Failed attack rolls are one of the more irritating parts of normal play. Somehow there always ends up being some poor schmuck at the table who has nothing to do but sit quietly until it’s time for them to roll a d20, announce they missed, and lapse back into bored silence. No amount of encouraging creative play or constructing interesting encounters prevents it entirely. I’ve become convinced that it is a genuine flaw in the game’s structure. It’s okay for the game to be frustrating, but it shouldn’t be be boring.
In all likelihood, Ava has the correct idea by simply removing attack rolls entirely from Errant. In her version of the game play moves directly from announcing an attack, to rolling damage. But let’s say we want to solve the problem while maintaining the traditional form of Roll to Hit, then Roll for Damage.
In the past I’ve suggested that failed attack rolls deal half damage. I do think this would be an improvement. Players can consistently rely on being able to contribute something, even if it’s just whittling away the foeman’s hit points a bit. The downside, though, is that it flattens out the drama of combat, right? Misses become less tedious, but hits are made commensurately less enjoyable as well. A hit no longer means overcoming a miss, no longer makes the difference between progress and zero progress. There will be times when a player misses, then rolls 8 damage which gets halved down to 4; then the next round they hit and roll 3 damage which doesn’t get halved. In the long term it is always better to hit, but it is less better than it used to be.
So I’ll propose a new solution. Missed attacks deal no damage, as in standard play. For each combat, players should keep a tally of their missed attack rolls. If they miss 3 times during a single engagement, their next attack is automatically a critical success. Which, in my game, allows them to automatically maximize their weapon’s potential damage (so, 8 for a d8 weapon), as well as perform a combat maneuver of some sort, like tripping their foeman.
The 3 misses need not be consecutive. Landing a blow does not reset the tally, but the end of combat does. I’ve settled on 3 as the number because it’s big enough to feel well earned when it occurs, but also small enough that it never feels too far away. Also, by my estimation, most combats in my games only last 2~4 rounds, so I figure this would be a fairly uncommon occurrence. My goal is not to make the players want to fail, but simply to give them some consolation prize to keep them engaged when they do. A sort of miniature barbarian rage as reward for enduring an enraging situation.
If a character earns their auto-crit, but doesn’t get to use it before the end of combat, they can keep it to use in the next encounter. When a player has an auto-crit, though, they must use it next time they attack. It can’t be banked for the most opportune moment. Also, I think the definition of “a single combat” can be a little flexible here. The aim of this limitation is to avoid a running tally that guarantees everyone a few auto-crits every session. But if the players roll 2 encounters in a row which both devolve into brawls, I think I’d count them as a single combat for the purposes of this rule.
*Unless they roll half of 1, which gets rounded down to 0 in order to differentiate it from rolling a 1 when you hit successfully.
I used something a lot like this in my 4e games, and think it worked quite well. We called them whiff tokens.
I suspect even the “just roll damage” approach still has this problem. If you have someone who just rolls 1 damage all night, it probably feels about the same.
Having played a bit of Errant, I don’t think the same problem does exist. Nobody likes rolling low damage, but that only happens 1/8th of the time (assuming d8 damage dice), and at least you didn’t have to roll a 16 on a d20 in order to deal that 1 damage! 😛
By offering automatic critical hits to players one waters down excitement of the the true critical hit. Perhaps instead when failing to perform any critical actions you might consider giving the PC xp instead. This way the character learns from its mistakes and gets better naturally.
My concerns are reversed from yours on this point. I’m not concerned about maintaining the excitement of critical hits. They’re not a primary source of excitement in my games. I am concerned about players gaining too much XP though, since I try to maintain a very shallow power curve.
I like this rule. I’m bumping up against something similar with my system of downtime activities, but it’s even worse, since it means some characters may develop their schemes more fully than other characters. I institute something similar.
Interesting. I’ve yet to run into that sorta thing myself. Your work on downtime rules is great stuff that’s very relevant to me, so I’ll be interested to hear what you come up with.
It’s rare that I’m all that impressed by a game mechanic innovation anymore, but this is a really simple and elegant idea. I mostly play Into the Odd-based games so it’s mostly moot for me, but if I do ever run a more traditional OSR type game again or another game with attack rolls, I’ll probably house rule this.
Wow, and here I thought it was just sort of a throw-away idea. That’s really high praise, thank you.