D&D 4E 4e/13thA immersion question and 5e/13thA DoaM question

[EnglishLanguage]

I don't follow.

You're wondering why a character, who has a technique he practiced in the off chance his attack isn't as effective as he hopes, doesn't use said technique when his attack goes exactly like he wanted?

 

[Ahnehnois]

I don't follow.

You're wondering why a character, who has a technique he practiced in the off chance his attack isn't as effective as he hopes, doesn't use said technique when his attack goes exactly like he wanted?

Yes, that's pretty much it. What sense does it make for him to forgo the extra damage most of the time? Or is there something about hitting that makes this technique unfeasible to use when you actually hit someone?

 

[pemerton]

but only under when he misses, whatever missing means. He isn't any tougher when he's not missing.

Hitting or missing is not, regardless of GWF or the like, a choice by the character, though it is an outcome he can observe.

"Missing" is to a signifianct extent a metagame state: it is the player rolling a certain result on the d20 (the PC doesn't do that!).

DoaM means increasing your minimum effort. That is not an absurd thing to do. It's a pretty common thing to do: improving your baseline so that your peaks (which remain what they are) are less spikey.

 

[Ahnehnois]

"Missing" is to a signifianct extent a metagame state: it is the player rolling a certain result on the d20 (the PC doesn't do that!).

I don't see how it's metagame at all. The d20 itself isn't a known commodity to the character, but its probability spread certainly is. The outcome creating by comparing the d20 roll with the target number is something that is clearly observable to the character.

DoaM means increasing your minimum effort. That is not an absurd thing to do. It's a pretty common thing to do: improving your baseline so that your peaks (which remain what they are) are less spikey.

It is hard to improve your minimum effort at something without affecting your average or maximum effort.

It is also rather reductionistic to look at attacks solely in terms of effort. Sometimes people try very hard at something and fail. Sometimes people succeed with minimal effort. After all, if the character's effort is the only thing that matters, and he can feasibly raise it to a level where failure is no longer possible, why not just say that he is always trying equally hard, dispense with the attack roll altogether, and simply deal full damage every time?

 

[pemerton]

It is hard to improve your minimum effort at something without affecting your average or maximum effort.

DoaM does affect your average! And what's at stake is not maximum effort but maximum output.

 

[EnglishLanguage]

Yes, that's pretty much it. What sense does it make for him to forgo the extra damage most of the time? Or is there something about hitting that makes this technique unfeasible to use when you actually hit someone?

I'm assuming he doesn't use the technique on a solid hit because it's something he has in case he doesn't land a solid hit, and using it during a time it's not needed is just a waste of energy for minimal gain, assuming the technique isn't just "swing hard enough and accurately enough so that it'll nick/tire out the enemy even if it's not a solid blow."

 

[heretic888]

I don't see how it's metagame at all. The d20 itself isn't a known commodity to the character, but its probability spread certainly is. The outcome creating by comparing the d20 roll with the target number is something that is clearly observable to the character.

"Hitting" and "missing" are to a large extent metagame states --- or, at the very least, they don't mean the same thing to players that they do to characters.

When a character "hits" a monster, all that means in the gameworld is the series of attacks, maneuvers, and movements that character has unleashed in the past 5-10 seconds reduced his target's ability to prevent a lethal or finishing blow for the rest of the day. He may have made actual physical contact or he may not have made any physical contact.

Likewise, when a character "misses" a monster, this simply means his barrage of attacks and movements over the last 5-10 seconds failed to reduce his target's ability to defend himself from a finishing blow (or, at the very least, his barrage was less successful than the "hitting" metagame state's effects). This does not mean the character didn't necessarily make physical contact, but that any contact he did make was relatively ineffectual.

 

[Ahnehnois]

When a character "hits" a monster, all that means in the gameworld is the series of attacks, maneuvers, and movements that character has unleashed in the past 5-10 seconds reduced his target's ability to prevent a lethal or finishing blow for the rest of the day. He may have made actual physical contact or he may not have made any physical contact.

Likewise, when a character "misses" a monster, this simply means his barrage of attacks and movements over the last 5-10 seconds failed to reduce his target's ability to defend himself from a finishing blow (or, at the very least, his barrage was less successful than the "hitting" metagame state's effects). This does not mean the character didn't necessarily make physical contact, but that any contact he did make was relatively ineffectual.

I don't think that's at all what it means. I don't see why people feel the need to take simple English words like hit or miss and try to deprive them of their meaning. Yes, it's true that a hit reduces the target's ability to keep himself standing, but it's also true that it does so through, in some part, the attacker's weapon making physical contact with the target and causing bodily harm. If that wasn't the case, the weapon being used wouldn't matter for for the purposes of calculating base damage or augmentations thereof. The role of other components of hit points (of which there certainly are some) is adjunctive.

In any case, that's an issue of abstraction, not in-game vs. metagame. For example, if you wanted to say that a successful attack was the result of the attacker exhausting the target through a flurry of parries that don't actually draw blood, or that it was the result of pushing the target against something or making him trip and hit himself, those are still observable phenomena that mean something to both characters. Conversely, a miss is a definitive indicator that none of those types of things happened.

I don't think anyone is seriously proposing that, for example, a hit represents a round where the attacker fails to cause any discernible harm but in doing so somehow uses up some of the target's good luck for the day so that next time the attacker is "due" for a finishing blow. I've yet to see anyone narrate a "hit" that way.

 

[heretic888]

I don't think that's at all what it means. I don't see why people feel the need to take simple English words like hit or miss and try to deprive them of their meaning. Yes, it's true that a hit reduces the target's ability to keep himself standing, but it's also true that it does so through, in some part, the attacker's weapon making physical contact with the target and causing bodily harm. If that wasn't the case, the weapon being used wouldn't matter for for the purposes of calculating base damage or augmentations thereof. The role of other components of hit points (of which there certainly are some) is adjunctive.

In any case, that's an issue of abstraction, not in-game vs. metagame. For example, if you wanted to say that a successful attack was the result of the attacker exhausting the target through a flurry of parries that don't actually draw blood, or that it was the result of pushing the target against something or making him trip and hit himself, those are still observable phenomena that mean something to both characters. Conversely, a miss is a definitive indicator that none of those types of things happened.

I don't think anyone is seriously proposing that, for example, a hit represents a round where the attacker fails to cause any discernible harm but in doing so somehow uses up some of the target's good luck for the day so that next time the attacker is "due" for a finishing blow. I've yet to see anyone narrate a "hit" that way.

I don't really disagree with you here. My only point is that the terminology of "hit" and "miss" is for the benefit of the players, not their characters. Sometimes a "hit" doesn't involve physical contact at all and sometimes a "miss" does involve physical contact (its just ineffectual is all). Likewise, when a player declares he is making an "attack" that doesn't mean his character only swings his weapon once during a 5-10 second round (especially during pre-3E editions when a round was 30-60 seconds).

These commonsense English words --- attack, hit, miss --- refer to players' interactions with metagame operations. They DO correspond to certain narrations or effects in-character but don't have the same meaning to characters as they do for players because of the abstract nature of DnD combat.

 

[Ahnehnois]

These commonsense English words --- attack, hit, miss --- refer to players' interactions with metagame operations. They DO correspond to certain narrations or effects in-character but don't have the same meaning to characters as they do for players because of the abstract nature of DnD combat.

I think the difference is really that the mechanics are more abstract than the character's experience.

For example, if the mechanics dictate a hit (and further provide damage and hit poit values), there are many different ways that could be narrated. The character experienced only one of those however. It's common enough that we who are playing the game call it a hit and move on, while the character is keenly aware of how many thrusts he made with his weapon, how many made contact, and a variety of other contextual details.

However, hitting and missing are mutually exclusive states in the mechanical realm, and I think that follows in the world as well. If you hit, you did something that caused harm (whatever that may be), and if you missed, you unambiguously failed to do so.