D&D 5E I just don't buy the reasoning behind "damage on a miss".

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It's entirely possible I'm being a scoundrel. I do aim for it. :)

But I really don't understand his point. There's a ton of corner cases where rolling your save isn't worthwhile, evasion or no. Like if your character is at 1 HP, it's sort of irrelevant if you save vs the 10d6 fireball. His point seems to be that granted abilities should always grant better results on a success, to magnify the difference between success and failure. I can see that as A viable design tenet, but not as THE overarching design tenet. Choosing to prioritize reliability over spiky results seems to me to be a valid choice, both at a metagame level AND at a character level. I can easily an adventurer choosing to prioritize his ability to consistently mitigate damage rather than occasionally avoid all of it.

Oh I know, and I agree completely. The idea that fortune resolution for mundane abilities as (something like) the inputs of entropy + skill yielding a firm fictional positioning output with few (or none at all) liberties of interpretive rendering being required to acquaint the two sides of the equation with one another strikes me as completely untenable (if that is indeed the position...its hard to say).
 

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Oh I know, and I agree completely. The idea that fortune resolution for mundane abilities as (something like) the inputs of entropy + skill yielding a firm fictional positioning output with few (or none at all) liberties of interpretive rendering being required to acquaint the two sides of the equation with one another strikes me as completely untenable (if that is indeed the position...its hard to say).
As is usually the case, the sticking point is the unwillingness to have a roll for any one character affect the reality outside the character. The result of an attack roll has to represent the relative skill applied to the character's swing. Rolling an 3 on a longbow attack is the character firing wide, not an errant gust of wind at a bad time or the target raising his shield to catch the arrow. Gusts of wind should be a conditional affect rolled by the DM, and blocking with the shield is purely a function of the roll compared to the Armor Class. (It's OK to narrate a miss by 1 or 2 as hitting a shield, because that's the difference in AC that the shield gives.)

More and more, I think the biggest difference between the camps of roleplayers is the willingness to embrace or not embrace different narrative stances in play.
 

I wonder what the poll results would be if we asked "are you OK with this rule" AND "are you pro- or anti-4th ed?"

I'm Pro-4e for what 4e does. 4e hit points are not simulationist so I buy the damage on a miss there.

5e is not shaping up to be as abstract. If 5e is targetted towards simpler concepts, I prefer it not try to use abstract HP and concrete/meat HP at the same time trying to justify some gamist element.

The only thing damage on a miss does is raise the damage floor and slightly increase DPR. Other mechanics can do that fine (advantage of damage rolls, or just a simple 1/2 strength mod bonus).
 

Choosing to prioritize reliability over spiky results seems to me to be a valid choice, both at a metagame level AND at a character level. I can easily an adventurer choosing to prioritize his ability to consistently mitigate damage rather than occasionally avoid all of it.
I'm not 100% sure I understand this as an ingame character choice, but then I know nothing about fighting or dodging explosions.

But as a metagame, player choice it makes perfect sense: do I want the unrelenting dreadnought, or the showy dealer of spike damage? It resembles (without being identical to) the choice between defender and striker in 4e.

many players have internalized narration that a miss on a 16 is described differently than a miss on a 3, despite their being no rule to support that interpretation. It's just fidelity to their internal imagined process simulation. And yet, I imagine there would be a lot of resistance to doing attacks as (d20 + attack modifier + weapon dice) - (armor value); with the value returned being the damage result. A value of 0 or below would then be a "miss". This would seem to be a better model of "simming" the imagined process behind attacks.
This is how HARP does it: roll to hit, apply attack mod, subtract defence mod (which includes both active and passive defence), then determine hit/miss (anything above 0 is a hit) then apply weapon damage mod (daggers hurt less than greatswords on this approach), and read resulting damage of a chart. (HARP is RM-lite, after all!)

HARP is a process sim game, with all the pros and cons thereof. One of the features is that we can tell if a strike was defeated by defence (good attack roll negated by high allocation to active defence by enemy) or by attacker error (poor attack roll that would miss even without active defence).

Part of my objection to the D&D approach of "3" is a wild swing and "19" is a rousing hit is similar to my objection to "one attack per 6 seconds" - it yields a fiction of fighters standing there like lumps of stone, swinging at one another periodically like automatons, never dodging but not so skilled as to be able to strike, without difficulty, a static blob.

Conversely, once I insert the sort of image that I personally have of melee combat, it becomes clear that most misses must be due to defender skill as much as attacker error, and saying that this only happens 1 time in 4 or thereabouts (when the shield or DEX bonus made the difference) simply makes no sense. It lacks verisimilitude, to borrow a phrase!

The idea that fortune resolution for mundane abilities as (something like) the inputs of entropy + skill yielding a firm fictional positioning output with few (or none at all) liberties of interpretive rendering being required to acquaint the two sides of the equation with one another strikes me as completely untenable (if that is indeed the position...its hard to say).
As is usually the case, the sticking point is the unwillingness to have a roll for any one character affect the reality outside the character. The result of an attack roll has to represent the relative skill applied to the character's swing. Rolling an 3 on a longbow attack is the character firing wide, not an errant gust of wind at a bad time or the target raising his shield to catch the arrow. Gusts of wind should be a conditional affect rolled by the DM, and blocking with the shield is purely a function of the roll compared to the Armor Class. (It's OK to narrate a miss by 1 or 2 as hitting a shield, because that's the difference in AC that the shield gives.)
I agree with both these posts (except I'm more confident that Manbearcat in the accuracy of his interpretive hypothesis). And the endless threads and poles also have a further, related cause - namely, an apparent blind spot to the possiblity that anyone might play differently, and hence a move without further argument or analysis to the conclusion that these mechanics are inherently flawed and make no sense and wreck the game.

It strikes me, at least, as a very blinkered conception of what mechanics in an RPG might be for.

More and more, I think the biggest difference between the camps of roleplayers is the willingness to embrace or not embrace different narrative stances in play.
Stances and related techniques. It's been a while since I've quoted this particular passage from Ron Edwards, so it's time to trot it out again!

Step On Up is actually quite similar, in social and interactive terms, to Story Now. Gamist and Narrativist play often share the following things:

*Common use of player Author Stance (Pawn or non-Pawn) to set up the arena for conflict. This isn't an issue of whether Author (or any) Stance is employed at all, but rather when and for what.

*Fortune-in-the-middle during resolution, to whatever degree - the point is that Exploration as such can be deferred, rather than established at every point during play in a linear fashion.

*More generally, Exploration overall is negotiated in a casual fashion through ongoing dialogue, using system for input (which may be constraining), rather than explicitly delivered by system per se.​

And we can see all the same objections: objections to author stance; objections to FitM and associated deferral of exploration; objections to casual negotiation of exploration using system as constraint but not determinative ("It's not consistent!). As always, the thing that most puzzle me is how and D&D player can treat D&D's particular systems - with their lack of active defence, and their hit point ablation - as anything but fortune in the middle.

In googling up my quote I also found this other passage which seems apposite too:

I submit that playing in the Narrativist mode is just as intuitive and instantly understood by most people as Gamist play. . .

Author Stance may be considered the default for Narrativist play only in the sense that it needs to be in there somewhere. Narrativist play doesn't have to be exclusively in this Stance, nor does it even have to be employed more often than the others. The only requirement is that it be present in a significant way. Narrativist play is very much like Gamist play in this regard, and for the same reason: the player of a given character takes social and aesthetic responsibility for what that character does.​

I think this is borne out by [MENTION=6688937]Ratskinner[/MENTION]'s reports about the ease of teaching MHRP and FATE to newbies. And I don't think there is any reason to think that new players would find "damage on a miss" confusing. They're choosing to play a particular sort of character - what I've called the "relentless dreadnought" - and the mechanics reflect that. And if that's not the character you want to play, take responsibility and pick a different ability!
 
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Eh, personally I don't have a strong reaction either way about the mechanic though I tend not to favor it for D&D as opposed to another fantasy game. That said I will relate my experiences with it in the 13th Age game I am currently running...

Pros...
It speeds combat up because the damage per round of the party is increased...

Players like the fact that they did "something" to further along the end of the monster, even if it wasn't much...

Cons...
I find that for the most part my players forget about it during the combat. IMO, it's not intuitive to do damage on a "miss" for most people and thus it's one of those things that gets forgotten about quite a bit.

The other issue I have with it is that it can cause the endings of fights where it results in the death of the BBEG to be kinda of anti-climatic... regardless of how you describe it... you the player know you actually missed and (again IMO) it's just not the same as rolling and actually hitting and killing the monster. I've since ruled in my 13th Age game that only an actual hit can kill a monster though I still subtract damage for the miss throughout the battle... it just can't cause the actual death blow to take place.
 

In googling up my quote I also found this other passage which seems apposite too:
I submit that playing in the Narrativist mode is just as intuitive and instantly understood by most people as Gamist play. . .

Author Stance may be considered the default for Narrativist play only in the sense that it needs to be in there somewhere. Narrativist play doesn't have to be exclusively in this Stance, nor does it even have to be employed more often than the others. The only requirement is that it be present in a significant way. Narrativist play is very much like Gamist play in this regard, and for the same reason: the player of a given character takes social and aesthetic responsibility for what that character does.​

I think this is borne out by @Ratskinner 's reports about the ease of teaching MHRP and FATE to newbies. And I don't think there is any reason to think that new players would find "damage on a miss" confusing. They're choosing to play a particular sort of character - what I've called the "relentless dreadnought" - and the mechanics reflect that. And if that's not the character you want to play, take responsibility and pick a different ability!

Agreed on all. Just wanted to break this out for a moment. It has always struck me that the distinctions between Gamist agenda and Narrativist Agenda is mostly (but not exclusively) about:

- Pawn Stance versus Author Stance

- Disregard for genre emulation/conceits vs high regard for genre emulation/conceits

- Fictional positioning being (very) subordinate to a fun romp vs symbiosis of a fun romp and fictional positioning.

I'm a big fan of both of those agendas so saying those things about Gamist agenda is descriptive, not pejorative. Whats more, these reasons are why one group can play 4th edition as (little more) than a (highly functional) fun romp of Step on Up while another can play it in very functional Step On Up/Story Now hybrid. The game's archetecture is extremely supportive of it. MHRP is similar save for the fact that the tactical interface, and thus mental overhead, while there, is reduced (significantly when compared to 4e). So if you're going to play it as a Step on Up superhero game, you likely aren't going to have much fun! But if you play it as a Step on Up/Story Now engine to emulate X-Men et al, you're pedal to the metal! The means (thematic and mechanical), the GMing advice, the advocacy for the techniques and the symbiosis of all of the moving parts is right there in both systems.

To the second point, I've had the same experience with teaching new players 4e, MHRP and Dungeon World. Asking them to name who dies in a battle before it begins, pick a complication, switch to author or director stance and outright generate content/justify the use of abilities with respect to the fictional positioning/invoke elements out of their character's locus of control is pretty natural if you haven't internalized certain RPG dictums.
 

Once again, this particular mechanic may have detrimental effects on emergent play issues, but I fail to see how people cannot grasp that this is an abstraction. I personally blame this hard core sim-nazi crowd on 3e and its overly situationist perspective. That and the fighters-can't have-nice-things crowd.
 

Conversely, once I insert the sort of image that I personally have of melee combat, it becomes clear that most misses must be due to defender skill as much as attacker error, and saying that this only happens 1 time in 4 or thereabouts (when the shield or DEX bonus made the difference) simply makes no sense. It lacks verisimilitude, to borrow a phrase!

The problem I have is that it seems a whole lot of work to insert this image that you seem to have in your head of how the game works. I'm trying to just suss out what seems natural and what makes sense with 5e rules as they've been talked about by the devs. Then I have to read paragraphs of game theory to try and accurately understand your position. And THEN I have to re-think a game I've played for years and agree to play it a different way than I've ever wanted to.

I don't have to do the math to figure out if 1 in 4 misses is the result of the defender or attackers skill, or if he blocked with a shield or not. It's enough to know a shield makes a guy better at defending, and a low roll is not "as good" as a high one. There's a lot of room in between there to input DM fiat, to narrate a hit however you want, without having to go "pure simulationist" and play HARPS or RQ or GURPS or any other number of games I haven't really cared to explore.

Perhaps we've "internalized interpretations of the system that have no actual rules backing to them" as TwoSix mentioned, but it's an interpretation that works and is shared by many. I still play monopoly with the free parking money even if it's not in the rulebook.

4e apparently made some headway in shifting the interpretations of D&D rules, but some of us want to go back to a more "classic" [maybe even 'wrongbadfun?"] interpretation, while still keeping some of the improvements 4e made.

 

Perhaps we've "internalized interpretations of the system that have no actual rules backing to them" as TwoSix mentioned, but it's an interpretation that works and is shared by many. I still play monopoly with the free parking money even if it's not in the rulebook.

4e apparently made some headway in shifting the interpretations of D&D rules, but some of us want to go back to a more "classic" [maybe even 'wrongbadfun?"] interpretation, while still keeping some of the improvements 4e made.
Just as a note, I couldn't care less if there is OR isn't rules backing for the roll narration. Play how you want, it's not badwrongfun. It's more pointing out that certain players (not you, [MENTION=6695559]bogmad[/MENTION]) assume that everyone else is playing using that system. Sometimes, when we always do something a certain way, we forget that other people might never have even SEEN that interpretation, let alone used it. That doesn't just apply to D&D but life in general!
 

Once again, this particular mechanic may have detrimental effects on emergent play issues, but I fail to see how people cannot grasp that this is an abstraction. I personally blame this hard core sim-nazi crowd on 3e and its overly situationist perspective. That and the fighters-can't have-nice-things crowd.

You're assuming people can't grasp it... when what I've seen (for the most part) is people who just don't like it or the type/quantity/whatever of abstraction it brings to the game. As far as "hard core sim-nazi" goes, I would say I see some pretty strong advocating of preferences coming from all sides so not sure this or the "fighters-can't-have-nice-things" labels being thrown around are really necessary... unless you're just trying to insult one side of the argument by calling them names.
 

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