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While playing I needed to look up the rules for splash damage and two things seemed counter-intuitive:
1. Why, if you miss the target, can you not still hit in the square you were aiming at? It is a 5 ft. square and the target isn't taking up all of it so if he dodges the attack can't it still hit in that square?
2. It seems harsh to make automatic damage to all other things around the hit square. Why is there no reflex save for half or none? I understand it not always being good to stay together, but you still get a save if they throw a fireball or lightning bolt at you.\
I don't know if I missed anything in the rules and if I did I do apologize.
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While playing I needed to look up the rules for splash damage and two things seemed counter-intuitive:
1. Why, if you miss the target, can you not still hit in the square you were aiming at? It is a 5 ft. square and the target isn't taking up all of it so if he dodges the attack can't it still hit in that square?
Couple of reasons for this. First, the tongue-in-cheek mechanical answer: Because there are no 9-sided dice.
More seriously, the game is an abstraction. Thrown weapons scatter from their target on a d8 roll x 1 square for every range increment thrown. If you want to throw at the target's square, you can do so (hitting a square is AC 5), but it only does splash damage to the target (not full damage).
2. It seems harsh to make automatic damage to all other things around the hit square. Why is there no reflex save for half or none? I understand it not always being good to stay together, but you still get a save if they throw a fireball or lightning bolt at you.
Except for Alchemists' bombs (which do give a save for the splash damage), splash weapons only do 1 point of damage to anyone not directly hit by them. If there were a saving throw for it, it would likely be something like DC 11 or 12, which most (N)PCs would make over 50% of the time, rendering the splash effect moot and creating a bunch more rolls. The net difference would be a bunch of people rolling dice to reduce damage from 1 to 0.
This really belongs in the rules section of the boards, however, not the Pathfinder Society section.
