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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6209660" data-attributes="member: 4937">Also problematic about this is that the logic depends on a very particular fiction.  Realistically, a 4' long blade sweeping an arc isn't occupying much more of a 5' square than a 3' long blade sweeping an arc.  That 5'x5'x'5 cube is still mostly empty in most cases.  The extra distance you might have to move to dodge away from one blade or the other, seems to make a little bit of sense, but only if our model of combat involves the target filling up most of the 5'x5'x5' square.   But for Mag Queen of Petals, who is only 4 inches tall, the extra width of the blade or the extra length of the blade is a lot less relevant than the fact that the blade is still pretty thin (hence sharp).  She only needs float up, or down, a few inches to evade a blade of any length completely.   So again, or explanation fails in the general case.And, I should say, that I intended Mag as an extreme example for the sake of clarity.  Mag is a real character in my game, and a long time ago she even featured in an adventure.  However, the problems while less extreme are still present for everything that has even some of Mag's qualities of being evasive.   She isn't an edge case.  The case is all over the place and in everything less than say attacking a Gelatinous Cube.  She's just an extreme case to highlight the magnitude that the problem can reach in hopes of getting people not to ignore it, or at least to convey where my difficulty lies.When I left D&D the first time, back in the early 90's, one of the systems that caught my eye was GULLIVER, an extension of the GURPS rules to provide for greater realism (no, seriously).  GULLIVER had a lot of cool ideas, some of which later found their way into the official rules for GURPS and some of its ideas I've seen informing all sorts of modern systems, M&M for example, but it was really really heavy on process - to the point that resolving actions often resembled solving physics problems and designing monsters involved a lot of complex calculations that make 3e's process seem tame (designing a starship under the official GURPS rules is closer).  One thing GULLIVER actually did was try to model fly swatters as weapons.  Basically, the idea was to figure out based on the movement rate, you size, and the width of the object attacking whether you could move far enough out of the way to evade the attack.  So that way you could realistically model the decreased difficulty of swatting a fly with a fly swatter compared to your sword, of a giant stepping on you, or of a superhero swinging a couch or a semi like a club and hitting a target.  And it all worked, and was logical.. it just took a minute or so and some scratch paper to work out.But I can promise you that the GULLIVER model for all of that didn't look like straight up 'damage on miss', and that even a simplified model of 'flyswatter' rules wouldn't look like 'damage on a miss'.   For one thing, if you've used a flyswatter, you know they don't always hit and aren't modeled well as a large sized two-handed weapon that does massive damage.</blockquote>

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