro]

And in your narrative the Death Knight dies due to his own incompetence. Yay for heroic PCs!

Actually I was going for the party putting so much heat on the death knight that even though the slayer was missing he was still contributing.

And tell me, have you never seen death by incompetence in any kind of media? It's not that uncommon and not that anti-climatic.

 

[pemerton]

Miss has equaled no damage since 1974.

Huh? Does 4e not count? It has a heap of damage on a miss abilities, including the fighter at-will Reaping Strike, to which the playtest's Reaper would appear to be the successor in title.

What I reject is the idea that a miss (not a "miss," not rolling low on the d20, but actually physically swiping your axe over the enemy's head) should result in a dead enemy on a regular basis. But the way Reaping Strike is described in the text, when you use it against a kobold or a rat or anything with only a couple hit points, this is exactly what happens. You miss the enemy--in the narrative sense, not the mechanical one--and it falls over dead.

Well, this is what happens when designers write flavour text for abilities that (i) is not intended to be part of their resolution, but (ii) does not correspond with the mechanics given. It is the natural endpoint of the 4e Essentials tendency to padding power and feat descriptions with pointless flavour text. In the playtest documents, it can also be seen in the Sleep spell, which makes reference to scattering sand but has no requirement to that effect - how many campaigns are going to see the question raised, can Sleep be cast by a caster with no sand? Who is underwater, or in a windstorm, and so can't scatter any sand? Etc?

My main problem here is it presumes incompetence on the part of the defender when such incompetence is not a given.

<snip>

There are too many corner cases here where this simply will not make sense in the game. That this foolhardiness, clumsiness, accidental happenstance, and self-inflicting incompetence happens around this guy so consistently makes it unbelievable in the long run.

The question is - how often do these corner cases arise? And what is the proper measure of "the long run"?

Someone upthread canvassed 6 misses in a row. On a 50% to hit chance the odds of that are 1 in 64. If a typical combat is 6 rounds, and the number of combats per level is 10 or so (as in the past 2 editions), then that will happen one in 6 levels. Not all that often.

So if we focus only on what actually happens in the game (as opposed to what might happen in a conjunction of rather unlikely eventualities) the narrative is likely to be fine.

In my view, the problem with these sorts of abilities isn't the corner cases or the long run. It's that those who don't like them aren't focussing on the actual narrative these abilities actually produce in play. Rather, they're treating the abilities as a type of process simulation, and are unhappy with what the ability apparently reveals about causal processes of the gameworld - are they absurd (eg the fighter projects an "unluck" aura) or incoherent (eg the fighter misses, but also hits - what the heck?!).

Rather than tinkering with the odd character ability, it might be better if WotC thought about how, if at all, it wants the rules to be related to process simulation, and then designed (and wrote guidelines) accordingly. Sticking in flavour text but then expecting it to be ignored during resolution is not "inclusive" or "big tent" - in my view, it's just bad design!

 

[Aenghus]

Magic missile originally needed a to hit roll (something I learned only recently, was changed to auto-hit and remained so until 4e changed it to need a hit roll. It was changed back to auto hit eventually.

Fireball and such spells can kill creatures even when they make their saves, and can kill weaker creatures regardless of whether they save or not.

The point being, we have had some classes be able to auto-kill kobolds if they want since the very early days of D&D. A wand of magic missiles pre-4e can mow down kobolds in their droves.

The slayer background allows a PC to do a small amount of damage even on a miss. I have no problems with this personally - careful description can make this believeable, providing the concept of abstract hp is accepted.

As this background is available to spellcasters and non-spellcasters alike it goes a small way to allowing non-spellcasters the sort of reliability spellcasters have traditionally had available to them in affecting their environment.

 

[CleverNickName]

It looks like about 60% of the people polled like it. So it is safe to assume that about 60% of the gamer base is somewhat less likely to purchase a product that fails to include it. For the sake of the D&D Next project, I hope WotC doesn't decide to ignore 60% of their customer base.

All the more reason to include support for all play styles, huh?

They've already seen the result of that experiment.

When?

 

[Dannager]

The point being, we have had some classes be able to auto-kill kobolds if they want since the very early days of D&D. A wand of magic missiles pre-4e can mow down kobolds in their droves.

But that's magic! Everyone knows magic gets to do cool things!