accidentally hitting grabber instead of grabbee?

[the Jester]

Wasn't there some difference between 3e and 3.5 here, too? In any case, that does sound familiar ;-).

Yeah, the cover and concealment rules were one of the few 3.5 revisions that I felt were worse than the 3.0 rules. The 3.0 pic illustrating cover was brilliant. 3.5 basically just dumbed it down. I don't know if "hitting the cover" got revised away and we just kept it, can't remember.

 

[Saeviomagy]

The rogue power garotte grip redirects any attacks which miss you to your grabbed target (which is totally broken and abuseable btw).

I believe the 3.5e rules only applied to shooting into a grapple, not meleeing.

And remember: in 3.5e, grappling was completely unfun: invariably being grappled was effectively the same as being paralysed - you coudn't reasonably expect to win a grapple check against anything that bothered grappling, so all the options evaluated to "sit and wait for someone to kill the creature or be swallowed". I think the 4e version is much nicer in general.