Touch attacks: is it just me..?

[takyris]

If you have weapon finesse, then sure, it's definitely a Dex-based "snatch an object"-style attack. All my ranting about the importance of Strength is only for people who want to use Dex without a feat.

 

[Pbartender]

Nydia the female sorcerer was being influenced by some red coin of an evil nature. During the in-party conflict, she held her hand out and looked at the coin in her palm, "How did this get here?" Next initiative, Nym, my STR 6, DEX 20 elven child rogue swings his hand up in an attempt to slap the coin from her hand. Nym has weapon finesse.

Is this a touch attack?
3.5 weapon finesse says all natural weapons are considered light?
Does he get his weapon finesse bonus?
If he didn't have weapon finesse, I would have to role with his -2 STR mod?

Nope, that's a disarm attempt.

She gets an AoO against you, if armed. You make opposed melee attack rolls, winner gets the coin. You'd get a -4 penalty (assuming Nydia is medium-sized) due to your size. You do get to use Weapon Finesse, since you are using a "Natural Weapon". If you did not have Weapon Finesse, you would indeed use your strength modifier.

 

[KnowTheToe]

To avoid the AoO and to stop her from gabbing the coin again in the future, use your great axe and cut her hand off. Problem solved. Next!

 

[woodelf]

Hey all,
I'm considering Rule-Zeroing touch attacks, and making all melee touch attacks *automatically* Dex-based, with no option of making them Str-based.

Has anyone else here gone down this road? Is there some weird game-balance karma that I might be disturbing by making this ruling?

only slightly weirder than having a dagger attack be more dependent on str than Dex. I'm considering going the route of any weapon larger than your size uses Str, any weapon smaller than your size uses Dex, and i haven't decided whether same-sized weapons will use Dex or Str. There will, of course ,be feats for altering each of these to the other.

Personally, i think that Str is already over-powered, benefitting too many scores, so anything that decreases its importance (especially to non-combatants, who are generally the ones making touch attacks) is helping, not hurting, game balance.

 

[takyris]

Personally, i think that Str is already over-powered, benefitting too many scores, so anything that decreases its importance (especially to non-combatants, who are generally the ones making touch attacks) is helping, not hurting, game balance.

Personally, I'd love to see you back that up.

Strength:
- Melee Attacks: Major
- Melee Damage: Major
- Ranged Weapon Damage: Could be major, but I don't see it that often -- not all bows are mighty, and people seem to not love thrown weapons
- Carrying Capacity: Honestly don't see this one that much in my campaign as a limiting factor -- I'd call it Minor
- Climb, Jump, Swim: Am I the only one who saw all the threads about how spellcasters make these skills effectively obsolete? I'd call these Minor in a normal-magic campaign

In Sum: It is possible for a character who limits himself to ranged combat or finesseable weapons to do just fine, and it is downright easy for a spellcaster to do so.

Dexterity:
- Ranged Attacks: Major, especially once ranged touch attacks come into play
- AC: Major
- Initiative: Major in my opinion, although I'm open to debate
- Reflex Saves: Has to be Major, it's one of the big three
- Hide, Move Silently, Balance, Tumble, etc: Hugely Major

In Sum: If you have a lousy Dex score, you are hurting your combat ability, your non-combat utility with respect to skills, and your overall survival chance (through AC, Init, and Ref saves). Dex is already ALMOST a "gotta have" for anyone who isn't a dedicated back-ranker, and it's even a "should have" for them, since they're doing ranged touches a fair amount of the time.

Please don't make Dex any more important than it already is. If you misinterpret what the ability scores mean, you can almost always attribute something the way you want it. Heck, Hit Points are abstract, and are more about dodging than absorbing tons more damage -- so maybe it should be Dex instead of Con that modifies Hit Points. And since I know that I can get hit by a poison stinger, make two fort saves, and be fine, when in real life I can't, it must be that I'm dodging the poison -- so I'll add Dex to Fort saves instead of Con. Playing a stringed instrument is more about finger movement than about having lots of presence, so Perform checks should be based on Dex instead of Cha. Stop. Don't do that. You're messing up the system.

 

[woodelf]

Personally, I'd love to see you back that up.

Strength:
- Melee Attacks: Major
- Melee Damage: Major
- Ranged Weapon Damage: Could be major, but I don't see it that often -- not all bows are mighty, and people seem to not love thrown weapons
- Carrying Capacity: Honestly don't see this one that much in my campaign as a limiting factor -- I'd call it Minor
- Climb, Jump, Swim: Am I the only one who saw all the threads about how spellcasters make these skills effectively obsolete? I'd call these Minor in a normal-magic campaign

In Sum: It is possible for a character who limits himself to ranged combat or finesseable weapons to do just fine, and it is downright easy for a spellcaster to do so.

Dexterity:
- Ranged Attacks: Major, especially once ranged touch attacks come into play
- AC: Major
- Initiative: Major in my opinion, although I'm open to debate
- Reflex Saves: Has to be Major, it's one of the big three
- Hide, Move Silently, Balance, Tumble, etc: Hugely Major

In Sum: If you have a lousy Dex score, you are hurting your combat ability, your non-combat utility with respect to skills, and your overall survival chance (through AC, Init, and Ref saves). Dex is already ALMOST a "gotta have" for anyone who isn't a dedicated back-ranker, and it's even a "should have" for them, since they're doing ranged touches a fair amount of the time.

I concur that Ref saves are very important--to everyone.

Initiative in D&D3E doesn't matter a damn bit. Since almost everything functions on the "from your action until just before the same initiative number in the next round" time unit, it doesn't matter whether you go on 20 and th other guy goes on 15, or you go on 5 and the other guy goes on 20--either way, you go 5 counts ahead of her *and* 15 counts behind her, in steady repetition. After the 1st round, having a higher initiative number is meaningless. And IME, 1 round doesn't make much difference after about 2nd level.

I see where you're coming from--i was looking at it in a very different way. I was thinking of it in terms of utility to individual people, not overall utility.

I hadn't thought of dex for spellcasters--IME, spellcasters don't bother with a high Dex because they don't use it. Most spellcasters in my games haven't used many ranged touch attacks, and the difference that Dex makes to AC is still too small to matter.

Rogues obviously need a lot of Dex, as do monks. But they also need Str (especially the monk).

But when you look at the fighting classes, dex gives you AC and Ref saves. But armor is far more effective at helping your AC than Dex is. The Dex impact on Ref saves is pretty much overwhelmed, IMHO, by class and other bonuses, and teh die roll. The problem is that saves are fairly infrequent events, unless they're do to an attack that a monster makes repeatedly--and the only one that immediately comes to mind for that is Fort saves vs. poisons.

Attack & damage rolls, on the other hand, usually come in batches, which averages out the effect of the die roll, letting even small modifiers make a difference. If you have poor Dex, buy armor (if you're a warrior), either don't mess with traps or boost your skills (if you're a rogue), or stick to spells that aren't ranged touch attacks (if you're a spellcaster). If you have poor Str, you're screwed--it clobbers your attacks *and* your damage, so you can't really trade off between the two. There's not much else that boosts attack rolls and damage as much as Str does. [i'm obviously not counting magic--because that can boost anything.]

Hmmm...i suspect i'm not being very articulate. Let me try it this way: i can't think of any other stat that gives a double boost to any one activity, much less the central activity of combat. Dex *does* benefit a whole bunch of things (some important skills, some elements of combat, a save), but none of them are overwhelming, or make up as much of that class of activity as Str does of combat. Put another way, i'd play a fighter with crappy Dex before i'd play one with crappy Str, just from a survivability standpoint.

Finally, if Weapon Finesse doesn't break the system, i guess i find it a bit of a stretch to claim that basically giving everyone that benefit for free would break the system.

 

[hong]

Initiative in D&D3E doesn't matter a damn bit.

Nonsense.

Since almost everything functions on the "from your action until just before the same initiative number in the next round" time unit, it doesn't matter whether you go on 20 and th other guy goes on 15, or you go on 5 and the other guy goes on 20--either way, you go 5 counts ahead of her *and* 15 counts behind her, in steady repetition. After the 1st round, having a higher initiative number is meaningless. And IME, 1 round doesn't make much difference after about 2nd level.

You need to play past about 10th level or so, before making statements like this.

 

[mmu1]

Initiative in D&D3E doesn't matter a damn bit. Since almost everything functions on the "from your action until just before the same initiative number in the next round" time unit, it doesn't matter whether you go on 20 and th other guy goes on 15, or you go on 5 and the other guy goes on 20--either way, you go 5 counts ahead of her *and* 15 counts behind her, in steady repetition. After the 1st round, having a higher initiative number is meaningless. And IME, 1 round doesn't make much difference after about 2nd level.

Well, let's just say that your experience is either very limited or highly atypical, because initative starts of as very important (since there are multiple 1st level spells that can easily take half a party out of commission, and plenty of low CR creatures you really want to disable before they have a chance to act) and as sneak attacks improve, spells get more interesting, and characters acquire ways of casting more than one spell in a round, it becomes crucial.

 

[woodelf]

Well, let's just say that your experience is either very limited or highly atypical, because initative starts of as very important (since there are multiple 1st level spells that can easily take half a party out of commission, and plenty of low CR creatures you really want to disable before they have a chance to act) and as sneak attacks improve, spells get more interesting, and characters acquire ways of casting more than one spell in a round, it becomes crucial.

Well, my direct experience is a 2+yr game (weekly), from 1st to ~9th level. I'll let you decide if that is limited (but given the rules have only been out a bit over 3yrs, unless you have time to play more than weekly, it'd be hard to better us by much more than 50%). I can think of exactly one combat where we gained a significant advantage by getting the initiative jump, and none where we were hurt by losing it. I can also think of exactly one combat where we even bothered to jigger with our initiative after round one to any effect. (We did it a whole bunch at first--until we realized it just didn't matter.) There are probably a couple examples of each i'm forgetting, but i can think of tons of times when we couldn't see any difference between the guy with the 23init and the guy with the 7init. In fact, just before the game changed systems, the GM was toying around with houserules to actually give the people with high initiative an advantage. After round one, it doesn't matter what your initiative number is--everybody is before everybody else, and after everybody else. Admittedly, our experience is probably atypical in the sense that we had nobody with the sneak attack skill at any point in the game.

Now, getting the drop on people--*that* is great. But that's a whole round to act, plus the beginning of the first real round. And it's something you can plan for. The other reason Dex doesn't matter to init is the magnitude: i played a monk and had the highest init score in the group by several points, and we all were surprised when i rolled the highest initiative for an important combat, because it happened so rarely. In general, my high init bonus was thoroughly trounced by rolling 3s and 5s while the "slow" characters rolled 18s. The difference between an 18 Dex and a 10 Dex is 4 points. Improved Initiative is +4. The die roll is a d20 and there are very few other things that affect it (other than spells/magic items), so my monk only had a roughly 20% boost over the slowest characters (not a lot of stats under 10), and usually less than that. The die simply overwhelms Dex for initiative, especially if you only roll once per combat.

 

[Norfleet]

IMHO, and this is admittedly with a lack of extensive experience in 3E PnP campaign play, as lately, I've mostly been doing wargaming sets, lacking the time for a full campaign, having a high initiative is something which is far less important with long encounter ranges, and is less beneficial overall than a contiguous initiative block for the entire group: High initiative enables a character to, in effect, go first in the first round of the battle, but after which he's simply an outlier from the rest of the group.

Contiguous initiative, on the other hand, enables the party to operate as a coherent unit, that faces the same tactical situation on its "turn". In a group action, the fact that every member of the group faces the same tactical situation on their turn, not a situation which has changed due to the movement and actions of opponents, is far more valuable than simply going first.