Attack rolls as Basic Saves I.e. damage on miss

[AsmodeusDM]

Without getting too much into the why’s Initially just wanted to understand the problems a rule like this would create and which ones it solves:

Basically on attack rolls you follow the following rules:

Crit: double damage
Hit: regular damage
Miss: half damage
Crit fail: zero damage

Also as a tangent thought: in order to speed up play ever so slightly perhaps instead of roll dice->half for Miss it’s a static value such as avg. result/2 or Minimum possible damage.

Eager to hear how this violates the very soul of the game and will bring certain death to all of pathfinderdom :)

[vagrant-poet]

Roll damage at the same time as the d20 speeds up play anyway, and reduces the fiddling with minimum damage.

This amounts to make attack spells +2 better than equivalent saves. But honestly, the game won't break too much, because attack spells aren't particularly good to begin with.

Do not do this with other types of attacks or you enormously buff Strikes, like basically saying everyone gets +3 to hit, or goes up several die sizes at once. It's an enormous buff and makes spells and bombs effectively pointless because doing something on a fail is how they are already balanced, swinging twice is how strikes are supposed to level out.

[AsmodeusDM]

Yes I was specifically talking about Strikes.

I’m not a fan of PCs oftentimes accomplishing nothing on their turn (due to say missing their attack). I have the same issue with spells where the passed save results in no results. Waiting 10-15 minutes just to roll a d20 and nothing happens is a tough sell.

[thenobledrake]

Problem #1 caused by adding half damage on a miss for a Strike is that you would then either A) accept that the game's balance has been thrown away and just let the game be broken, B) reduce the damage output of Strikes so that the expected damage values are the same as now despite something happening on a miss, or C) crank up HP values so that the increase to expected damage values results in the same percentage expectations as now despite something happening on a miss.

B and C require a lot of math and takes a lot of effort and the result is, at least in my opinion, not actually worth it for reasons of both "it ain't broke, so don't fix it" and reducing the "this feels different from that" aspect which is necessary for game elements to not get boring (variety, spice of life, etc.)

As for the theory here: It's the negative-focused view of "I waited for my turn and then nothing even happened" that is needing to change, not the action not guaranteeing some result - and that should be evident just by the house rule you suggest still involving a "nothing even happened" result.

Failures highlight success. Without failure, and at pretty regular rate, the sought after successes will be less and less interesting - there was no challenge swaying the odds, and no lucky moment, just the same-old thing that grows more and more boring the more reliably it happens.

So focus on that something did actually happen, the battle progressed - and focus on that most turns you aren't looking at just one chance at a d20 roll resulting in something cool, you can regularly take multiple actions that involve a chance to roll high and feel like you accomplished something.

[AsmodeusDM]

Right so let’s talk about A; game is broken, I like that sound of that.

Consequences of that?

#1 thing I see is faster combats as hp totals should deplete faster. Similarly PCs should find their hp dropping faster too; especially from lower level monsters who require say a 16 or higher to hit (who would now do half on 6+).

#2 correlated to #1 is that second and especially third attacks would be more appealing combat option

What are some other consequences you can think of?

[Rysky]

Your PCs getting knocked out/killed way more often, combat in P2 is already much more deadly than P1's combat.

[AsmodeusDM]

What about if it only applies to PCs? (i.e. only they get to do half-damage on a miss).

Or a reverse form of incapacitation wherein if you are higher level than your target; you do half damage on a miss?

[Rysky]

If I was a PC I would feel like the GM is handling us with kid gloves, would kill interest a bit.

for a second bit we're getting into too many stipulations here.

[thenobledrake]

AsmodeusDM wrote:

Right so let’s talk about A; game is broken, I like that sound of that.

Consequences of that?

As you point out, HP totals would indeed be depleted faster - and that'd be especially rough for the PCs if you didn't arbitrate that NPCs don't get the same benefit.

But another part of this consequence is that the current balance between Strike and Spell would be changed. Currently, at-will spells are slightly behind Strikes, and slot-costing spells are slightly ahead of Strikes if used in the "right" circumstance for the given spell - this change to Strikes would mean that Strike-based damage would always be better than spell-based damage except when a spell manages it's best-possible use conditions (such as catching an entire encounter-worth of enemies in an area effect damage spell).

That's likely to sway some players away from playing characters that use spells, and sway some players that still play spellcasters to skip taking most damage-dealing spells because they can do better overall by using Strikes and support magic instead.

Your players may be into this... but the core idea would be a deal-breaker for me as a player.

[Gorbacz]

Yeah, playing a caster would make no sense under these rules.