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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5935092" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think the obvious solution to this (and I posted on it in a bit more detail in the "Poll" thread) is to have multiple themes that fill this design and story space.This does raise one other difficulty, though: the game rules would have to explain the difference between them not in ingame terms (because the whole idea is that, in ingame/story terms, they occupy the same space) but in metagame/mechanical terms. And that sort of rules text - rules text that presents the rules as rules rather than as simple translations into rulespeak of ingame descriptions of abilities - is itself controversial, and generally controversial among much the same group of players as those who don't like damage on a miss (which is to say, their simulationist sensibilities extend beyond rules design to rules presentation).I'll leave it to WotC to work out how to square this circle!Any sort of special martial ability is always going to give rise to this issue, as soon as it takes a form less abstract then a bonus to hit or damage. I mean, why in 3E can only a *trained* person sacrifice precision for damage (Power Attack - though as [MENTION=11821]Obryn[/MENTION] has pointed, it's already problematic to talk about precision in this context)?That's why many highly simulationist games (eg RQ, RM, HARP) link special combat manoeuvres either to skills that anyone can learn, or to reaching certain threshholds of combat bonus (which, again, any character can achieve).In this respect, the feat is in good company with the Sleep spell, which talks about sand but doesn't have it as a requirement, and presumably can be cast while underwater or in a windstorm or nude and unequipped or otherwise unable to scatter sand on one's targets.The mechanical effect of Reaper is, in effect, this: make your attack roll; whether your roll is a success or not you hit and do STR damage, but if your roll is a success you get a stronger hit and add your weapon dice plus other bonus damage as normal. The flavour text should probably be rewritten to reflect this.The "close call" stuff can then get subsumed into the standard narration of hit point loss. What I mean by that is that, unless you take the "all hp are meat" approach, then clearly some hits (in the mechanical sense of successful attack rolls) are merely close calls in the fiction (because they neither bloody nor kill). It is (in my view) an obvious mistake to try to import this general narrative feature of hit points, which some people hate and avoid via a "hit points as meat" approach, into the flavour of one particular feat.</blockquote>

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