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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 2777892" data-attributes="member: 2011">That's exactly like saying that the "to hit" roll is still successful, even if it is negated by the miss chance. No difference. You actually were successful in making the attack roll with a normal attack. You just were not successful with the attack.Precisely. But, you'll note from the exact words of the rule that it does not state that it supercedes the success of the roll (unlike your claim here). The to hit roll is still successful (just like in the Vorpal case)."If the attacker hits, the defender must make a miss chance percentile roll to avoid being struck."You are not struck. The hit is negated. The hit roll was still successful, just like in the Vorpal case, but the hit is not successful.No difference.And how is negating the "critical hit" in this case different than your statement "negates the hit" in your previous sentence?A critical hit IS a hit. It is just a special type of hit, one that hits a vital spot and does double damage or more (PHB page 303). If you do not hit a vital spot, how do you chop off someone's head? The neck sounds pretty vital to me.You are not crited if the critical hit is negated. The critical roll was still successful, just like in the Miss Chance case, but the critical hit is not successful.No difference.Vorpal does not state that it gets past Fortification (only undead and constructs). Hence, it does not.Fortification, on the other hand, explicitly states that it negates Critical Hits and the roll for Vorpal is explicitly stated within Vorpal as being a Critical Hit.You need a Critical Hit for Vorpal to work. Vorpal says so.People are trying to ignore that part and focus on the roll for the critical hit.I think the reason that people have a problem with this is that a Vorpal weapon explicitly talks about chopping off the heads of undead and constructs, hence to some people, there must be a special hidden rule here that somehow allows for it. That is not the case. A Vorpal weapon is an exception to the normal "not subject to critical hits" rule of constructs and undead. The sentences about constructs and undead are enough to indicate that, even if they do not explicitly call it out.Vorpal was modified from 3E to 3.5 to talk about the roll instead of talking about the Critical Hit, probably because of the Vorpal dicotomy in 3E ("On a successful critical hit, ... undead ..."). In 3E, Heavy Fortification stopped Vorpal cold. I think when they changed Vorpal in 3.5, they tried to change the wording to make it slightly more clear that it affected undead and they forgot about Fortification when they did that. If it were truly the intent of the authors of 3.5 to have Fortification not work against Vorpal (like it did in 3E), they would have explicitly called it out. They didn't. I think the confusion here is totally accidental when they tried to make the Vorpal versus Undead and Constructs more clear.If you have to come up with a argument about the success of the roll as opposed to the success of the result, you have to realize that a high percentage of people playing the game who do not have access to these boards are not going to be able to intuit that without having the synergy of all of the people here talking about it.People in the game are used to events like criticals either being successful, or not successful. Not partially successful. It is very unlikely that the designers had such an interpretation in mind if you have to come up with a difference between success of result and success of roll (i.e. the critical hit is not successful, but the critical roll still is), especially when the Miss Chance rules already work virtually identical to this and the result is different than the proposed Vorpal one.Also, I'm convinced that one of the reasons Fortification was added to the game in 3E because there was no real defense against Vorpal weapons and Swords of Sharpness in 2E. In 3E, Fortification explicitly stopped Vorpal. In 3.5, it became a little more muddied. But, I think the intent was identical.It just got slightly confusing.</blockquote>

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