NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9711071" data-attributes="member: 6877472">This is a consequence of the game over the decades changing how it describes combat.  In a six-second combat round, you are actually doing a lot more than moving (maybe) and making a single attack.  What's being glossed over is the maneuvering, parrying, feinting, and trying to find a good opportunity to get a solid hit in.  There's no doubt several attacks that "miss" in the traditional sense due to the opponent's defensive maneuvers or that bounce of their armor harmlessly.  The attack rolls you make are the opportunities that matter.Similarly, a "hit" isn't whether or not you hit your opponent- it's about whether or not you penetrate their defenses.  This is why Strength grants a bonus to attack rolls (which if you think about it, makes no sense at all- being buff doesn't make you more accurate, yet few people fixate on this point, lol)- it's helping you penetrate the opponent's armor.  We get hung up on "hitting and missing" having their usual terms, but I assure you, when a horde of goblins attacks a lone warrior in plate armor, when their attacks fail to harm him, it's not because his plate armor allows him to Matrix dodge the attacks- quite a few did, in fact, hit him, but with no real effect other than minor damage to his armor!The big weapons with Graze, then, are more efficient at penetrating armor (if I had a complaint about Graze, is that the mastery isn't applied to weapons that in real life were actually good at penetrating armor) due to their mass and striking power.  This "armor-piercing" is reflected in the fact that, no matter how good your armor is, you can't complete negate these attacks.But since the rulebooks have streamlined the descriptions of what's actually going on in a combat round over the decades, while still keeping combat rounds stupidly long (seriously, get out your stopwatch, grab a weapon, and figure out how many times you can swing it in six seconds!).As for your Green Flame Blade example, the spell probably should deal some damage on a miss (compare it with Acid Arrow, which does).  The reason why comes down to two things- balance (if every flaming sword you find in game can deal some damage past armor, armor becomes less useful) and largely that "damage on a miss" was a concept introduced in 4e, and a few (but very loud) people trotted it out as another reason to hate 4e, because they felt it made the game less realistic (somehow).  Thus when 5e was made, the concept was removed from the game (except for spells, where apparently it's ok, lol) to placate this crowd.  Now, apparently, in 2024, they apparently found that the amount of players who hate it are an acceptable loss if they bounce off the game (I presume).</blockquote>

Verification