D&D (2024) Graze on a miss questions

[UngeheuerLich]

My opinion: "damage on a graze" forces the player to reimagine the way that hit points, damage, attack rolls, and weapons all work in order for it to make sense. I'm not willing to do that, so that new rule will never make sense to me. (Which is fine. I've never needed it.)

Then the whole concept of HP and armor makes no sense at all.

 

[GMMichael]

Can someone please recap:

• what the various opinions from the community about graze on a miss?

Here's one: it kind of throws a wrench into the whole hit/miss, succeed/fail, hit-points-are-meat spectre of D&D's.

So, bravo?

 

[Rejuvenator]

"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is like the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning"

It sounds as if this rule exposes cracks in the system. "Hit", "miss", "damage", "slashing", "graze"... it sounds like these words are bugs.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Here's one: it kind of throws a wrench into the whole hit/miss, succeed/fail, hit-points-are-meat spectre of D&D's.

So, bravo?

Into what?
Since when are hp just meat?
Since when does hitting and not hitting your AC tell you something about not connecting. (Maybe it was that way for a brief period of 3e, where you were able to target touch AC).

It is an abstraction. And everything works better if you look at it that way. Healing over night? Just sleep griveous wounds away? No. Rest to recover from your stress sounds much more plausible.

 

[Vaalingrade]

They just need to take a stand and explicitly explain what 'abstraction' means for the game and how game terms are game terms and not something to be taken literally or as the physical rules of the universe from the PoV of the characters.

 

[Emberashh]

To throw my hat in the ring; in my system HP is called Composure. Additionally, my combat system is an Act/React system; you roll for both and how you roll basically covers how well you do both.

And in an effort to nix the null result, when you use your Act to attack, your opponent has to use their React in order to counter it, otherwise the attack will always hit. However, the Act roll still has to meet a minimum to-hit, otherwise the attack does half-damage. Likewise, when Reacting, the React roll has to exceed the opponents Act, otherwise you're unable to use your Armor to mitigate the damage.

It makes sense, and it keeps combat pretty slick.

 

[James Gasik]

It does scale as you increase your STR stat from 3 to 5, and basically gives you +2 Damage per round to your DPR calculation at the highest (40%*5). It also scales nicely with the fighter's extra attacks and actions surges.

As a side note, I really hope they change the heavy weapon property to be STR based instead of Size based.

That's not really scaling in an appreciable way against stronger foes, though.

 

[mellored]

"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is like the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning"

It sounds as if this rule exposes cracks in the system. "Hit", "miss", "damage", "slashing", "graze"... it sounds like these words are bugs.

Personally, I always found rolling to-hit and damage separately as unnecessary.

Like, you can get a 18 on your "hit" roll, but a 1 on damage...
Also, rolling twice slows the game down.

But I don't expect it to change with the 50th anniversary so...

 

[Parmandur]

Personally, I always found rolling to-hit and damage separately as unnecessary.

Like, you can get a 18 on your "hit" roll, but a 1 on damage...
Also, rolling twice slows the game down.

But I don't expect it to change with the 50th anniversary so...

Mo' dice is mo' bette'.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

never mind