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<blockquote data-quote="Kurtomatic" data-source="post: 5336850" data-attributes="member: 85486">It's much, much simpler than that. The game needs a term for the successful outcome of an attack roll. Instead of repeating the phrase &quot;successful attack roll&quot; fifty-bazillion times, they decided to use the word 'hit' as an official rules term for that outcome. Perhaps they could have chosen a better word, but nothing obvious comes to mind. I don't think this choice is any more ludicrous than intentionally conflating a game term with it's general language meaning.As an aside, Shadowrun used the term 'success' constantly to describe a die roll that met or exceeded a target number, but the current (4th!) edition has now switched to the word 'hit'. Since checks in SR4 now often require a minimum 'hit' threshold, the word 'success' might induce the same kind of confusion faced in this thread. However, when a player says &quot;I have three hits on my Perception check&quot;, nobody pretends there's an attack involved either. Even in the older editions, if a player told me he had &quot;one success&quot;, and I said that wasn't enough to achieve the desired result, no one was going to sqeal like a stuck pig and claim the word 'success' meant what it meant, and I was cheating them of their just reward. On the other hand, maybe somebody did squeal like such, and thus they've switched to 'hit'.., which appearently has its own baggage to live down.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Kurtomatic, post: 5336850, member: 85486"] It's much, much simpler than that. The game needs a term for the successful outcome of an attack roll. Instead of repeating the phrase "successful attack roll" fifty-bazillion times, they decided to use the word 'hit' as an official rules term for that outcome. Perhaps they could have chosen a better word, but nothing obvious comes to mind. I don't think this choice is any more ludicrous than intentionally conflating a game term with it's general language meaning. As an aside, Shadowrun used the term 'success' constantly to describe a die roll that met or exceeded a target number, but the current (4th!) edition has now switched to the word 'hit'. Since checks in SR4 now often require a minimum 'hit' threshold, the word 'success' might induce the same kind of confusion faced in this thread. However, when a player says "I have three hits on my Perception check", nobody pretends there's an attack involved either. Even in the older editions, if a player told me he had "one success", and I said that wasn't enough to achieve the desired result, no one was going to sqeal like a stuck pig and claim the word 'success' meant what it meant, and I was cheating them of their just reward. On the other hand, maybe somebody did squeal like such, and thus they've switched to 'hit'.., which appearently has its own baggage to live down. [/QUOTE]

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