Sneak attacking undead and constructs seems wrong

[CleverNickName]

Ah, the nature of Hit Points. It brings back memories of the early days of 4th Edition, and all of the embarrassing posts I wrote about how Healing Surges were ruining my life.

It's balanced and effective, but I still maintain that Sneak Attack is boring. The rogue is the guy who gets to add extra damage to his attacks, sometimes. Meanwhile, his cousin the monk can catch arrows in midair, walk on water, kick holes through plate armor, and punch dragons out of the sky.

 

[Hussar]

Heh. whoo, a HP=Meat argument. Gee, that'll go far.

*opens up a bag of popcorn to watch the show*

 

[Immortal Sun]

"Sneak attacking" was always problematic in my mind since it had so little to do with "sneaking" and the attack was still based on random die rolls, rather than how well you actually snuck and then attacked.

So it doesn't bother me much. Think of it less as "sneak attacking" and more of "Rogue knowing where it's gonna hurt most" attacking.

 

[Dausuul]

Hey, look! Someone is observing that pre-4E hit points work exactly as if high-level fighters are made of iron, and other people are quoting the 1E "Hit Points Are Not Meat Paragraph" (okay, actually several paragraphs - this is Gygax we're talking about) at them.

Good times.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Yeah, I was thinking my efforts would be fuel to the fire, but instead I think I might have put it out. Oops...

 

[Guest 6801328]

Sorry if I'm skipping the 10 pages in between, but I think the answer is "both" of the original answers on page 1:

1) It's because the rogue needs sneak attack damage to be viable

aaaand....

2) When you want something to be true in the game world, you simply adopt whichever rationale works for you. E.g., it's about timing, or finding weak spots, or the God of Rogues (a very, very busy god) intervening on their behalf, or whatever.

The other alternative, of course, is that you can actively choose to not do step 2, and then start threads about how some rule you don't like is "immersion breaking".

 

[Harzel]

One of my house rules for 5E is that Elementals and Oozes are immune to critical hits and sneak attack, due to their lack of a discernible anatomy or vulnerable points.

I still allow crits and sneak attack for constructs because I figure that a clever rogue can find a weak joint or an exposed seam or whatever in a golem or automaton. I still allow crits and sneak attack for undead because in my experience almost half of the enemies you face in D&D are undead, and the 3.5 Rogue's inability to sneak attack undead, elementals, constructs, oozes, plants, and maybe one or two types I'm forgetting made the class essentially worthless in sometimes quite literally every other combat, but by far the biggest source of the problem was the undead.

But undead are really the only place there's a tension of any kind between my personal sense of "okay, that makes sense to me" and "this is how the game needs to be balanced". And I defer to the latter. I might amend my house rules so that INCORPOREAL undead are immune to sneak attack. While that's a bit fiddly, there is something very weird about the idea of backstabbing a wraith.

As has already been mentioned, 5e explicitly describes sneak attack in terms other than hitting vulnerable points, but for the sake of discussion, let's set that aside for a moment. Assuming that sneak attack did involve hitting vulnerable points, with all due respect to your existing conceptions of various creatures, how do you know that elementals, oozes, and wraiths (among others) lack vulnerable points? Have you had the opportunity to examine one? Very few creature descriptions make explicit reference to vulnerable points. (In fact, ankhegs are the only exception that come to mind.) We make assumptions about humanoids, beasts, and other sorta kinda animal-ish things by analogy to RL, but really we have the same amount of certain knowledge of wraith anatomy as we do about bugbear anatomy - close to none. So, rather than seeing sneak attack as a mechanic that doesn't fit the (your) fiction, perhaps the fact that sneak attack works on all creatures is evidence that all 5e creatures have vulnerable points, and your assumptions about, e.g., elementals, oozes, and wraiths are just incorrect.

(This is pretty much [MENTION=6919838]5ekyu[/MENTION]'s point; I'm just reformulating it a bit.)

 

[Azzy]

Besides, in my games, we fight monsters. Killing people is what the bad guys do.

1e's Shadow Magic, Demi-Shadow Monsters, and other similar spells would like to talk to you.

 

[Azzy]

Wow, this debate about hits points has gotten pretty good. Just for the fun of it, here are the references to hit points in 1E DMG and PHB, in full:

I actually once wrote an article that examined how hit points were presented and described in every edition of the game.

 

[Satyrn]

Sorry if I'm skipping the 10 pages in between, but I think the answer is "both" of the original answers on page 1:

1) It's because the rogue needs sneak attack damage to be viable

aaaand....

2) When you want something to be true in the game world, you simply adopt whichever rationale works for you. E.g., it's about timing, or finding weak spots, or the God of Rogues (a very, very busy god) intervening on their behalf, or whatever.

The other alternative, of course, is that you can actively choose to not do step 2, and then start threads about how some rule you don't like is "immersion breaking".

If you do read further into the thread, you might find to the same conclusion I have. The OP's table includes an assassin who had focused on ambushing the enemy, and at least some of the other PCs are built to help him do so. And it may be that the DM is counting every one of the assassin's targets as surprised, so he is automatically critting in nearly every combat.

The underlying problem here really looks like the assassin is dealing out crazy damage, and the other players are feeling outshined.