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

[BryonD]

Or maybe instead of working great it has just been serviceable for decades, but not really great. Both options are really matters of opinion.

Nope. It may be an opinion to like or dislike something. But a large number of people consistently stating that they like something is a fact.

 

[BryonD]

Considering there are multiple quotes from people who actually played with Gygax himself about what HP meant to them I highly doubt my claim is questionable. Your claim that people playing in 1981 cared about HP is irrelevant. They weren't the first people to play D&D. Not by a long shot. By first to play, I mean "first to play" like with Gygax, etc. I'm uncertain how "first to play" means anything close to your interpretation of "played in 1981" considering D&D was first published in 1974.[/quote
Gygax said lots and lots of things and you can find Gygax quotes to support both sides of many arguments.

But, if your claim is now that no one should care now because they didn't care from 1974 - 1981 (which I still reject as true) despite the fact that they have cared since at least 1981. Then OK.
Thank you for the humor.

And of course people care what other people think about something. "Did you like this?" "No, I did not." "Oh, maybe I won't like it either."

If you don't what people's opinion on this matter are, why are you even posting in this thread? Just go play D&D and do whatever you want. Pretend HP are whatever you dream them to be.

You are the one that told me what my opinion should be. You flat out said you were challenging *my* desire to care. If you were working by the advice you just gave here, then this conversation would not exist.

 

[Umbran]

They weren't the first people to play D&D. Not by a long shot. By first to play, I mean "first to play" like with Gygax, etc. I'm uncertain how "first to play" means anything close to your interpretation of "played in 1981" considering D&D was first published in 1974.

The real problem with your position is not the interpretation of what is "first to play".

Your position is "appeal to authority". Gygax didn't care, so neither should you!

You do realize that Gygax and his buddies were the first - and therefore hardly representative of what folks, overall, get out of playing games, right? MIllions of people have played since. We have discovered a whole lot about gaming that Gygax did not know when he was first playing. Gygax is therefore not a be-all, end-all of gaming discussion.

Now, I happen to also think that exactly what hit points are isn't really a big deal. But as a reasoned argument supporting the position, the Gygax Trump Card isn't strong.

 

[Sailor Moon]

Until I changed the Great Weapon Fighting style, all my players did drop their great swords.

because "This weapon is butt. I take the most damage and don't even deal the most damage. What is the advantage of this stupid big sword. Die faster?"

Here is our personal experience. Sometimes we are on a roll where we are dropping things left and right, greatsword wielder included, but he's not stupid enough to go charging in the middle of a crowd alone. Now sometimes we miss like crazy and end up having to run away. Sometimes we are on a hit miss hit miss kind of game but that's just the nature of the game.

Your reasons for DoAm are extremely poor. You want a contingency for having a bad night of rolling. Even though the game isn't structured around team play as 4th edition was, you still need to play smart and use tactics. Silly mechanics don't make the game any better.

 

[Jester David]

It's not "I wasted a turn".
It's "Great weapon users wasted a turn."

The issue is that ranged weapons, two weapon fighting, and weapon and shield mitigate misses whereas great weapons don't AND have no advantages at low levels.

The extra AC from a shield only matters if an enemy hits you or is using attacks. If the sword and board fighters miss a wizard, they waste just as much of their turn as a GWF. And a TWF who misses twice feels even worse than the GWF.
And what about the duelist fighter? They likely lack the armour for a high AC, can't use a shield, and don't even have the high damage weapon of the GWF. They seem like the character that could really benefit from DoaM too.

Heck, what about the wizard. The wizard fighting mooks who wastes cantrip after cantrip and doesn't do anything. Yeah, like the ranged fighter they're not at risk, but that doesn't give them the feeling they're contributing to the fight and being a useful member of the party.

And what about orcs with two weapons? If they suck so much, shouldn't they also deal DoaM?


If missing is so large of an issue that DoaM needs to be added to the game, it should be added to the game and not just one option for one class.
If it is just a GWF thing then this fight is really about fighting and a veil for edition warring.

 

[Jester David]

So I added DoaM to 5e via an optional rule (along with a wound point system):

Glancing Blows & Wound Points

(But I don't expect more feedback or response than when I posted glancing blows earlier in the thread, because this fight isn't really about adding something reducing missing into the game and more about protesting the removal of something semi-related to 4e.)

 

[pemerton]

Then don't play one.

You do realise that solution is available for DoaM options also!

In my mind automatic damage (damage on a miss) just means increased success and/or skill.

<snip>

That is why I prefer the term automatic damage. With that context damage on a miss is no different, unless you make it a semantics argument based on terminology.

Agreed.

The goal of the mechanic is to prevent an action from doing no damage. Why not just call it a partial hit? Why not just say that the mechanic allows you to always hit? Why refer to it as a miss that does damage? I don't see the point.

"Partial hit" introduces a new piece of technical jargon into the game. "Automatic hit" means that you can' distinguish between STR damage on a miss and W+STR damage on a hit.

The problem here is that damage on a miss actually narrows the set of outcomes such as an attack that really has no significant effect - and surely, there's no reason for them not to exist, even in an abstract combat system.

Others have pointed out that it doesn't narrow options, because you can choose whether or not to build a DoaM character.

Another point is that, if the abstract combat system is resolving the outcome of two skilled fighters having at it for some moderately extended period of time, why should there be such periods in which no significant effect occurs? Are the two fighters actually not that skilled after all?

If a party gets into a fight and the fighter loses a lot of his hit points while out in the wilderness, away from towns and temples, and the cleric's dead - some understanding of the nature of his wounds becomes a germane question. In superfast healing editions like 4e and 5e, he's up and back to full form farcically fast.

I think you have this backwards. Given that in any edition the fighter can recover from his "wounds" without any medical intervention, I think we can infer that they are not all that serious. Given that in 4e and 5e he can recover overnight, I think we can infer that they are sufficiently non-serious that he can push on in spite of them.

That's not "farcically fast" recovery. It's very typical adventure fiction. What is farcical is narrating the wounds as (say) a broken limb or serious organ damage, and then having the fighter moving and fighting at full ability after resting for a day and recovering a hit point or three.

If all it takes is a good night's sleep to fully recover, that pushes the nature of hit points away from physical components and into something else. You're not finding a lot of blood and guts in that mix.

The thing about guts is that, if you have your stomach sliced open, you are not going to recover without medical/surgical intervention, just by sleeping for a few days or weeks. Hence, hit point loss in AD&D doesn't represent "blood or guts" until you are dead. An optional rule in Gygax's DMG allows that if you get to -6 or below the GM can narrate maiming, blindness etc as a consequnce - but that's still not guts.

As for blood - no one in AD&D ever received a blood transfusion, so we're hardly talking about a litre of blood being lost. We're talking about amounts of blood loss which are recovered by drinking some water, eating some food and having a rest. Whether you narrate your "pushing on after rest" as taking hours or days is a matter of taste and genre, not a matter of physiological plausibility or implausibility.

A months time for full recovery in 1e is still fast compared to the amount of punishment a body can take, so we can be pretty sure hit points aren't all meat but we can also be pretty confident in our narration that the physical injury is significant - significant enough to make the PC very vulnerable for a while.

But after 1 day to 1 week's healing (depending on whether or not the character fell below 0 hp) that character can run, fight, climb etc at full strength, and is no more vulnerable in combat than the typical farm labourer. So the injury actually isn't very significant at all.

Or, conversely, if you narrate the injury as significant but treat the ability to run, jump, fight etc as "narrative licence", then I'm puzzled as to why the recovery of hit points can't be treated with the same "narrative licence" also: ie the injury is still there, but not impeding the character's performance.

There is room here for differences of taste around pacing, gonzo-ness etc, but in the absence of any non-fatal yet debiltating injuries in any edition of D&D, the idea that some options encompass physiological reality and others don't is very implausible to me.

hit points are a terrible system.

<sip>

A hit, if hp is energy, is a near miss that causes the target to tire themselves out deflecting or avoiding. A DoaM miss, if hp is energy, is a near miss that causes the target to tire themselves out deflecting or avoiding. They're the same thing in the world despite having opposite expected results.

I don't regard hit points as a terrible system. They're a different /I] system from other, more injury-focused systems (eg Rolemaster), but they're not terrible at all.

I play a game with a lot of DoaM - 4e - and narrating it doesn't cause any problems: the attacker, via force of arms, puissance of magic, etc, has gone some way towards cowing/defeating/killing his/her opponent. There is no "opposite expected result", because when a player rolls an attack using a DoaM ability s/he is expecting to do at least some damage!

I do think it skews the risk:reward ratio because, unlike spells that deal automatic damage, there's no expenditure of resources.

That's not true. Character-build resources have been expened in choosing the DoaM option.

Missing isn't that bad, it's not some horrible hardship that must be avoided at all cost. It's okay to miss.

Says who? For many players, having no effect on the ingame situation is boring. And needlessly so. [MENTION=63508]Minigiant[/MENTION] has elaborated this, with reference to the actual design and play parameters of the game, in fine detail.

But the general point is that there is no rule laid up in RPG heaven that says that a player's choice on how to spend his/her action must have a chance of having no effect. That's not the case when the wizard player choose to fireball or magic-missile, and that has hardly ruined the game, nor spoilded generations of caster players.

 

[Sailor Moon]

Says who? For many players, having no effect on the ingame situation is boring. And needlessly so. [MENTION=63508]Minigiant[/MENTION] has elaborated this, with reference to the actual design and play parameters of the game, in fine detail.

And 9 times out of 10 it's just exaggeration.

 

[Minigiant]

And 9 times out of 10 it's just exaggeration.

I dunno.
Ive met the "Missing suck" feeling since my very first game of D&D and a noob long ago. It also was compounded with simplistic action options of low level PCs.

When you roll bad in D&D, its really bad. It is very demoralizing to have a bad roll streak. Most of the cursing I've heard were from. Missing. That's why people call dices jinx. Gamers don't waste rolls between turns. And dice are placed in certain facings.

Because gamers hate miss streaks.

 

[Umbran]

And 9 times out of 10 it's just exaggeration.

Made up numbers don't really support your case. They make you seem like you're willing to make stuff up to get your way, and the truth of it doesn't matter.

Then don't play one.

As has been noted - that goes both ways. You don't like damage on a miss? Don't play a character that uses it! Done.

Arguments of the form, "you cannot have the option in the game for you to use, because I don't like it" are not terribly reasonable, in my opinion.

This edition is not about the stats, it's about playing a class or concept because of what it is.

So, if the class or concept is about someone that is well modeled by DoaM, what then?

If it isn't about the stats, you should have no problem with changes to the stats, because they are not what the game is about!

Your reasons for DoAm are extremely poor. You want a contingency for having a bad night of rolling.

You should probably stop telling people things - what they want, what games are about, and so on. You should probably *listen* more. You might learn somewhat more than you teach.

I am pretty sure you are wrong here. He's not looking for a contingency for a bad night of rolling. He sees a character concept that seems to be a notable disadvantage, statistically speaking, such that his players avoid it. He'd like to see an option (just an option, not a mandatory feature) be available that would negate the disincentive to play the type.

Silly mechanics don't make the game any better.

If the game is not about the stats, then silly mechanics won't make it worse, either. Nobody's making you use the silly mechanic. So, I don't see why you stand against it.

A GM of my acquaintance saw a tendency in his gaming circles. It was in respect to plots centered around a character, but it holds for other aspects of RPGs as well. It goes like this: Your character has a pony. It is a good pony. You like it. Some other character is given a pony.... and you start feeling like somehow the other guy having a pony makes your pony worth not as much. You start arguing that other people shouldn't have ponies. You having a pony isn't good enough for you - other people need to *not* have ponies, for you to be happy.

This is, obviously, kind of silly. The existence of other ponies does not diminish your pony. The attitude is dysfunctional, and leads to you arguing for making the game less fun for others.

You sound like this - as if the game can only have the stuff you like, and not stuff that others might like, even if that other stuff really doesn't impact you.