Inspired by this thread I was wondering if some players would like the game more if the game's balance was focused around melee attacks interacting with the 4-degrees of success system. I could envision something like:
Critical Success: The same as it is now.
Success: Also unchanged.
Failure: Deal your attack modifier in damage to the target.
Critical Failure: Either just a miss or a miss that gives you some minor penalty until the start of your next turn.
In reality, that little bit of extra damage won't change combat math very much but it opens up space for weapons, feats, and archetypes that focus on grinding our a higher damage floor in exchange for a lower damage cap. It also means that a miss isn't binary and a failure still comes off as a glancing blow rather than a failure to even land a touch.
If this was implemented and balanced do you think it would enhance the feel of the game?
There's already an optional rule to add 4 degrees of success to martials: critical hit/fumble decks.
And they do a fun job of it, most of the time.
Anything beyond that is more likely to bog down the game with having to remember more things, which is the opposite of why I tend to pick martials. My numbers and actions do their thing, double their thing, or they just don't do their thing.
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A “glancing blow” for half minimum damage on failure was an idea early in development.
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I think conceptually it's interesting, but you'd have to cut attack bonuses and/or damage, just because it's so easy to throw attack after attack at enemies. The biggest examples are Two-Weapon Flurry or Impossible Flurry, which are very good already.
Crit fail giving a penalty could be good, or it could just result in being super punishing for the temerity of rolling a 1 on an attack, which is statistically pretty likely to happen. (I had the massively fun experience earlier this week of my martial refusing to roll above a 4 on attacks for three rounds in a row, and also rolling incredibly mediocre on some of the things I used to try and help allies.)
I think conceptually it's interesting, but you'd have to cut attack bonuses and/or damage, just because it's so easy to throw attack after attack at enemies. The biggest examples are Two-Weapon Flurry or Impossible Flurry, which are very good already.
Crit fail giving a penalty could be good, or it could just result in being super punishing for the temerity of rolling a 1 on an attack, which is statistically pretty likely to happen. (I had the massively fun experience earlier this week of my martial refusing to roll above a 4 on attacks for three rounds in a row, and also rolling incredibly mediocre on some of the things I used to try and help allies.)
Wouldn't enemies doing the same back to you also be a balancing factor?
Plus, in this sort of design meta, a martial character might invest in a method of avoiding the effects of critical failure. Rather than crit fishing (swinging for the fences) you might aim to get balls in play (trading easier times on hits for weakened crits) or extending you at-bat (lessening the effects of critical failures and slightly enhancing damage on a miss but perhaps giving up crits entirely). These might even be something as core as a stance or fighting style and could interact with counterpart defensive stances to constantly have each side shifting and angling for some advantage.
13th Age was really good about keeping combats from bogging down.
One of its mechanics was that martial strikes did a small amount of damage on a miss but not on a critical miss.. (Level in that case)
Am a little sad that PF2 doesn't utilize a similar mechanic to differentiate missing from critically missing.
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Alchemist bombs get the full 4 degrees of success.
I advocated for firearms to get similar mechanics, but discovered most players hate getting a little damage on failure.
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The game isn’t quite set up to work for just half minimum damage on miss, with elemental damage runes and whatnot that could be a lot of damage or not.
Instead I’d suggest half your flat mod (i.e. str+weapon spec) but of course bow/dex users won’t see anything until until level 7.
13th age works because you can only make like 1-2 attacks per turn. 4e is very similar with many encounter/dailies having a miss effect, but most of that is because 4e powers are usually a single roll and done, and you can usually only use one a turn.
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4 degrees of succes for martials ... 1/2 damage on fail
It would take 10,000 hours to play out a combat.
Discussions on balance changes are missing the point, in my opinion. All fall under crushing tax of marking hit points every. single. swing.
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Just seems like it would encourage taking attacks with MAP more, and thus incentivise making more strikes and less anything else as the best approach. Which even if it were balanced is not very appealing.
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There are already 4 degrees of success for martials. The F and CF results are the same on their own but CF on a Strike means you have opened yourself and enemies with abilities like Riposte can use that. Also all maneuvers have 4 distinct degrees of success.
Edit: Fighter Press attacks with a Failure effect also already use all 4 degrees.
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Casters pay a very steep price for the mitigating effects they have. Only 2 cantrips have them (acid splash as written does not do splash damage on a miss and has not yet been errata’d as far as I know). One of those spells is ranged touch, the other is 30 ft. Both take 2 actions. Otherwise they apply to limited resource spell slots and focus spells. 1 time a turn with a very restricted set of options.
Martials can attack 3 times, and would be able to do this with any weapon. No one would ever move or do anything interesting in combat.
A game could be designed differently around 4 tiers of success and be fun, but it would be a very different game.
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Exactly how happy would players be with foes dealing damage to them on everything but a natural 1?
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Critical Failure:
Have you seen Riposte? It is very strong.
Fighters and Swashbucklers have some pretty good things that trigger off critical failures. I'm sure there are some others out there too.
So this ground is sort of covered already.
Martials can attack 3 times, and would be able to do this with any weapon. No one would ever move or do anything interesting in combat.
I think this is nonsense as outside of very low levels doing 3-5 points of damage on a miss is going to be worse than using another action that will let somebody else land proper hits. It would require balancing around this idea but isn't some complete nightmare that changes the fundamental nature of PF2.
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Martials can attack 3 times, and would be able to do this with any weapon. No one would ever move or do anything interesting in combat.I think this is nonsense as outside of very low levels doing 3-5 points of damage on a miss is going to be worse than using another action that will let somebody else land proper hits. It would require balancing around this idea but isn't some complete nightmare that changes the fundamental nature of PF2.
I don't really know what you want to hear. Maybe this thread should be moved to the homebrew forum, as it is not really anything that could possibly happen in another context?
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Obvious other things to consider is how it heavily devalues things like Confident Finisher, Certain Strike, and splash weapons.
Alchemists would cry in this.
Obvious other things to consider is how it heavily devalues things like Confident Finisher, Certain Strike, and splash weapons.
Alchemists would cry in this.
Paizo should have made bomber alchemists playable without first wasting an action to drink a mutagen, then checking that the stars are aligned, spacing out a few moments wishing they could rely on true strike like casters are forced to do can, and finally rolling just enough to do splash damage.
I don't really know what you want to hear. Maybe this thread should be moved to the homebrew forum, as it is not really anything that could possibly happen in another context?
My wondering is why Paizo used 4DoS for everything except melee and ranged strikes? They use it for skills, maneuvers, spells, and anything else they can think of and not for the most common die roll in the entire game. Given that doing so would hardly be unworkable, I'm left to wonder what they think they've gained by leaving it absent from this single slice of design space while seemingly designing an entire archetype - the bomber alchemist - around it.
I don't really know what you want to hear. Maybe this thread should be moved to the homebrew forum, as it is not really anything that could possibly happen in another context?My wondering is why Paizo used 4DoS for everything except melee and ranged strikes? They use it for skills, maneuvers, spells, and anything else they can think of and not for the most common die roll in the entire game. Given that doing so would hardly be unworkable, I'm left to wonder what they think they've gained by leaving it absent from this single slice of design space while seemingly designing an entire archetype - the bomber alchemist - around it.
DOMA polled very poorly during the NEXT playtest for 5E. The concept sparked a mini E war all on its own. Im guessing the PF2 designers wanted to sidestep that powderkeg. Not saying this was the only reason, but likely a strong one.
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As Rex said upthread, they did consider this, and playtesting showed it to be unfun.
I think ultimately something like this could have been balanced, and might be something we see on a Rune or the like, but evidentially their math shows it to be too powerful on lower level characters.
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My wondering is why Paizo used 4DoS for everything except melee and ranged strikes? They use it for skills, maneuvers, spells, and anything else they can think of and not for the most common die roll in the entire game. Given that doing so would hardly be unworkable, I'm left to wonder what they think they've gained by leaving it absent from this single slice of design space while seemingly designing an entire archetype - the bomber alchemist - around it.
I think they did. 4DoS isn't the same everywhere. If you look at skills, then failure means you spent actions but didn't accomplish anything; if you critically fail then bad stuff happens. Spells are a bit different: you expend a resource and then only on an enemy critical success, nothing happens. As opposed to "on a success, nothing happens". So spells are shifted one degree compared to skills, but spells tend to have a more significant cost than using a skill.
Attacks on the other hand are like skills in that you do the regular thing on a hit, a better thing on a crit, and nothing on a fail. The difference is not normally getting bad stuff on a critfail, but there's a good reason for that: MAP. Skills sometimes get penalties of -2, but getting a -5 is very rare. And you're often rolling against on-level DCs. With attacks though, you're also often rolling against above-level DCs and taking a -5 or more in MAP. So if you got fumble effects on a critical failure, they'd happen really really often.
And this comes back to a 1E thing - fumbles. In theory the idea of fumbles was cool, in practice it was quite unfair. Consider the monk making three or four attacks per round, compared to the 2H barbarian making one and the wizard making zero because fireball doesn't require an attack roll. The monk is getting many more fumbles just for playing the wrong class.
So, we don't want fumbles in 2E. But what about damage on a miss? That would mean grading attacks more like spells like fireball. But you don't have a limited number of attacks to expend per day. So how are you going to balance that?
And damage on a miss also changes the balance of weaknesses drastically. If I'm fighting a demon who's weak to cold iron and I do some damage even on a miss, you bet I'll want to use a cold iron weapon. Because as long as I do just 1 damage I get 5 or 10 bonus damage.