Simia Saturnalia said:
You're welcome to be unimpressed, but calling a failed attack roll a "miss" (save possibly on a roll of 1) suggests limited familiarity with the abstractions of armor and Hit Points as used in D&D.
Nope, it simply suggests I don't percieve the necessity to dial up the resolution in my description in order to take all possible scenarios of why the attacker failed to do damage into account. Splicing it up into "your hit simply missed outright", "the target moved out of the way fast enough" and "your swing connects but bounces off his armor harmlessly" was far too much to type for my initial post, but apparently I should get used to people questioning my gamer cred as soon as I start using shorthand.
Shorthand like "You didn't hit the AC, you fail to do damage". This is what the attack roll is about, and the differing factors that in the end enable the fighter to roll for damage are all included in that one abstract attack bonus (or ThAC0 value, or the To-Hit value, or whatever you prefer to use). The same way, all the differing factors that keep the target from suffering damage are rolled into its AC.
What I simply don't like is ANOTHER factor that says "Hey, despite you not hitting your target strong enough to punch through the armor, despite it ducking away from your swing fast enough, you still do some damage because we don't want you to not have fun while swinging/lose one of your encounter abilities because your die rolled bad." At some point in the game, there are simply too many safety nets to make sure a character cannot entirely fail no matter what he does FOR MY PERSONAL TASTE! That is not meant as a general statement of value of the game in question, by the way.
Njall said:
Well, it's because now saving throws work like AC ( notice the reference to "cha vs will" ), thus it is reasonable to think that the two would work in similar ways.
Wizard power: deal, say, 2d6 damage to anyone in the area, half if reflex defense is missed. Int vs Reflex. It works exactly like fireball in 3.x;
Fighter power: deal weapon damage to your target. Deal str bonus as damage on a miss. Attack vs AC.
Seems consistent, doesn't it?
If both are per encounter abilities, I don't see where the problem is
My personal problem with this is that one is a clear area attack that spreads its damage over the entire area, the other is an attack against one singular target, as such it is very locally restricted damage. If you had given that fighter some area attack weapon (flame thrower, greek-oil grenade, blackpoder bomb), I'd have less problems with it.
Conversely, if a ray attack misses, I'd have as much problems with the spell still doing some damage to
its intended target.
In the light of spell attack rolls, I'd rather have them institute the "miss" on a failed attack roll more broadly for combat spells as well to make them equal to a failed weapon attack roll. But that's just me.
And yeah, with older editions, spells were different enough from weapon attacks in combat, in applicability, effect, and frequency, to warrant a different handling. If spell attacks are now closer to weapon attacks in 4E, they should be handled pretty much similarly as well.
