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.