Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="N8Ball" data-source="post: 4909001" data-attributes="member: 63757">OK, here goes.  Assumptions: (at least the most contentious ones)- A Critical hit is a hit that does max damage (and extras)- The permissive or definitive language used in the rules, feats and features surrounding Critical hits is meaningful and deliberate.This is what I think precision does as written in the PHB.  I really hope I can explain this clearly because this may take a bit.  Please read each part in order because they build on each other.  I will talk first lay out how I see the basic rules and then how feats and features have modified them.In the beginning...(you know this is going to be a long one)In the basic rules, there are 2 rules that talk about rolling a 20 on an attack roll.  One is "Automatic Hit", the other is "Critical hit".  Automatic hit referred to rolling a 20 and was a hit regardless of the defense attacked.  "Critical hit" required not only a 20 but also an attack good enough to hit the defense.Before feats and features enter into the equasion, there is no need for precision because it specifically talks about feats and features.  I think we can agree that it's only relavent when those begin to change other aspects of the general crit rules.We can see that with a 20 that is also successful attack roll, the Automatic Hit rules apply but are not really meaningful since the attack roll was already good enough.Furthermore, when you got a 20 and POSSIBLE crit, you already knew that you had hit, because there was 100% correlation from critical hit-> automatic hit.  (note the direction is important, because the reverse was not true).  One common error that people make is confusing correlation with causation.  One might have erroneously assume that because you rolled a POSSIBLE crit, that it was at least an Automatic Hit.  (the advent of 4E was filled with erroneous assumptins like this) That faulty cause->effect thinking would have resulted in no incorrect results just using the basic rules, because there was 100% correlation from crit -> auto hit.  We know the possible crit was not causal, it was conincident because the 2 events were governed by 2 different rules that simply had some criteria in common.It's also worth noting that any time that the Automatic Hit rule had any meaningful effect on the outcome, the possible crit had been already been denied because the other criteria had not been met (good enough attack roll).Then come along feats and features that start to change the basic rules on what the POSSIBLE crit numbers are.  But they only change the qualifiers for achieving a crit.  The 100% correlation is no longer there because you can crit on a 19, but a 19 is not covered by the Automatic hit rules.  The erroneous causation assumption made before now creates problems for the player who thinks that because he rolled a 19 that he gets an automatic hit because he can crit on a 19.Enter Precision.  It addresses feats and features that might allow you to achieve crits by other means (specifically rolling numbers other than 20).  The mastery feats definitely fit this description and I am of the opinion that Holy Ardor does as well.  It points out that while there may be feats that provide a looser criteria or other routes to the promised land of crits, that the Automatic hit rules are not changed by these crit enhancing rules.So the guy who rolled a 19 and didn't get a attack score good enough to hit Orcus looks at this situation may think that Precision says he didn't hit, but all it really did was remind us that those "precision" feats and features don't change the automatic hit rules.So what did Precision do?  It clarified the scope of "precision" feats and features.  The critical hit rules, even modified by mastery, say he didn't get a crit and the normal hit rules say he missed.  Actually, it was the same criteria in both cases that denied him (not rolling a good enough attack).Precision does not have any binding parts, actually.  It simply and correctly applies the automatic hit rule as written on the previous page, but that is not the same as enforcing a miss.  THAT was satisfied by the basic hit rules in the first place.It's important to note that the term "Automatic hit" is a game term (defined on page 276) that only speaks to 20s being hits.  The rule does not talk about missing or say when you miss.  It just makes a special case that a 20 is always a hit.  Not having an "automatic hit" is not synonymous with missing, that much is clear.  "Automatic hit" is essentially a "last resort" rule when the regular hit rules have called a miss.  It denies nothing, it only grants a hit in a very narrow case.I realize that several of you will disagree with some of my underlying assumptions, but as a whole I think that this way of thinking about thing is internally consistent, matches extremely well with the text as written and doesn't not require any terms to be contradictory.</blockquote>

Verification