Thoughts on Magic Melee Touch Attacks and Strength

[TheAlicornSage]

I know a few folks will go "this has been done, strength applies to melee touch attacks by raw."

Not in dispute. But I would say that while I've seen one good reason to use strength for melee touch attacks, it was only one reason, and I've found a problem with that reasoning.

The idea is that strength is what lets you make your attacks quickly enough to hit before your target can dodge. Sounds reasonable, except Improved Unarmed Strike.

Take two identically statted wizards (Aya and Bella), but one (Aya) has Imp Unarmed Strike.

Well, to punch an opponant, Bella has a -4 and incurs an aoo compared to Aya.

But, for a mere touch attack, both are equal.

So, if Aya has an improved ability to strike an opponent, why does her ability to merely touch an opponent not imorove?

Additionally, why does Bella suffer from inability to physically attack an opponant by being so incompentant as to incur an aoo, but to do the exact same thing with a palm and she is suddenly not dropping her guard as much?

While raw obviously overlooks these oddities, I'm not.

So, I think the resolution kn the conceptual side of things, is to mot look at touch attacks as requiring physical contact.

For example, in Naruto (pre shippuden for those who know), Hinata attacks with chi such that she does not need to make physical contact to harm, but certainly does need to be in melee range.

So the idea here is that magical melee touch attacks are not strictly a physical contact affair merely a melee range one, then it would makes sense both that a penalty to unarmed attacks would not affect magic melee touch and also that improving unarmed skill would not impact magic melee touch attacks, both of which are true results of raw.

But this then negates the idea that strength should apply to melee touch attacks (at least for magic anyway, probably not so much for merely incorporeal punches).

On a side note, this also leads to another issue, ac. Armor is not actually a passive defense, but it is mechanically represented as such. Real armor is used to block and parry and you can take a hit where protected to get inside an opponent's guard with armor, and therefore, defending purely by dodging uses vastly different movement styles than defending by using armor to parry and block. As this is an active choice of defense style, it is something not represented in the mechanics, or perhaps the rules assume one always knows which to use against each attack unless flat footed, but yet also assumes one is unable to gain greater skill in dodging except via class bonuses (the monk).

Anyway, what would you folks use for attack bonus for this type of magical melee-range-but-not-physical-contact type of touch attacks?

Any thoughts or critiques you'd like to share?

P.S. the post that started me thinking about this.
https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/36627/do-you-add-your-strength-modi fier-to-touch-spells