Every week, during the Monday-night D&D game I play in, I reconsider the notion that players should hit monsters about 60% of the time. (I play an arcane striker, lately, so the to-hit rate is of great concern to me.) The idea being that a 9 or higher on a d20 roll should, on average, be enough to hit the appropriate defense score of a monster at the same level as the PCs. Maybe it’s just because I play with a chatty group of six players (the DM makes seven) — and I’m as much a loudmouth as anybody, believe me — but when I fall into that 40% part of the equation, I get pretty bummed.
It could be a long while before my turn comes around again, and the odds are decent (they’re, you know, about 4-in-10) that I’ll miss again, and spend more time waiting around. On a night when the dice run cold, it’s easy to become a spectator. But what’s the alternative?
Chris Sims suggests using 3d6 in place of a d20. The idea, there, is to use the bell curve generated by 3d6 (added together) to increase that hit rate of 9+ to something more like 74% (his math, not mine), thereby cutting down on whiffs during each at-bat. Is this crazy? If it protects the fun at Sims’ table, how crazy can it be? He’s built-in crits and everything.
It’s a simple enough fix, if you don’t find the d20 to be such an integral part of the D&D experience that getting rid of it is unthinkable. It’s a more drastic approach than mine, which was just to throw more lower-level monsters at the party (thereby increasing the number of player hits and the number of enemy hit points on the table all at once), but drastic’s not always bad. (But I’m the guy who tried rolling first for a while, too, so what do I know?)
You’ve played some D&D 4E. How often do you think a player should miss? Where’s that sweet spot between risk and reward for you?
Here’s something alarming: The first thing my brain spewed out in response to “How often do you think a player should miss?” was “Never.”
I got a chance to meet Chris and hang out a fair bit at Nanocon last year, where he was one of the other guests. Great guy.
Since I wrote this, I’ve been considering what never missing might mean, too.
Damage dice might make it so that never missing isn’t utterly unthinkable, actually, especially if speed is more important than peril to your mode of play, I think. And, sometimes, it may be.
D&D becomes different, but not necessarily broken, if people never miss. Add more hit points to, what, everything? (My striker deals 1d10+14 damage with his at-wills; that needs somewhere to go every turn.) I think the game exhausts itself quickly this way (defenses wouldn’t mean anything, obviously, and they’re a load-bearing pillar for sure), but it might be an interesting wrinkle for a fight or a session: No one misses.
I am going to run a session like this one day: a fight on the feast day for the god of Battle — no one misses. Every strike finds its way home. It’s all just a question of severity.
I’m with Jeff on this one. I always liked describing when the player rolled less than the number necessary to “hit” as being an ineffective attack. Or, making/letting the player describe that. That way when you can still get the dramatic cinematic battle.
I guess it’s more of a “sometimes the player misses, but the character doesn’t have to.”
I find it similarly frustrating when my character DOES hit, but doesn’t do much/any damage for whatever reason. So maybe a missed roll means minimum damage, and a successful roll means fair-to-good damage?
Have you played Green Ronin’s Dragon Age? I’ve not yet, but I believe it uses the 3d6 option. It is one of those games I’ve been meaning to play for a while, but just have not gotten to yet.
So is 6 6 6 a critical hit with this variation?
This is one area where perhaps the JRPG computer game has an edge- it’s usually the case that every attack does some damage, but the player input is in choosing a strategy that does damage the most quickly.
I think Will may have hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that defenses would become meaningless when missing is removed. That changes things quite a bit:
-There is no longer any value to armor beyond cloth, other than item powers
-“Miss” effects have no value, nor do abililties triggered by misses.
-Unless it triggers something like backstab dice, there is much less incentive to flank.
-No one would ever use a shield, absent an ability that requires it.
-Enemy marks, which usally just impose a penality to hit other targets, do nothing
-Defenders’ health pools are all that make them better able to take attacks.
-Damage resistance and vulnerablity becomes hugely important.
-All those feats that give bonuses against opportunity attacks have no value.
-Positioning changes, because flanking becomes devalued but opportunity attacks become more powerful.
-Lol, minions.
Perhaps a mechanic where defenses give a static damage resistance would mitigate some of this, but there’s the potential of substanially unbalancing the classes here. Avengers, for instance, would lose a their class defining 2-rolls feature.
The 3D6 idea, on the other hand, is interesting. Crits become rarer, but I think the math would make things that allow you to crit on lower numbers more valuable. It is more addition though, and that might slow things down.
Also, you’ve gotta love criting on the number of the beast 🙂
3d6 seems like a pretty good alternative to me. You have to come up with something for crits, but any of the old 3.5 hacks for that would work.
Operating in purely theoretical mechanics-space, I’m not sure I see the need for a “miss” in D&D. Why does there need to be a binary gate in front of overall damage in 4e?
Read Chris Sims’ piece and you’ll see that he’s figured out that 17 and 18 crit out nicely (they approach the 5% frequency rate on the dice). Plus it means that you can have a crit and some sort of super-crit, even if only for cosmetic purposes.
This has me thinking back to a percentile system I’ve messed around with in the past, in which the percentile isn’t a roll-under system but a mandate of how often the character succeeds. If your Shooting skill is 70%, then you must miss three times for every seven times you hit. Part of play is deciding when to miss, to “charge up” the hits again.
In fiction, characters miss to raise tension and seed doubt and create, you know, drama. Missing in D&D can create drama… or you can just look at it as a 40% of dealing 0 damage each round. But what if each miss dialed up the damage on the inevitable hit? So that the game builds those moments where characters fail dramatically before rising up and, with one fell blow, slaying the villain?
That, of course, creates a potential problem in that D&D is a team sport, so that’d be a lot of characters potentially ramping up to the climactic strike at once, but I’m just kicking ideas around here. Maybe that’s not a problem at all.
To clarify, when I say “I’m not sure I see the need” I mean both that I’m not sure, and that it seems to me that the reengineering involved might be interesting.
Word, Russell.
Hmm, my math has 17 and 18 crit happening just under 2%, but I’m bad at math. 4 combos out of 216?
It would also be interesting to see how powerful abilities are which let you reroll 1 of your d6s.
No math whiz myself, but something triggering off 3 of the same # would be interesting. For example: three 4’s = 12. Let’s say that is a hit, make it a critical. Or if it is a miss, let’s say that it triggers some other effect . . . a dodge bonus to defense, or a ringing blow that while not damaging staggers the opponent, etc.
Hmm.
but something triggering off 3 of the same # would be interesting.
That’s kind of similar to cherries and sour cherries from Unknown Armies.
In this case, 3-of-a-kind rolls will happen one time in 36.
Here’s a thing from a game design I’m tinkering with (we also used it in our WFRP game and once in D&D4).
When you fail a roll, you get a Rage token. You can save up a number of Rage tokens equal to your level. You can spend any number of your Rage tokens before a die roll to add +2 to the roll per token spent. If the roll fails, you keep your tokens (and gain an extra one). If the roll succeeds, all the tokens spent on the roll are lost.
You can spend Rage tokens on an ally’s roll if your character is in position to assist them. Like, if you attack a monster and miss, you can pass the Rage token you got to the next player who attacks that monster — “I’m distracting it! Get him!”
Another untested use: Spend a Rage token to add +2 damage to a successful roll.
I don’t think that Armor or Defense have to become meaningless. If the idea of always hitting becomes a core mechanic, you would need to assess how much skill/equipment should mitigate the damage of an attack. It becomes a matter of tiers and the difference between them.
I can imagine that defense could remove dice from the damage pool while Armor is a flat damage reduction. At the same time, attack bonuses would need to add dice to the damage pool and weapons dictate the dice type (magic might provide a flat damage bonus).
The issue with this resolution is that you could create a situation in which a player can never hit the target… though this is not an issue to everyone. After reading the Rage Token, I can see that as a useful addition to the above… though I might want to create an additional “Master Plan” option that allows you to roll a skill to gather similar tokens instead of ‘attacking’ when you know your going to miss (i.e. damage reduced to 0).
The simple alternative would be some sort of minimal damage being dealt on a miss. For example, a miss might always deal 1 point of damage; or 1 point of damage per character level; or assume you rolled the minimum damage possible on the attack. Tweaking for balance would obviously be necessary.
A more interesting alternative might be: “Misses always do something interesting.” This can be merely descriptive, but it can also have meaningful impact. For example, your bullets miss but hit the glass window behind the bad guys — showering them in broken glass. Or you fail to deal damage, but only because you caught their sword and drove it into the ground (forcing them to yank it free). Or your axe slammed into the stone pillar, sending chips of stone flying into your opponent’s eyes (they suffer a -2 penalty).
I just remembered an old blog post I wrote about this.
http://mightyatom.blogspot.com/2008/06/dms-toolbox-consequences.html
Basically, you turn a miss into a partial success but you pay for it.
I had some similar ideas on my blog a while ago. Let me know what you think.
http://www.crunchfluff.com/2010/12/ruminations-on-narrative-control-in.html
The average roll on a 20 sided die is 10.5 ([1+20]/2). The average roll on 3d6 is 10.5 ([1+6]/2 + [1+6]/2 + [1+6]/2). Obviously there are no decimals in DnD so you’re most likely to roll a 10 or 11 in either case. Rolling 3d6 makes it more likely to get around the middle.
Each 1d6 roll has a 1/6 chance of getting a certain number. A toss of 3d6 gives you 216 possible roll combinations like a 3, a 2, and a 4(1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6). If you add up the results, 160 out of these 216 possibilities add up to a number higher than 8 (what the average character needs to hit).
If the average character needs a 9 or better to hit, rolling 3d6 gets you at least a nine 74.07% of the time. Each number on a 20-sided die has an equal 5% chance of showing up, so rolling 1d20 only gets you a 9+ 60% of the time.
You are, however, much less likely to roll the extreme ends with 3d6 (“3″or”18″= 0.46%). Hence, if you were to graph the probabilities it would look like a bell curve.
This creates a problem with critical hits that might be too tricky to solve. Essentially, the rules as written take into account a 5% chance to crit. You’d have to come up with a fair way to match this number with rolling 3d6.
I propose you keep the d20 and just make characters (and perhaps monsters) more accurate. If you’re seeking a ~74% chance of hitting, you need a 6 or better instead of a 9 on 1d20. Maybe characters automatically get weapon expertise feats. Maybe everyone just has an extra +1 to attack.
Result Freq. Prop. Cumulative Prop.
3 1 0.46% 0.46% 100.00%
4 3 1.39% 1.85% 99.54%
5 6 2.78% 4.63% 98.15%
6 10 4.63% 9.26% 95.37%
7 15 6.94% 16.20% 90.74%
8 21 9.72% 25.93% 83.80%
9 25 11.57% 37.50% 74.07%
10 27 12.50% 50.00% 62.50%
11 27 12.50% 62.50% 50.00%
12 25 11.57% 74.07% 37.50%
13 21 9.72% 83.80% 25.93%
14 15 6.94% 90.74% 16.20%
15 10 4.63% 95.37% 9.26%
16 6 2.78% 98.15% 4.63%
17 3 1.39% 99.54% 1.85%
18 1 0.46% 100.00% 0.46%
Here’s the theoretical frequency and proportion table for 3d6