Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="dcollins" data-source="post: 287043" data-attributes="member: 876">Perhaps the following may be helpful, and I don't believe it's been clearly stated previously.* Let's say you're making a "normal" ranged sneak attack (with bow, thrown dagger, etc.) against someone with no armor (AC 10). Is your chance to hit any worse than if you were making a regular, non-sneak, ranged attack against that person? No -- there's no actual in-game attack penalty, even though allegedly you're trying to hit a more limited vital region on the target.* Magic touch attacks, in-game, simply go through armor as if it wasn't there. Therefore, from the point of view of a magic ray, every target is effectively presenting itself without any armor -- and hence your chance to score a sneak attack with a ray should be exactly the same as in the case above, i.e., with no penalty over the base AC 10 to hit.In short: no form of sneak attack has any added attack penalty over the normal attack chances. There's no reason for magic rays to "avoid" armor, because it goes right through it (ignores it), just like there's no penalty for a normal sneak attack needing to "avoid" allegedly non-vital areas on the target.-----------------------------------------Footnote: Here's a little bit more comment on the claim that rays can "hit their shield rim", which is not actually implied by the rules. In fact, if that were so, it would actually connote a larger hit region than if a target had no shield, which isn't the case because no such bonus is given. Rather, what is the case is that (again) touch attacks go through armor as if it wasn't there. Example 1: Hit the outer rim of the shield? That should be considered a possible result when you roll a touch attack miss -- the ray clearly missed the person, and would have regardless of whether they had a shield or not (by the nature of a ray touch attack).Example 2: Hit the inner or center part of the shield? Then, yes, that's represented by a touch attack hit -- the ray went through the shield in a place where the person was behind it to take the attack. It's not that damage is conducted through a person's armor, it's that the ray itself simply "ignores" (the critical word) the armor.Maybe that's helpful for visualization purposes.</blockquote>

Verification