D&D 5E I just don't buy the reasoning behind "damage on a miss".

[urLordy]

To me, that sounds like damage on a miss. I'm not sure in which way it is different in the game world. At the table, yeah, but in the game world I don't see much difference.

In every game I've ever played between 3 editions and completely different people, nobody would see that as hit on a miss. They would see it as a hit that didn't hit as much as they'd hope for. In a street fight, a guy could intend to KO his opponent. So if he just smashes the guy in the face but didn't KO him, that's a damage on a miss?

 

[bogmad]

Weird. Nobody in this thread is demanding you use this feature. Indeed, my entire goal in this and the two other threads is to find a way to add in an additional offensive feature for big weapon fighters that satisfies the people objecting, without removing the damage on a miss option. That appears to be the goal of others who support this feature as well in this thread - find a way to satisfy the people objecting, without removing this feature as an option for those who like it. The only group I see that wants to force people to play a certain way, are the ones saying they want this out of the game even as a potential option.

This idea that it "ticks so many people off" because "a vocal group demands it" doesn't seem to meet with the evidence at hand. It's the opposite. WOTC says they got GOOD feedback on this ability, that people LIKE this ability in their feedback. That tells me it's a vocal (but smaller) group of people who do NOT like the ability, not the other way around.



And if there are many options for the big weapon fighter, and of which you can choose from, with multiple offensive options in addition to multiple defensive ones, and only one of them is this option?



LOL it's contentious because the vocal group is making it contentious, even though that vocal group seems to be in the minority! So let me get this straight - if 10 loud people dislike something, the default should be to remove it from the game? What's the threshold here for a vocal minority demanding something that the majority likes be removed from the game?

I won't argue it's negates WoTC's feedback, but right now the poll here has most people disagreeing with damage on a miss, so it's not an open and shut situation of just a few whiners.

You're not the only one trying for a compromise. Mine just didn't involve a damage on every miss because that has huge implications for playstyle and guiding design principles.

If I'm DMing a game then the demand is that I do allow and use this feature unless I houserule that my players can't use it. So far it hasn't been mentioned as part of a 4e style tactical module or anything optional. It's frustrating because to me because when I explain my situation (I.e. Post #160, and others):

Except I can't narrate as I please. YOU can narrate however you want if a miss doesn't have any numerical impact -and I can pretend that a miss on a 1 is worse than on a 12 with no repurcussions.

But with auto damage I always have to either narrate an impact of some sort or - if not the reason given by the developers (i.e. brunt force through armor)- I have to try and rationalize an even more improbable reason that I've sapped his stamina or whatever it is that lowers his hp the equivalent of my strength mod.

Does that at all help demonstrate why your argument is less conducive to the "let anyone play the game as they want" that most of us will agree is a good goal for this new edition?

-I get ignored and then I have a guy (available default mechanics if miss-damage is implemented as described) basically grabbing my arms to make me hit myself and then everyone else exclaiming "why are you hitting yourself?!" -to use a sloppy analogy for my frustration, but not one meant to accuse you of anything so please don't blame me for that.

 

[TwoSix]

I copied and pasted LostSou's example, but in my games, nobody pre-narrated or viewed it as fortune in the middle. IOW, if a player said "I cut his head off!" then he meant "I try to cut his head off" or "I swing my axe at his neck trying to sever his head from his torso" but "I cut his head off!" would just be short-hand. Remember that we tend to play in-character (from 1e to 2e to 3.xe) so players would generally narrate that way.I didn't assume that. Who is everyone?

If the player says, "I cut his head off", that's pre-narrating. You don't know that you did or not until you roll the dice and compare it to the orc's hitpoints. So, yes, there's an assumption of intent there, which is what I said. You're assuming the player (not the character) means he's trying to cut the orc's head off. That's what I mean with familiarity with the system. There are other styles of games where if the player says it, that's what happens unless there's a declaration of opposition.

 

[TwoSix]

I do. Can you tell me at least what section of the DMG has this sort of stuff in it?

I'll find it when I get home. I believe it to be in DMG2, but I'm not positive.

 

[urLordy]

If the player says, "I cut his head off", that's pre-narrating. You don't know that you did or not until you roll the dice and compare it to the orc's hitpoints. So, yes, there's an assumption of intent there, which is what I said. You're assuming the player (not the character) means he's trying to cut the orc's head off. That's what I mean with familiarity with the system. There are other styles of games where if the player says it, that's what happens unless there's a declaration of opposition.

I was very specifically talking about my games. What does your generalization have to do with LostSoul's example and my response to it?

 

[Cyberen]

This is a really strange anectode to me. I have never heard of anything like this in D&D. In this example, does the Player have any agency to declare what WILL happen, and the DM always complied regardless of the result? Or is it just the Player declaring that the character is attempting to do so-and-so?

My D&D experience goes like so:
Player: "I cut his head off!"
(rolls to-hit: hits; rolls damage: 5 damage)
DM: "The orc shifts away, and although you fail to cut his head off, your axe does nick his shoulder. He takes 5 damage."

(If, however, the damage brought the orc to zero hp, then heads go rolling.)

I guess you're right, but for a looooong time we haven't been using those kind of statement. We're more :
Player : I go after the Orc.... 5 damage

DM : still alive and kicking
OR
DM : he's done
Player : yeah, I cut his head off !

I guess that puts me in the Gamist side. The narrative is kept very simple, unless the story demands it (the orc was "named"). I don't care anymore for the simulation, since I acknowledged D&D was terrible at it. Consistency is very important, though, in order to have everybody at the same page around the table, and to enable quick and reliable rulings.
I really think moving to a success ladder assuming basic competence, rather than basic suckage, would go a long way towards unifying old schoolers, 3ers and 4ers : the system would act more as a bridge between DM fiat and Player fiat.

 

[Imaro]

I don't think it was, but TwoSix claims it was. I think it was first mentioned explicitly in the PHB2, which is not "first THREE core", but then it's definitely "core" according to most who played 4e. Indeed, a lot of concepts people think of as core as in the PHB 2 and not the PHB 1.

And again, 3e ran into this same problem of a "core" type rule being in a "non-core" type book. Why are folks not willing to cut 4e slack on an important later retroactive rule like that when 3e committed a similar "sin" with another important rule?

Dude it wasn't about "cutting slack" I was wondering why so many people assume that objects couldn't be hit by spells, powers, etc. unless it was listed as a target... and if it's not in the first 3 core books for 4e then it makes alot of sense doesn't it... Now show me where I argued for whatever the rule you're talking about in 3e being core and not popping up in a supplement?

 

[urLordy]

I guess that puts me in the Gamist side. The narrative is kept very simple, unless the story demands it (the orc was "named").

Oh we do that all the time too.

Really, this is just an anectode in response to LostSoul's post. It doesn't mean anything more than that.

 

[LostSoul]

In every game I've ever played between 3 editions and completely different people, nobody would see that as hit on a miss. They would see it as a hit that didn't hit as much as they'd hope for. In a street fight, a guy could intend to KO his opponent. So if he just smashes the guy in the face but didn't KO him, that's a damage on a miss?

That's how I'd look at it as well (because the to-hit roll missed). I'm specifically looking at narration of the events in the game world: How is what we've described in the game world not appropriate for damage on a miss?

My point is that you don't know - and can't say - what happened in the game world until you get the damage result. (Like your mention of how the orc in my example would have been decapitated if the damage exceeded his HP.) The PC misses, but still deals damage, so you can simply narrate that as any other attack that deals damage.

 

[Celebrim]

To me, that sounds like damage on a miss. I'm not sure in which way it is different in the game world. At the table, yeah, but in the game world I don't see much difference.

This is actually the very heart of the problem. It's not 'damage on a miss'; it's damage on a hit. How do we know whether it was a hit or miss? Because by definition, a hit is defined as "Solid enough of a blow to do damage." That's the D&D definition of a hit. If you are seeing damage, you are never seeing a miss. There is not need to invent a category for 'lesser hit' and then say, 'oh that was always a miss, now I'm going to call it damage on a miss' as if there was some narration of damage that wasn't considered in the system until 'damage on a miss' came along.

Where people get confused is they understand that hit abstractly include some sort of measurement of luck, skill, destiny, and so forth as well as the capacity to sustain physical punishment. While that is true, it is also true that under D&D's model, all hits have always caused physical damage. Gygax defined hits as doing damage; even Mearls has asserted this traditional definition. The way to really see what hit points are is it think about a relatively unskilled fighter with 5 hit points, and a quite skilled one with 30 hit points. For the low skill combatant, all 5 of his hit points represent the ability to absorb physical damage. So if someone swings a sword at him and does 5 damage, the low skill combatant has little ability to evade this attack, he takes the full blow and possibly dies. For the high skill combatant, he may still have roughly 5 hit points of ability to absorb physical damage, but he now has 25 entirely abstract hit points representing his ability to turn aside blows, block blows with his shield, or dodge aside at the last moment so that he only catches part of the blow. When the high skill combatant is attacked by a sword and takes 5 damage, he loses physical health and abstract ability proportionally, so that he loses perhaps just 1 hit point of physical health and 4 hit points of abstract metaphysical health. The fighter took a 5 point hit, but he received the damage that the lower level combatant would have received on a 1 point hit. The rest was evaded. There is never a case however where he is hit by a blow that damages only his metaphysical health. All hits do at least some physical damage. That's the way it has always worked.

So, now that we understand how a hit has been defined, what is damage on a miss?

The answer is nothing. It's a contradiction in terms. It's an oxymoron. A miss is defined not by the fact that it whiffed, but by the fact it did no damage

People trying to justify 'damage on a miss' do so through several impossibilities before breakfast. The first is requiring us to try to concretely visualize what the abstract portion of a character's hit points are. So you'll here suggestions like, "The blow misses (maybe even whiffs), but it tires the opponent out.' But while vigor and fatigue might sound like reasonably good components of the abstract metaphysical health of character, in point of fact D&D has never modeled fatigue through the hit point mechanic. First editions fatigue rules weren't entirely coherent, but the most prominent example I can think of models fatigue as temporary level drain. Third edition coherently defines it as a condition. Neither generally applies to any kind of ordinary exertion, and really, if it is fatiguing hits we are trying to model, why not have them apply a debuff instead of doing damage? If you try to model hit points as fatigue, you end up with absurdities - why don't you lose hit points for attacking an opponent, running, climbing stairs, dancing, etc. Shouldn't any aerobic exercise do at least as much hit point damage as spending six seconds dodging and parrying if all we are modeling is fatigue?

The second problem is that they ask AC to be abstract, when in fact AC is not entirely abstract but can often be broken down into components even in 1e. We don't usually worry in D&D about why an attacked missed, and we leave that to free narration. But there are times when the only narration that makes sense in the system is one or the other, because the AC of the target is clearly entirely one thing or the other and not some mixture. In the 3e stat block, the break down of what makes up AC is done formally, and it even tries to define special conditions - 'touch' and 'flat-footed' - when it narratively makes sense that one component of AC is missing. In D&D it is possible, to know if an attack whiffed, was dodged, or block, or glanced off armor by working backward from the more abstract AC to its less abstract components. But what about a case were every attack that wasn't a hit, we know to be an attack that whiffed. In that case we lose the ability to narrate this consistent with the rest of the fiction created by the game mechanics.

One of the reason that we have to each hit connect with flesh is that hits in game trigger process consequences - energy drain, poison, bonus fire damage, paralyzation, etc. If it is 'damage on a miss', and we don't know whether this means a whiff or contact, we don't know whether or not to trigger the consequences. If we treat this as fortune in the middle and hold off narration further, the logic of the save system breaks down. If you were 'damaged on a miss', but we resolve this a Stormbringer whiffing because your soul wasn't sucked out, why did you need to make a Fortitude based body save instead of a Relfex based evasion save? Surely if it whiffed (but still did damage!) and that's the reason your draining attack failed, a Reflex save is the appropriate color of what happened and not Fortitude. And so forth.

In short, within in the existing framework of D&D, accepting 'damage on a miss' involves accepting that the mechanics are meaningless within the fiction. If you always believed the mechanics were meaningless within the fiction, that's probably an easy thing to do. But its quite clear that the writers that created the mechanics didn't feel they were meaningless within the fiction, and that many people use them as process simulation/physics to inform the narration and always have.

And frankly, if you think that is 'Pervy', get the heck of my game system and go play some Forge approved rules set. And no, 'X system plays better as process/simulation' isn't a retort. I like D&D they way it always played. I don't want it more or less abstract. It's a sweet spot for me. If it isn't a sweet spot for you sorry, but this is mine.