Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6208152" data-attributes="member: 42582">D'karr has the answer here. It has never been part of D&D that hit point loss is nothing but tissue damage - it has always been possible to lose hp to fatigue and exhaustion, for instance. And evading an attack can certainly be fatiguing.Are you actually asserting that there are no people for whom the absence of process simulation mechanics (what you are calling "associated" mechanics) is a selling point in an RPG?From WotC's point of view, I would have thought they would want to retain at least some of that pool of 4e players who are likely to migrate to 13th Age (which takes "dealing damage on a miss" and dials it up to 11).This is just bizarre.There are RPGs in which casters can fail to cast their spells. D&D has never been one of them  - casting success is automatic. Has that led all players of casters to gain diabetes? Giving the player of the fighter the power to declare "I deal damage - let's roll the dice to see whether it's a lot (W+STR) or a litte (STR only)" is no different from giving the player of a wizard the power to declare "I cast a spell - now you roll the dice to see whether I get max effect (failed save) or min effect (successful save)". I think we could assume that in both cases it might be possible, in the fictional world, for something to go wrong - for instance, presumably the wizard could forget his/her words of power at the last minute, or suddenly cough or sneeze - but we don't both to try to model that in our mechanics.Another well-known rule from which it is no different is "taking 10". The SRD tells us that "When your character is not being threatened or distracted, you may choose to take 10." We don't both to roll to see if your character suddenly coughs or sneezes and therefore plummets from tightrope to his/her doom. Some possibilities aren't worth modelling in our mechanics.Damage on a miss is no different from any of these.</blockquote>

Verification