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

[Ahnehnois]

I thought the ability only worked with 2-Handed weapons?

A halfling can't hold a butter knife in two hands? Substitute a similarly absurd example if you like. The point is, ridiculous things can happen with this rule.

And I'm totally cool with a 1 being a complete failure, even if you have an attack roll fail ability.

Okay. WotC isn't (that we've seen).

And let's not forget the more salient point, that regardless of the ability or not, the dragon is going to WTFPWN the halfling. The fact that it lost a few hit points is immaterial to the greater fiction.

True, that's an extreme reductio ad absurdem example to illustrate why DoaM makes no sense. However, this thread has plenty of common examples, the most basic being an NPC who has been reduced to a couple of hp and gets killed by a blow that missed him, possibly one that missed by quite a bit.

 

[dmgorgon]

Yup, this nails it.

Or, as I said waaaaay back in the start of the thread: Verisimilitude--or immersion, which is really the issue here--isn't about carefully explaining the relation of the mechanics to the fiction. It's about whether, in the heat of the game, people are questioning the narrative. Whether you've got a convincing answer is irrelevant. As soon as the question is asked, immersion breaks.

You can get away with all sorts of kludges behind the scenes (hit points being Exhibit A), as long as you present a smooth facade that doesn't jolt people out of the fictional world. One thing that's sure to wreck that facade is when the Player's Handbook gets in a fight with the dictionary. A miss should be a miss, and a hit should be a hit.

When I played 4e I considered hiring a narrative interpreter. My players were constantly rolling their eyes and we needed someone to help us to constantly correct our imagination.

 

[TwoSix]

I doubt that it is possible in any sort of general case. Besides, D&D has always traditionally done exactly that - it's called a Monster Manual. Creating unique opponents is assumed to be an advanced application of the rules. By default, you are supposed to be flipping open the Monster Manual or using some stock stat block from a 'Rogues Gallery' of stock NPCs.

Well, yes. And that's why I prefer my Monster Manuals to have stats I need, not stats that players need.

The reason why you can't ever have a perfect answer to whether a monster is challenging is how much of what makes a monster challenging isn't obvious. It's the synergies that the monster has within its own abilities, with its allies, and with its environment that really make it threatening. Having Achilles heels can vastly undermine assessments of CR. That's why CR and EL are such imperfect numbers and get it wrong so often. No system is going to be able to account for the fact that if you give a troll access to a spellcasting class that can cast spells that grant it immunity from fire, it's going to be much more dangerous than simple application of 2+2 suggests. No system can correctly account for the fact that if a monsters best attack is a grapple, advancing its size class has a much bigger impact than if it's best attack is a magical ray. Sometimes, because of synergy, 2+2=5. Some powers make the creature vastly more dangerous than others. At best, you might have a simplified set of stat blocks for monsters with nothing other than simple attacks, but these would tend not to work at higher levels when being threatening usually means also having access to a variety of means of manipulating the action economy and resisting debuffs (and that has been true since 1e as well).

Again, that speaks to the necessity of having a well-written, playtested Monster Manual. Ideally, they would have guidelines telling me how they gauged the challenge level of the monster, as well as what tweaking the monsters will do to affect their overall challenge level. That's what I mean by providing me simplified rules in the first place!

When 4e came out, it was supposed to fix that, but in practice, not really. Monsters of the same level are still vastly different in threat level. The math didn't get fixed, monsters still needed tweaks (especially at high levels) and monsters still have emergent properties in combination or when altered. No amount of simplified guidelines substitutes for good design and never will.

I'll just observe that I experienced a much smaller delta of monster effectiveness in 4e than I have in 3.X/PF and leave it at that.

I've been DMing since 1e, so my stat blocks in my prep look a lot like the old 1e 1-2 line simplified stat blocks, only they are 3-4 lines instead. I cut and paste them out of a word document I have, and tweak them slightly and we are good to go.

I'm fine with smaller stat blocks. But if part of the stat block is "casts like a 12th level wizard", than I'm not OK with that. I don't want to use the PHB to run a monster out of the MM (other than the combat section).

 

[TwoSix]

True, that's an extreme reductio ad absurdem example to illustrate why DoaM makes no sense. However, this thread has plenty of common examples, the most basic being an NPC who has been reduced to a couple of hp and gets killed by a blow that missed him, possibly one that missed by quite a bit.

Except if it killed him, it didn't "Miss", by definition.

And around and around we go....

 

[TwoSix]

When I played 4e I considered hiring a narrative interpreter. My players were constantly rolling their eyes and we needed someone to help us to constantly correct our imagination.

Lots of people have trouble adjusting their narrative stance. It's nothing to be ashamed about. Those of us that can merely get a wider assortment of games to enjoy.

 

[Wicht]

Except if it killed him, it didn't "Miss", by definition.

And around and around we go....

You can't have it both ways. You tell me that the fighter doing damage is missing plenty but now that the person goes down, its no longer a miss. Which means that you are arguing for a mechanic in which the dice lose all relationship to the narration.

Sure, the dice have a tenuous connection to the narration under the older system, but the connection is there. Now you just make it up after the fact. I didn't like that idea when put forward under 4e and it doesn't improve with age.

 

[dmgorgon]

Lots of people have trouble adjusting their narrative stance. It's nothing to be ashamed about. Those of us that can merely get a wider assortment of games to enjoy.

For my group, the rules should support the narrative in a consistent and intuitive way.

For others, a narrative is used to explain the results of the rules.

 

[TwoSix]

You can't have it both ways. You tell me that the fighter doing damage is missing plenty but now that the person goes down, its no longer a miss. Which means that you are arguing for a mechanic in which the dice lose all relationship to the narration.

Sure, the dice have a tenuous connection to the narration under the older system, but the connection is there. Now you just make it up after the fact. I didn't like that idea when put forward under 4e and it doesn't improve with age.

Of course I can have it both ways. To my mind, it's the best way to run a game with a hit point model. The only roll that needs a narration is the one that drops the target below 0.

 

[Celebrim]

Well, yes. And that's why I prefer my Monster Manuals to have stats I need, not stats that players need.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but if you mean 'no overlap between the rules for monsters and players' then I can't agree. Having monsters leverage PC rules is far and a way the most efficient way to create monsters. Otherwise, if you want to have, "Monster can alter the weather", you need a block for that unique to the monster instead of common to all 'weather changing' monsters. You don't have to leverage common rules when creating a monster, but its very handy to be able to do so (especially when it comes to having a lot of content relative to page count).

It should come as little surprise that I loathed the massive space filling info dump of 4e stat blocks. My eyes just slide right off of it. It was the first edition of the monster manual that bored me. Worse, it looked like the entire stat block MATTERED. I've tried my hand at both 4e and 3e stat block creation, and 4e seems just as hard to get right as any prior edition, and no easier to tweak. Smithing out custom monsters as a test of the system when it first came out (I started converting Keep on the Borderlands), I found it as tedious as anything prior and I felt much more strongly compelled to adhere to the MM than I had for prior editions.

Again, that speaks to the necessity of having a well-written, playtested Monster Manual. Ideally, they would have guidelines telling me how they gauged the challenge level of the monster, as well as what tweaking the monsters will do to affect their overall challenge level. That's what I mean by providing me simplified rules in the first place!

On this I very much agree. Every edition of the game could have used better discussion of this, better editing, and better refinement. For example, every criticism we've here leveled applies to 1e in spades. And for 3e, the guidelines don't really work to begin with and I've massively departed from the guidelines in some critical ways that just aren't really covered, and so had to make up my own guidelines.

I'll just observe that I experienced a much smaller delta of monster effectiveness in 4e than I have in 3.X/PF and leave it at that.

I'm not hugely conversant with 4e, but when I was evaluating it when it first came out this wasn't my impression. Some monsters of a given level were pushovers. Others looked like they threatened TPK's if used injudiciously.

I'm fine with smaller stat blocks. But if part of the stat block is "casts like a 12th level wizard", than I'm not OK with that. I don't want to use the PHB to run a monster out of the MM (other than the combat section).

I'm fine with part of the stat block being, "Casts spells like a 12th level wizard", provided there is a nice little edition that says something like, "Typically known and selected spells: Detect Magic, Magic Missile..." That way I can run it from a stat block if I have to, and can customize if I want to.

 

[Bluenose]

The random nature of Dungeons and Dragons combat has always created a rather loose connection between the choices of the Player and the actual actions of the Character. If you read Gygax's thinking about it, it was meant to model an extended back and forth with the assumption the PC would know better than the Player what would be the right choice given the abilities and position of the other. Called Shots break this assumption and so does not work well with the mechanics as originally structured. The randomizer of a deck, however, maintains the assumption but also introduces the actual effects into the game in a simple and elegant way.

Magic also breaks the assumption about the random nature of D&D combat. Does it not work well with the mechanics as originally structured?

And random is one of the ways I would describe grenade-like effects, and absolutely not one of the ways I'd describe strikes with hand weapons.

I don't see how that's the case. If you roll a 1, or get a low enough result to miss the target's touch AC (regardless of whether this term appears in 5e or not), than you miss. If you roll high enough to contact the target but still miss, the blow is absorbed or deflected in some way. The mechanics are feeding you the results, as far as I can tell.

And if the roll is high enough to be a hit. Is this the result you envision? It's a trope for a reason.