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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5933126" data-attributes="member: 42582">Huh? Does 4e not count? It has a heap of damage on a miss abilities, including the fighter at-will Reaping Strike, to which the playtest's Reaper would appear to be the successor in title.Well, this is what happens when designers write flavour text for abilities that (i) is not intended to be part of their resolution, but (ii) does not correspond with the mechanics given. It is the natural endpoint of the 4e Essentials tendency to padding power and feat descriptions with pointless flavour text. In the playtest documents, it can also be seen in the Sleep spell, which makes reference to scattering sand but has no requirement to that effect - how many campaigns are going to see the question raised, can Sleep be cast by a caster with no sand? Who is underwater, or in a windstorm, and so can't scatter any sand? Etc?The question is - how often do these corner cases arise? And what is the proper measure of "the long run"?Someone upthread canvassed 6 misses in a row. On a 50% to hit chance the odds of that are 1 in 64. If a typical combat is 6 rounds, and the number of combats per level is 10 or so (as in the past 2 editions), then that will happen one in 6 levels. Not all that often.So if we focus only on what actually happens in the game (as opposed to what might happen in a conjunction of rather unlikely eventualities) the narrative is likely to be fine.In my view, the problem with these sorts of abilities isn't the corner cases or the long run.  It's that those who don't like them aren't focussing on the actual narrative these abilities actually produce in play. Rather, they're treating the abilities as a type of process simulation, and are unhappy with what the ability apparently reveals about causal processes of the gameworld - are they absurd (eg the fighter projects an "unluck" aura) or incoherent (eg the fighter misses, but also hits - what the heck?!).Rather than tinkering with the odd character ability, it might be better if WotC thought about how, if at all, it wants the rules to be related to process simulation, and then designed (and wrote guidelines) accordingly. Sticking in flavour text but then expecting it to be ignored during resolution is not "inclusive" or "big tent" - in my view, it's just bad design!</blockquote>

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