D&D 5E Now that "damage on a miss" is most likely out of the picture, are you happy?

[Balesir]

I think the big difference is that the spell doesn't attack first. It automatically hits and then you have a save to avoid certain destruction.

Funnily enough, put like this, this arrangement would arguably be a considerably better representation of hand-to-hand weapon combat than the standard D&D system.

Heigh ho.

 

[Grydan]

The save to take half damage from a fireball strikes me as a rather silly way to model the effects of an explosion of any sort.

Instead of automatically hitting wherever you targeted, and the damage (relative to max) being determined by whether you somehow reflexively avoided half of the damage, a far more sensible approach would have the spellcaster perform some form of check to determine how accurately they placed the fireball, with damage (relative to max) determined by distance from the epicenter, combined with degree of cover (perhaps with reflex saves to allow movement away from the epicenter or towards cover).

As is, it produces nonsensical results like characters at the very limit of the effect potentially taking twice as much damage as those right at ground zero.

 

[XunValdorl_of_Kilsek]

Whether 4e did action points right is debateable. I like them, though I'm not particularly attached to them.

I don't see anything odd about critting with a fireball though. Maybe some wind blew most of the blast their way, or they didn't dodge as well as they think they did, or their metal armor had some flaw that made it super-temperature conducting, or (insert other reasoning here).

I would rather keep the notion that I will at least do some damage with a fireball than the possibility of missing but gaining a potential for a crit.

There were some spells in 3.5 that did effect you differently had you been wearing metal armour.

 

[Warbringer]

To me, doam highlighted 3 basic issues that we have as players accepted more or less for the lastb40 years and other game systems have differentiated themselves on.

1. What is a hit
2. What is AC
3. What is damage

In D&D, all are abstract and revolve around the simple concept of over coming a defensive number to create attrition on a value hat represents how far dead is away.

When any part of the game challenges that concept, riots and ruination ensue: doam, auto hit, spells circumventing damage (sleep, disintegration, petrifaction)

As a rule, I'd like to see touch AC return, with that threshold permitting a series of alternate mechanics, such a doam, delivering poison, armor as hit points or other effects (such doam from the spikes armor) ...

IMO ...of course

 

[Mistwell]

The origin of hit points is that it was a point system that represented how many hits you can take. So if you had 4 hit points, you could take four hits until you died (so you were tracking hits you took, not damage you took).

Then the concept was expanded more to hit dice, a hero was thought to represent roughly 40 ordinary men, and the hit dice text read like this, "Dice for Accumulative Hits (Hit Dice): This indicates the number of dice which are rolled in order to determine how many hit points a character can take...being the number of points of damage the character could sustain before death. Whether sustaining accumulative hits will otherwise affect a character is left to the discretion of the referee."

Then the game added a range of damage per hit. And then later the game added variable damage depending on which weapon it was. And then bonus damage from things like strength.

With each addition the game was further stretched away from counting hits, and more towards the concept of damage. But the basic system it was built on, hit points, was never originally intended to track "damage", just "hits".

Thus, we have vagueness concerning what hit points really are, since "damage" was never really the thing it was supposed to be tracking.

 

[EnglishLanguage]

I would rather keep the notion that I will at least do some damage with a fireball than the possibility of missing but gaining a potential for a crit.

There were some spells in 3.5 that did effect you differently had you been wearing metal armour.

4e Fireball still did miss damage though, in addition to he crit potential.

 

[Uchawi]

The save to take half damage from a fireball strikes me as a rather silly way to model the effects of an explosion of any sort.

Instead of automatically hitting wherever you targeted, and the damage (relative to max) being determined by whether you somehow reflexively avoided half of the damage, a far more sensible approach would have the spellcaster perform some form of check to determine how accurately they placed the fireball, with damage (relative to max) determined by distance from the epicenter, combined with degree of cover (perhaps with reflex saves to allow movement away from the epicenter or towards cover).

As is, it produces nonsensical results like characters at the very limit of the effect potentially taking twice as much damage as those right at ground zero.

Good point. You get into similar nonsense with abilities like evade, especially if the subject is blind when attempting to use it. There is a level of abstraction that is needed to accept any exception based ability/mechanic without breaking it down into little pieces.

 

[XunValdorl_of_Kilsek]

Good point. You get into similar nonsense with abilities like evade, especially if the subject is blind when attempting to use it. There is a level of abstraction that is needed to accept any exception based ability/mechanic without breaking it down into little pieces.

Let me remind you that 3rd editions evasion did not work if you had no where to go.

Also, being blind isn't so much an issue because your other senses would be heightened, along with your reflexes. You could hear the caster most likely chanting as well.

 

[Minigiant]

The fact of the matter, every edition had a mechanic or dozen that could possibly make no sense.

That is the flaw of having to reduce mechanics to one simple enough to not require computers to establish a certain feel of game.

Somethings we have to choose to accept or ignore, not this problem will never end in paper based games.

 

[herrozerro]

Ley me remind you that 3rd editions evasion did not work if you had no where to go.

Also, being blind isn't so much an issue because your other senses would be heightened, along with your reflexes. You could hear the caster most likely chanting as well.

Could you point out where it says that?

From the srd
At 2nd level and higher, a rogue can avoid even magical and unusual attacks with great agility. If she makes a successful Reflex saving throw against an attack that normally deals half damage on a successful save, she instead takes no damage. Evasion can be used only if the rogue is wearing light armor or no armor. A helpless rogue does not gain the benefit of evasion