D&D 5E "Damage on a miss" poll.

[Jan van Leyden]

Truth is not subjective, statements can be proven false, you know. "I swing my sword and miss, and my sword damages my target" is a false statement. Nothing you can say or do will change that. Nothing anyone here can will change that.

Hit, miss, damage, swords, none of those are game concepts. They are familiar to anyone off the street

Gary Gygax in Dungeon Masters Guide, Revised Edition - December 1979, page 82 under the heading Hit Points, discussing the reason for increasing hit pionts when advancing in levels: "Why then the increase in hit points? Because these reflect boith the actual physical ability of the character to withstand damage and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill in combat [...] the "sixth sense" which warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protections."

Damage in D&D never meant physical harm in a sense "anyone off the street" would use the term.

 

[Paraxis]

Truth is not subjective, statements can be proven false, you know. "I swing my sword and miss, and my sword damages my target" is a false statement. Nothing you can say or do will change that. Nothing anyone here can will change that.

Why can't the statement be "I swung my sword and missed, the enemy dodges using up the last bit of luck and stamina he possessed, so my attack still weakened my target."?

Why must dropping to 0 hit points = death, why can't it be out of the fight, knocked out, just beaten down to the point he can't do anything?

I don't know about you but I don't have npc's and monsters make death saves that is something for the players to worry about, as a DM I decide what happens with the narration of the story so that killing blow with a missed attack doesn't even have to be a killing blow if I don't want it to.

 

[Halivar]

I hate the words "hit" and "miss". We never should have used them. Plate armor doesn't make you harder to hit. It makes you harder to hurt. You have success in your attack, or failure. And mechanics exist to mitigate some failures.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I hate the words "hit" and "miss". We never should have used them. Plate armor doesn't make you harder to hit. It makes you harder to hurt. You have success in your attack, or failure. And mechanics exist to mitigate some failures.

They're not just words though. Every character that doesn't have a damage on a miss special ability does no damage when their attack fails to match the target's AC. That is a miss.

If you wanted to do armor as DR, and/or tie the amount of damage to the attack roll and eliminate the separate damage roll, that could make perfect sense if implemented well.

But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a game that has one basic (if flawed) approach to how combat works, and one small subset of characters that completely violates that model, for no discernible reason that I can see.

 

[Morrus]

I hate the words "hit" and "miss". We never should have used them. Plate armor doesn't make you harder to hit.

Sure it does. It gets in between you and the sword, so the sword hits the plate armour and doesn't hit you.

 

[Bluenose]

Sure it does. It gets in between you and the sword, so the sword hits the plate armour and doesn't hit you.

Ask someone in the street whether the blow I land on your motorcycle helmet was a hit and they aren't going to check whether you are injured before being able to give an answer. The Courts, btw, agree that a blow that doesn't injure is still a hit. Just not in D&D terms.

 

[Morrus]

The Courts, btw, agree that a blow that doesn't injure is still a hit. Just not in D&D terms.

I don't really understand what courts have to do with anything. In D&D, a hit has traditionally - but not exclusively, as this thread shows - been an attack that damages you. An attack deflected by your armour has always been a "miss" going back to the 1970s. Motorcyclists and courts don't really get a say in this.

 

[Halivar]

I understand what it means in D&D terms. I'm saying I don't like those terms because they give rise to arguments like this. You can't be damaged on a miss, everyone says; but a miss in D&D can mean that you were still hit (in the English definition, not the D&D definition) by an attack. It is therefore narratively appropriate that you can still take damage.

IOW, there is no cognitive dissonance in "damage on a miss" if we take the D&D definition of "miss".

 

[Minigiant]

The problem is to the words "hit" or "Miss". The issue is hit and miss requires targets. D&D has never named a target of what you hit or miss. Damage from a Miss (to the unarmored skin) could be a Hit to the (armor) or a Miss (to the armor).

 

[Manbearcat]

The "hit" and "miss" paradigm is rife with incoherency and I'm certain everyone knows this. If you throw in the implication rider of "hit <such that you roll damage + modifiers>" or "miss <such that you do not roll damage + modifiers but may deploy any effects that apply on a miss>" then the fiction makes sense.

Otherwise, if a miss is a miss is a miss is a miss then every single attack against the high AC, gigantic, notoriously lumbering, dex-deficient tarrasque renders the fiction utterly incoherent as its morphed into a swashbuckling mythical monster deftly sidestepping a blow in the same way that Errol Flynn might do. A miss on these giant, slow, heavily armored creatures means the same thing as a miss against an Air Elemental. If anything is at tension, it is that binary interpretation of the D&D hit/miss paradigm.

There are dozens of these examples. Glancing blows occur all over the place in real life. Collateral damage occurs all over the place in real life. You intend a takedown but in the fog of the melee your head smashes into their nose.

If you have to have HP as meat, then damage on a miss might be a lucern hammer "hitting" the plate mail (which absorbs much of the blow, thus denying standard damage resolution) and the pierced edge poking through enough to abrade the flesh and the force of the impact still being absorbed by the soft tissue as the plate mail doesn't cause the kinetic energy to fully dissipate (Str damage). Or any number of renderings such as the one I outlined above where the Great White Shark "missing" the bite attack on the fur seal but his size, ferocity, and velocity causing "damage on a miss" as his girth barrels into the seal at 25 MPH despite missing the bite attack. Etc, etc. I'm pretty sure the fur seal doesn't agree with the Great White Shark that it was a "miss!"