Rolling to Hit: A Sacred Cow that should have been slain?

[Dausuul]

DnD is already balanced around the scaling 50%, and you may run into a bunch of glitches that you or we can't anticipate.

On the contrary, I think it's possible to anticipate quite a few of them. Cascade of Blades comes to mind.

 

[Blackbrrd]

Last time we played we met a white dragon. The warlord got a +4 attack from the clerics righteous brand and he flanked and used an action point so he was at +7 to hit. He hit with the warlord power that gives the rest of the party +3 to hit against that enemy for the rest of the encounter.

If you put a little effort into it you can get to 80-90% to-hit chance, but you have to cooperate to do it. Cooperation is good.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Let's go a step further. Fix all values (average rolls, average damage, etc, etc). Then you don't have to be bothered by that pesky adventuring at all. You roll up your character, the DM compares it to the adventure he has created, then tells you if you succeed or fail.

You gain XP much more quickly this way.

 

[krakenstar]

Let's go a step further. Fix all values (average rolls, average damage, etc, etc). Then you don't have to be bothered by that pesky adventuring at all. You roll up your character, the DM compares it to the adventure he has created, then tells you if you succeed or fail.

You gain XP much more quickly this way.

err.. I really doubt this is what the OP is trying to get to.

While it's possible, you'd have to rewrite almost all the rules. while it is possible to have a diceless PnP RPG, D&D is not (I hope never become) one of them.

On a side note: we did start to use "average damage" with a calculator at high level 3.5 play for spells like disintegrates.

 

[2eBladeSinger]

I don’t quite understand the OP suggestion. It seems that it’s not really getting rid of the ‘to-hit’, it’s just makes each attack more successful – one still has to ‘roll’. I’ve always viewed a ‘miss’ in D&D not as a clear ‘whiff’ but as an ineffective series of blows. To this end, the character’s aren’t ‘missing’ so much as they are not effective. With the suggestion above, the combatants would be more effective, but then to make them more durable we would adjust their defense resources. What I’m saying is that I don’t see how this adjustment makes D&D any better, or any different at all.

 

[Shabe]

50% cor eck, i dream of hitting 50% of the time, if its traditional to hit 50% of the time i'm gonna have to have words with my dm.

 

[Saeviomagy]

50% cor eck, i dream of hitting 50% of the time, if its traditional to hit 50% of the time i'm gonna have to have words with my dm.

It'd be interesting to know what you're fighting, and what the character doing the fighting looks like.

For instance I played last night. First encounter my Rogue ends up getting isolated from the rest of the party and my hp drops quickly. I look over my powers and sees that I have only one power that can save my bacon, blinding barrage, which is a daily power and takes the form of a blast that blinds enemies. So I shift back and uses this blast, rolls 4 dice and misses on 3 of those attacks. Next round I was dropped and after the battle the healers went to work patching up my severely mauled body. With a bonus to hit I would probably have survived and been capable of getting back to the rest of the party.

A couple of things: You didn't need to shift back to use the power - it's a 'close blast' so it doesn't provoke. Next - you've learnt a valuable lesson - a rogue is much more powerful when he sticks with the rest of the party. Finally: using dailies when they're the last resort often results in you using them in non-ideal circumstances. The best time to use your daily is when you've got a nice big bonus to hit, and a rogue usually has no problem manufacturing combat advantage for himself.

Incidentally, there ARE a fair few powers in the game that have the effect that the OP describes. Reaping strike, any of the powers that have a "miss:" or "effect:" line etc. You WANT to hit, but your turn isn't wasted if you don't.

And of course as others have pointed out - a D&D 'miss' can be anything from a complete miss to a blow which strikes the foe but has minimal effect.

 

[ConcreteBuddha]

On the contrary, I think it's possible to anticipate quite a few of them. Cascade of Blades comes to mind.

I didn't say that we couldn't anticipate any bugs, I said that there may be bugs we can't anticipate. Two completely different things...

There might, just might, be bugs that aren't readily visible, unless you have figured out a way of discarding testers as a necessary profession.

 

[Jack Colby]

OP, I can kind of see where you're coming from, but remember that WoW is focused on the level-up grind more than D&D, and at the tabletop things need to be exciting... and hitting all the time is not exciting, even if it makes a certain amount of sense.

Also, the online games seem to consider HP to be the same as health, and misses to be more literally missing the target. D&D is much more abstract, and open to narration to explain the dice results.

Still, it'd be interesting to see someone design a tabletop RPG that assumes you are successful in most cases. I've heard it discussed, but not personally seen it implemented in a finished game.

 

[ConcreteBuddha]

Let's go a step further. Fix all values (average rolls, average damage, etc, etc). Then you don't have to be bothered by that pesky adventuring at all. You roll up your character, the DM compares it to the adventure he has created, then tells you if you succeed or fail.

You gain XP much more quickly this way.

Or we could instead see that dice are a mechanic, and that different mechanics exist for games. Take chess for example: there are no dice, no methods of RNG, and yet the game is fully functional. What the OP is attempting to do is take the randomness out of "hitting" and either place the randomness somewhere else, or get rid of the randomness all together.

In fact, I would think the RPers should be happy about such a system, since there would be less interaction with dice, and more time to RP.