D&D 5E Damage on a Miss: Because otherwise Armour Class makes no sense

[ExploderWizard]

Or, you embrace the fact that there's some exceptions out there. A miss is usually, but not always or strictly, a miss

Why stop there? Perhaps every die roll that isn't up to snuff just becomes a negotiation mini-game to try and squeeze something out of nothing. Or heck, just make dice optional. If its a narrative you want then one hardly needs them. Tell desired story-profit!

 

[JamesonCourage]

Why stop there? Perhaps every die roll that isn't up to snuff just becomes a negotiation mini-game to try and squeeze something out of nothing. Or heck, just make dice optional. If its a narrative you want then one hardly needs them. Tell desired story-profit!

Yeah! Why do anything without taking to an extreme? I can't believe you cracked this!

 

[Jester David]

As everyone knows, AC refers to Armour Class and makes you harder to hit. This does not mean that wearing plate armour makes you leap around like a ninja (it doesn't slow you the way urban myths claim - but it certainly doesn't speed you up). Plate armour is utterly mundane and doesn't have a magical forcefield - but still adds 8 to your AC, making you much much harder to hit.

So what does this mean?
A significant proportion of blows that "miss" must be hitting your armour - otherwise armour class makes no sense at all because it does mean that plate armour turns you into a rapidly moving ninja.

Armour will absorb the force of most blows. Damage on a miss with brass knuckles would be ... bizarre. But when a giant swings a greatclub at you, armour will not help you get out of the way. It also isn't some magical inertia-neutralising thing - that greatclub still has momentum, and the only thing preventing it breaking your ribs is your armour so you must take blows on your armour. And with that much momentum you're going to end up with a full-torso bruise at the very least. Of course if you hadn't been wearing armour you'd be much worse off. You'd have taken the full force of the blow to your unprotected body. Ouch.

That's damage on a miss. And without it, large high impact weapons that will rattle the enemy by sheer force and momentum and AD&D's armour paradigm make no sense at all. (DR doesn't work any better because of the vast difference in what it stops between bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing).

That's very true, so long as:
a) hitpoints are meat
b) Your high AC is from armour
C) The blow would have connected

If hitpoints are a result of skill or energy or luck then the target of the attack doesn't take the blow full on but dodges out of the way or parries. Only the final hit, the one that knocks the target below 0 hp, actually connects.
A hit is them dodging out of the way, but doing so in a way that tires them out or leaves them a little wearier and more easily struck. A miss is a blow that they don't have to dodge or can be dodged so easily it does not tire them. DoaM means... they dodge out of the way but are still tired by the exertion, which sounds like how a hit is described.

If your high AC is from Dexterity or a spell like mage armour then a miss does not hit you or is deflected by magical force field that doesn't take impacts like metal plate.

The blow misses because or your armour and not because the target was blind or you had cover.


Given PCs wear armour but most monsters don't, the vast majority of the time, DoaM will NOT be applied to creatures in plate.

 

[pemerton]

If hitpoints are a result of skill or energy or luck then the target of the attack doesn't take the blow full on but dodges out of the way or parries. Only the final hit, the one that knocks the target below 0 hp, actually connects.
A hit is them dodging out of the way, but doing so in a way that tires them out or leaves them a little wearier and more easily struck. A miss is a blow that they don't have to dodge or can be dodged so easily it does not tire them. DoaM means... they dodge out of the way but are still tired by the exertion, which sounds like how a hit is described.

Correct. If a character has DoaM, that means that even some of their results which, by the default mechanics, would count as "misses", nevertheless have (a modest version of) the same consequences in the fiction as wold those results which, by the default mechanics, would count as "hits".

In effect, for a DoaM character the attack roll isn't to determine whether or not they hit, but to determine which damage expression they use: W+STR, or STR on its own.

 

[Reyemile]

Not quite. AC does indeed refer to Armour Class, but it doesn't make you easier to hit, it makes you easier to hurt.

And as soon as that distinction is made, Damage on a Miss makes no sense whatsoever - an attack failed to hurt you, but it does damage anyway?

If Armor Class makes you harder to hurt, not to hit, then why do we refer to a low roll as a miss ​in the first place?

 

[delericho]

If Armor Class makes you harder to hurt, not to hit, then why do we refer to a low roll as a miss ​in the first place?

Lack of a better word, I suppose.

 

[Emerikol]

I'm battle weary over this as much as anyone. I think the mechanic fails to evoke the feel of a great weapon. I believe other approaches that no one objected to and which everyone embraced could have been presented. This is a failure of design. It's a failure because the devs are not aware of the viewpoint of a large segment of their playerbase. No one who likes DoaM would have missed it if another equally evocative but inoffensive option had been offered.

I'm not quiting the game over DoaM as it is now. If though the thinking that underlies damage on a miss pervades the game then it will be a deal breaker for me. I'll ban the mechanic otherwise. The key is are the devs going to go down this path? Is it the slippery slope? We have 4e to scare us when it comes to these types of mechanics. Obviously WOTC is capable of such design.

 

[Emerikol]

You claim that is "the problem". We can just as easily turn it around and say that "the problem" is folks being a tad too strict in insisting that game mechanics language must hitch directly to narrative language always and without exception, and willing to make a huge stink and fuss over it.

It is true that some people like process simulation. I don't know how we change that. I like it. I want my narrative to coincide with the mechanics. I do not like end results, narrate how you want design. So what do we do? I think we avoid offensive things as much as possible so long as a good alternative exists to evoke the right feel. Where that is impossible, I'd say we modularize. I do think though we shouldn't have to modularize that much.

If the biggest problem the game with dragons, elves, and fireballs has is an occasionally inconsistent definition of what a "hit" is, then I think we're doing pretty darned well.

This is one of the most fallacious arguments ever. Any author of fantasy or science fiction novels will tell you that they are often held to a tighter standard of realism than mystery writers.

I'll give you my classic example of why this is bad. Let's assume the super man universe. Superman is battling some enemy who knocks him off a skyscraper and he falls to the ground (force of blow or whatever). He gets back up and attacks. No problem happens all the time. If that same villian knocks a car full of ordinary people off the building and superman fails to save them and the car hits the ground, there should be no survivors. That is just as true in a superman story as in a murder she wrote story.

So a game being fantastical is not a license to ignore reality entirely.

 

[Balesir]

I'll give you my classic example of why this is bad. Let's assume the super man universe. Superman is battling some enemy who knocks him off a skyscraper and he falls to the ground (force of blow or whatever). He gets back up and attacks. No problem happens all the time. If that same villian knocks a car full of ordinary people off the building and superman fails to save them and the car hits the ground, there should be no survivors. That is just as true in a superman story as in a murder she wrote story.

So a game being fantastical is not a license to ignore reality entirely.

Sure - but that leaves the question of what constitutes "realistic". A system where the outcome of a melee exchange using medieval weapons devolves to a "hit" or a "miss" is hopelessly unrealistic. We can work around that or say that the mode of "fighting" is just part of the fantasy - which will work but will in no way contradict "damage on a miss".

P.S. I actually like the way you put it in your previous post - you just don't like it. No better reason to be against it, in my view (it's just not a reason to expect others to be against it).

 

[tomBitonti]

Apologies if this has already been covered ... there are so many threads ... but I'm seeing these problems with DOAM:

1) It scales terribly. How far you were from hitting makes no difference to the result.

Now, damage on a near-miss seems to be more sensible. But, D&D has, except in a few rare cases of optional or home rules, not gone down the route of detailing nears misses, or complete misses, or just barely hits, or strong hits. There *are* fumbles and crits in 3E, and those are set to the maximal results, so that sets a precedent to start considering the attack result vs. the target number as a measure of the result. But, we just haven't gone there, and the game seems to have long decided to not go there.

2) It requires wholly new mental gymnastics to explain. That is, we already have to bend (and bend, and bend) to explain hit points and attack rolls, and really only go so far before giving up and accepting the game mechanics as is, since they make for a decent game anyways. Why invent this new mechanic?

3) It interacts with other rules in strange ways. For example, often, an attack must deal damage for a poison effect to occur. Would poison apply on a miss?

4) It creates a new narrative niche which begs for an explanation. Does the damage represent effort expended to avoid an actual hit?

5) It breaks the abstraction model by adding a new mechanic which is defined in terms of the abstraction, not in terms of an underlying imagined world. Now, mathematicians often do this when exploring mathematical models of physics, and can arrive with new implied physical processes as a result. But, they can also arrive a non-physical situations. In the underlying game world, perhaps there is something there to be discovered which would explain damage on a miss. But, asking players to make that discovery is asking too much. The rules author really has to present a case to justify the abstraction -- that's their job, not the players.

Then, if there are these objections, and they seem to be real objections, the onus turns to the rules author to demonstrate that the new rule is a good idea. That, the new rule adds a value which is greater than the objections.

Thx!

TomB