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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6597399" data-attributes="member: 42582">How do you know that the feat is making you hit less often unless you do the maths?Or, rather, given that the feat has to be declared before the dice are rolled, of course it is making you hit less often than you otherwise would. The trade off is increased damage. How do you know if the trade off is worthwhile without doing the maths?If the answer is "rely on intuition" then I don't think that's a very good answer, because in my experience most people's intuitions involving probabilities and expected outcomes aren't that robust.If the point of the feat is to boost damage, just give a damage boosting feat.As to why I say it plays on the maths of the system, and is therefore metagamey, it simply trades on the fact that D&D separates the to hit roll from the damage roll. Which is not modelling anything in the fiction but is just an artefact of the mechanics.I think you've missed my point.No doubt someone can swing harder but less accurately. I've done that myself, chopping wood or hammering nails (though never in combat).My point is that the to hit roll in D&D doesn't correspond to accuracy, nor the damage roll to hardness. Eg a to hit roll that barely hits, but that deals maximum damage, can very easily in the fiction correspond to a precision blow.The division of the attack process into a to hit roll and a damage roll is purely an element of game design, not modelling any distinct ingame causal processes, and Power Attack simply exploits that mathematical framework to set up an optimisation problem for mathematicians to solve.So 4e mechaincs "leaping out" at you is self-validating evidence of their "dissociative" character, but me saying that Power Attack is a ridiculous, metagaming mechanic is "digging", "disingenuous" and involves "reasons that aren't holding up"?Who went and made you the arbiter of what is genuinely "dissociative" and what is not? Why do your feelings have some objective weight that mine (or [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION]'s) don't?</blockquote>

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