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<blockquote data-quote="ExploderWizard" data-source="post: 6258710" data-attributes="member: 66434">So much yes. A melee attack roll in D&amp;D simply means a best efforts of the character for the combat round. A high level fighter gets more attack rolls to represent his level of effectiveness compared to the low level fighter, not because he/she actually swings that many more times. In AD&amp;D this would mean that a typical melee fighter would only swing a weapon ONCE in the span of a minute. This is because D&amp;D combat was designed at the wargame unit scale, thus the built-in abstraction. There are rpgs with much less abstract combat resolution that maps individual actions such as the swing of a weapon to specific results.&nbsp; You do see the difference right?&nbsp; Saying &quot; I attack the goblin&quot; gets you same overall result as &quot; I swing my sword at the goblin&quot; in an abstract adjudication system.&nbsp; Either way , damage is scored on a &quot;hit&quot; and not on a &quot;miss&quot;, but the results of this are different to the minds eye depending on how abstractly we have mapped them to what took place. For example if Joe the fighter successfully attacks Grog the goblin for 5 points of damage, there are a couple ways it could have gone down if we treat the results abstractly. Joe could have caught Grog's leg with a spinning sweep of his sword, then when Grog's leg gave out, Joe could have smashed Grog across the back of the neck to finish him. In the abstract, this is very descriptive and works well to desribe the ultimate result of the die roll, which indicated Joe reduced Grog to less than 0 hp in the round. If the hit roll represented a single swing of a weapon then Joe couldn't have done that because he is only entitled to one attack per round. The abstraction allows for a greater level of creativity in applying description to the roll of the dice. In this case Joe's player could have described his attack roll as a series of 5 very swift brutal slashes that cut Grog down before he could raise his weapon. This also works under the blanket of abstraction but falls apart when trying to map results to discrete activity.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="ExploderWizard, post: 6258710, member: 66434"] So much yes. A melee attack roll in D&D simply means a best efforts of the character for the combat round. A high level fighter gets more attack rolls to represent his level of effectiveness compared to the low level fighter, not because he/she [I]actually swings that many more times. [/I]In AD&D this would mean that a typical melee fighter would only swing a weapon ONCE in the span of a minute. This is because D&D combat was designed at the wargame unit scale, thus the built-in abstraction. There are rpgs with much less abstract combat resolution that maps individual actions such as the swing of a weapon to specific results. You do see the difference right? Saying " I attack the goblin" gets you same overall result as " I swing my sword at the goblin" in an abstract adjudication system. Either way , damage is scored on a "hit" and not on a "miss", but the results of this are different to the minds eye depending on how abstractly we have mapped them to what took place. For example if Joe the fighter successfully attacks Grog the goblin for 5 points of damage, there are a couple ways it could have gone down if we treat the results abstractly. Joe could have caught Grog's leg with a spinning sweep of his sword, then when Grog's leg gave out, Joe could have smashed Grog across the back of the neck to finish him. In the abstract, this is very descriptive and works well to desribe the ultimate result of the die roll, which indicated Joe reduced Grog to less than 0 hp in the round. If the hit roll represented a single swing of a weapon then Joe couldn't have done that because he is only entitled to one attack per round. The abstraction allows for a greater level of creativity in applying description to the roll of the dice. In this case Joe's player could have described his attack roll as a series of 5 very swift brutal slashes that cut Grog down before he could raise his weapon. This also works under the blanket of abstraction but falls apart when trying to map results to discrete activity. [/QUOTE]

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