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Message: <blockquote data-quote="chaochou" data-source="post: 5957325" data-attributes="member: 99817">I'm running with this thought experiment to see where it goes... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />So, my first thought is - why roll 'to hit' at all? In an attritional system where losing hp means nothing other than losing hp, where the only dividing line is between hp>0 and hp=<0, why not just roll damage?Then I think about armour.Two men-at-arms are facing me. Both have 50hp. I have an axe which does 1d8 damage. One man is wearing full plate and shield, the other is wearing a loincloth. That armour has absolutely no bearing on the blow I can deliver to either man with an axe. I can do max 8 damage to either which is nothing. Maybe a nick, maybe a loss of fatigue or a clumsy parry, depending on how it gets narrated.What 'armour' determines is how often I nick or fatigue the platemail man relative to loincloth man. In other words, armour - especially over the course of an adventuring lifetime when die rolls tend to the mean - is simply a hit point multiplier.Then I wonder why different weapons do different damage. Going back to our two men at arms, my best hit with an axe can only nick or fatigue either of them. Can I not also fatigue them with a dagger thrust? If so, why is the dagger only doing d4 damage? What is the damage roll really expressing, if anything?Right now, I don't have any hard and fast conclusions, but my instinct is that because HP and AC are, in design terms, empty space - that the other building blocks of D&D combat (to hit and damage) must be as well.To-hit rolls and damage rolls might provide the illusion of process simulation, but I'm far from convinced that they're not just more blank canvas to paint whatever you like over.A comparison with Runequest is forming in my mind, but I'm not typing it up <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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