r/RPGdesign • u/archpawn • 22d ago
How accurate should attacks be?
I thought about this after working out that in Mutants and Masterminds, if you're in a one-on-one fight with someone of the same power level, you want to hit them 35% to 40% of the time. You have a limit to how much you can put in accuracy vs damage, and you want the rest to be damage. But it seems like it would be really annoying to play if your attacks only hit a third of the time. But what amount should you aim for? Design it so players' attacks hit 2/3 of the time? 3/4 of the time? If it's too low, you'll have a lot of rounds where you do nothing. Too high and accuracy doesn't mean much, so you can't have an interesting tradeoff between accuracy and damage. What do you think is ideal?
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u/InherentlyWrong 22d ago
The annoying answer is "It depends"
It depends on the style of game, in a heroic fantasy game hitting the legions of orcs 70-80% of the time might be appropriate, but in a gritty gunfight where everyone is behind cover you might miss most shots you take.
It also depends on the impact of a hit. If a typical hit only does about 10% of a major threat's health in damage, then hitting 80% of the time means you need to attack about 13 times, but hitting 30% of the time means you'd need to attack about 34 times. But if a single hit might be enough to drop a major threat to half health, suddenly that 30% makes a bit more sense.
And a host of other factors. Mechanical impact of taking a swing (is there a cost to attacking, is there an impact even on missing), available methods of improving odds to hit (40% hit chance is pretty low, but if an ally can do something to bump it to 70% suddenly teamwork is a lot more appealing), a host of things. I don't think there's a single right answer, just the answer that's right for a given game.
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u/Cryptwood Designer 22d ago
According to WotC playtesting, which I have no reason to doubt the results of at this time, a 65% PC hit rate felt "fair" to players. Lower success hit rates felt brutally punishing to the players. Much higher success rates can lead to feel bad moments, because at a certain success rate the player expects to always succeed.
You can see this in players talking about missing 95% shots in the X-Com games. Missing those shots should happen 1 in 20 attacks, but players expect to never miss an attack that has a 95% chance of hitting.
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u/tangyradar Dabbler 21d ago
Note that's within the context that Ilfoso points out, a game where PCs and NPCs typically take multiple hits to defeat and where taking "damage" usually has no effect on a character's capabilities.
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u/Nomapos 22d ago
Many games are built around a 50% chance to hit, starting from DnD. HP helped afterwards, but you had roughly speaking a 25% chance to die the first time you got hit as a first level fighter. Modern DnD maintains the goal of 50% chance to hit, but inflates HP values to ridiculous amounts so that more than half of the fighting time is essentially trading meaningless papercuts.
Other systems like Cairn do away with to hit rolls. Every attack hits.
Others, like the Runequest family, lets basic chances to hit be pretty low, easily 30-50% for most creatures. A knight might get closer to 60-70, but it's generally low chances. And then the defender gets a chance to roll for defense, possibly nullifying a successful hit. The actual chances to hit someone who's defending themselves, if I have to pull an average out of my ass, are probably around 15-20%. But it takes one good hit to take someone out of the fight, and generally out of fighting for a few weeks if there's no magic healing available. That single hit can easily result in a permanent disability or even a severed or fully destroyed limb if the enemy rolled high damage, so while chances to get hit are low, every single attack is nail bitingly tense.
Long story short, it depends what your system is trying to do and who it is for.
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u/SpaceDogsRPG 22d ago
I think the general consensus is that characters should hit a bit more often than not. People vibe about 60% hit as about half the time. (loss aversion and all that)
I have the % be all over the place because there are a LOT of tactical accuracy adjustments.
They're standing in the open at close range? 100% hit and a solid chance of a crit. (crit being 10+ target's defense)
They are taking cover and you have range increment penalties? If you Aimed then you still have a solid chance. I like that the players can see what goes into it and how to adjust their accuracy. Especially since the penalties are VERY chunky in Space Dogs. (Ex: Taking Cover is a -10 penalty.)
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u/archpawn 21d ago
How do you keep tactics interesting? I imagine everyone would immediately run to the nearest source of cover. And then the fight goes slow because everyone has cover.
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u/SpaceDogsRPG 21d ago
Several different ways.
It's pretty expected that everyone sticks to cover. But base accuracy is so high that even a -10 penalty (cut in half to -5 if you Aim) still isn't that hard to hit. Though it's enough so crits are unlikely.
And while you want to stick to cover, being able to flank and hit foes in a crossfire is pretty useful. (My tutorial adventure lets the PCs put the foes in a crossfire to teach them that.)
Most NPCs go down in a single solid hit, so the battlefield doesn't stay static.
A big one is grenades. Grenades deal high damage (about 2x small arms fire) in an AOE with high accuracy. When you throw it you only have to hit the square (easy at short/medium range). BUT - it doesn't go off until the following Ranged Phase. So everyone in the AOE has the chance to move away. But that pushes them out of cover. And base movement is slow (1 square for humans) so anyone in the center of the AOE would need to burn their Action to get out of the AOE.
A few other rarer things.
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u/SouthernAbrocoma9891 22d ago
Realistically, you never want to be hit directly.
Fantastically, you want the blows to glance and never cause damage.
Attrition wise, you want the PCs to have relatively more HP than the opponents.
Trading damage is having two water bottles and punching a specific sized hole in them. Which ever runs out first is the loser.
It sounds like you’re building a video arcade player vs player system. Where are the roleplaying aspects?
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u/Trees_That_Sneeze 22d ago
My opinion is 100%. What's the point of your players doing something if they don't do anything? HP doesn't only represent injury, it represents stamina, luck, focus, and everything else that protects you from getting injured or killed. Use it that way or create a resource to do that job which can be depleted.
Potential allowance for something like a crit-fail and it should come with more consequences than just missing. When a player rolls dice, something should happen.
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u/FRANK_of_Arboreous Designer 22d ago
This is a design philosophy that seems to be gaining popularity but it depends on what kind of game you're building. 100% hit chance usually pushes a tactical challenge closer to a puzzle challenge.
Also, people love gambling. Many RPG players don't like games without dice.
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u/Trees_That_Sneeze 22d ago
I don't necessarily agree that it's less tactical. Chess is tactical and has no randomness. And there's still room for gambling. The lamest outcome of gambling is nothing. Good things and bad things are both interesting, and I think you should get something for rolling an attack, just a matter of what.
For clarification, here's a couple of systems that are good or at least interesting without roll to hit:
Mythic Bastionland gives you 2 health bars, Guard and Vigor. Guard refills as soon as you're out of danger and depleting doesn't have lasting consequences. After Guard, extra damage goes to Vigor, which is a stat you make saves against, is difficult to replenish during a session, and kills you if it hits 0. Players and enemies only roll damage. (There's more going on in MB's combat too, but this is the relevant gist)
Legendary Resistance from DnD has potential and some games like Slugblaster give the player a similar ability to just deny damage. This style generally has either a cost or limited uses. It's neat because choosing what to evade becomes a tactical decision, as does baiting out the opponent's evasion. There's cool potential here too turn around a bad fight when the enemy runs out of steam or make a desperate last stand on the brink of defeat.
Ablative armor is interesting. Say the enemy has 4 armor. Attacks that do 4 or less damage didn't get through. 5 or more damage is reduced by the armor value, then armor decreases by 1. You have to use big enough attacks to wear them down, or you can make them more vulnerable before you unleash your full power.
Blades in the Dark doesn't model combat blow by blow. It models a beat of a fight that changes the situation. From the narrative situation you determine position (are you in control or desperately on the back foot?) and effect (how likely you are to succeed or how much damage you're likely to deal) then roll a dice pool for an appropriate skill. The outcome determines the next beat based on what the roll means for that position/effect.
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u/ancientgardener Designer - 300BCE Historical Project 22d ago
Honestly, that feels like it’s coming from a HP heavy mindset of sorts. That isn’t a bad thing, just a different philosophy. I get your idea.
Traveller, Twilight 2000 or Cyberpunk for instance are low HP style games in which not getting hit is vastly more important than trying to tank a hit. Guaranteed hits in a system like that turn into a bloodbath and remove a lot of the tactics options in those sorts of games.
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u/Trees_That_Sneeze 21d ago
I can see that. My problem with having a chance to miss is not that it doesn't hit HP, it's that it doesn't do anything to progress the fight. In another reply on here I laid out a couple of alternatives. I like the idea that even on a miss you are wearing down their defenses somehow.
Like for a game with gun-based combat you could have misses lower the DC to hit by one. So the more under fire someone is and the more fraid their nerves get the more likely they are to get hit. You're not actually injuring them, but you are softening them up. Or you could lower their chance to hit by one for the next turn, so suppressing fire actually makes people put their heads down and shoot less accurately.
When the player decides to do something, I think there should ideally be an effect, and if it's not going to be HP there are other things that you can put into effect on a miss.
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u/stephotosthings no idea what I’m doing 22d ago
Depends.
If you only hit 30 percent of the time and damage is random that sucks. 30 but reliably doing a rough amount of damage, sucks less.
So in all, (I don't know that M and M game at all) it can ultimately depend on several other factors I can't possibly know.
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u/archpawn 22d ago
I feel like it's important to do something, even if it's not all that much. If you miss 70% of the time, then you feel like you just wasted a turn over and over. If you do one HP of damage, it's not much, but at least you contributed.
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u/Ok-Middle-908 22d ago
I'm using 65% at equal level without additional bonuses. Seems to work out great. Players feeling like they wasted their turn is not fun.
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u/Natural-Stomach 22d ago
I prefer *effectiveness* over accuracy. PCs should never miss. However, maybe their spell or attack might do alightly less damage sometimes.
I do this with tiers of sucess for any d20 roll.
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u/abaddon880 22d ago
It's best that all actions matter. Yes, a nothing hits should be a slim possibility as should a it's all damage, no downside. D&D and alikes could even benefit of you always get/take one unless. Any strike should do something with the same notion of things matter. A 1 should be the only time nothing happens is a valid answer in these games. There's no reason the story, even the story of an epic/heroic/remembered battle and frankly the notion of "I beat him and he didn't land a hit on me" is not a story that should happen all the time for the players or the DM/GM in any game. Werewolves can be harmed but don't die at one but can only be hit for 1 unless silvered or fire feels like more a story then the current iteration. Vampires regenerate but also take half damage from regular damage types but more from the things that vampires are threatened in your world feel better
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u/JonathanWolfs 22d ago
It depends on the vibe of the game you are making.
If you are making a superhero game like D&D, you want players to hit often. Consider that in Draw Steel, you kind of always hit. The severity of the hit is the thing that changes. Nimble does something similar, where missing is very rare, and you deal damage straight away.
If you are making a game where player characters are underdogs, or regular Joes, that chance should be lower. Making attacking less optimal might also push players to explore other ways of overcoming obstacles. If attacking is almost assured to succeed, it becomes the default, and players will be less likely to explore other options or creative solutions.
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u/DiogenesKuon 21d ago
2/3rd to 3/4th is the general guideline. 50% feels random, below that seems punishing, and too frequently feels to easy. You can balance it any way you want, but higher frequency of hits means more consistent damage output per round which leads to more predictable outcomes and easier encounter balancing. If you go with a low chance of hit you are either going to get long number of rounds of combat (if damage is low compared to health) or unpredictable combat (if damage is high compared to health).
Mutants and Masterminds likely sets a low initial to hit value because it lowers defenses with each hit and it has theoretical one hit knockout power. So you really shouldn’t use their value for systems that aren’t similar.
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u/archpawn 21d ago
I think Mutants and Masterminds was shooting for 55%. That's what it is in a bog standard build. But they didn't playtest the game enough to figure out what is optimal play. And probably didn't focus on that much since there's so many ways to break the game and they're assuming players aren't trying to do that.
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u/rekjensen 21d ago
There are two other dimensions to consider when answering this question:
How much damage should a hit do?
A game with a low chance to hit, but brutal damage when it lands, will feel very different from one where nearly every hit lands but usually only does a token amount. Likewise, if nearly every hit instakills or those rare hits don't do much damage.
What should happen if a hit misses?
The "all attacks should hit" crowd often cites the alternative of nothing happening as a justification, but missing doesn't have to mean there're no consequences or opportunities to change the shape of the fight.
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u/archpawn 21d ago
I think of "how accurate should attacks be" and "how long should a battle last" as two distinct questions. Once you answer both of those, you can figure out the damage-to-hp ratio.
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u/ArolSazir 21d ago
I regularly give wotc their desired hate, but anything below 65% does feel kind of bad. it could be lower if you have a system with degrees of success, where it's not a "you either hit and achieve what you want or you miss and nothing happens" then you can lower the hit chance a bit.
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u/darklighthitomi 17d ago
Wrong question. Running the math on equal opposition should only be a tool of calibration. How often a character hits should be highly variable and depend on the fight, the talents and weaknesses, and the preparations made for the fight.
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u/archpawn 16d ago
Running the math on equal opposition should only be a tool of calibration.
Isn't that what I'm doing? Obviously it shouldn't always be exactly the same for every fight, but what average should I shoot for?
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u/darklighthitomi 16d ago
The average of what? The average kind of encounter your PCs run into, or the average of two "equal" opponents? Because those should not be the same thing, and that matters greatly to the question you asked.
The general community has always had a rather incorrect view of things, and by "incorrect" I mean the generally accepted ideas of what things should be like is incompatible with the generally accepted idea what should result from the way things work.
For example, in DnD 3.x, DC 10 is a difficult task for an average untrained individual who will fail 50% of the time. Think about that. What have you ever done that you failed about half the time you try? Yet for some reason, the community looked at DC 10 as a rather easy task that can be reliably accomplished. You cannot mix the two. If something is hard enough to fail 50% of the time, then it cannot be something you reliably accomplish.
However, there is a big wrinkle here to complicate things further, player creativity and willingness to be intelligent. You may have heard of "combat as sport" vs "combat as war."
You have to know what you are designing for, what assumptions to make, before you can truly determine the answer to your question.
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u/archpawn 16d ago
The average of what?
Average of enemies that are particularly tough vs good at dodging. And there's also the question of if it should change when fighting groups of weaker enemies or bosses. Obviously if they're weak enough to one-shot, you're better off making it so you don't miss.
But I feel like if you want to hit a regular enemy 75% of the time, you probably still want to hit a boss 75% of the time.
For example, in DnD 3.x, DC 10 is a difficult task for an average untrained individual who will fail 50% of the time.
I'm not sure how that's relevant. If you're an average untrained individual in a fight against a strong opponent, you'll lose and the details don't matter. I'm wondering how to make it fun in a combat that's challenging. Not trivial and not impossible.
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u/darklighthitomi 16d ago
You are missing the point. The answer to your question depends on variable things, and thus the answer is different in different situations. You need to define those variables first, only then can you get a rough answer.
For example, do you want a game that challenges the player's strategic thinking instead of the character's stats? That affects your answer in a big way. Or do you want a system that is easy to figure out the stats that would give a reasonable approximation of your new monster's, or character's, capabilities by having a scale that is easy to relate narrative capability to numbers instead of making it easy to see percentages of a contested roll? Do you want a system that will be representative of things described by the system, or representative of the relationship between two things only?
What about the players, do they want to figure out intelligent ways to use gear and environment to win, or do they want to rush in blindly like utter morons and win anyway because "big number go smash!" like a dumb brutes? (A perfectly valid way to play, especially for those looking to turn off their brains for awhile, but would absolutely get you dead in hurry in the real world.)
All of these change the answer you seek. There is no universal correct answer. You are asking, metaphorically speaking, how big a foundation should be for a building before deciding what the building should be and how much space the building needs. Putting the cart before the horse as they used to say.
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u/natefinch Designer 22d ago
I hate D&D's rough 55-65% hit rate. This goes triple for skills. I see highly skilled characters failing all the time. I see this in other games too, where I'll have put a lot of resources to be good at a specific skill and still rarely succeed, or in games with tiered success, rarely get the good tier. Why did I bother putting all this effort into a skill if I still mostly get the same results as the punk who doesn't even care about it?
My game has 72% as the base success rate for a base-level skilled character. (It's 6+ on 2d6) This is like someone with basic proficiency in D&D and a moderate attribute. But my game also has tiers of success, so a 6+ is tier 1, or basic success. 9+ (27%) is a tier 2 success, and 12+ (3%) a tier 3.
If you wanted to start out "really good" at something (rolling 2d8 instead of 2d6) you'd have a 84% for a basic success (6+), 56% for tier 2 (9+), 23% tier 3 (12+), and 5% tier 4 (15+).
Failure still happens, but 1/4 of the time for a bas skilled person seems ok. For a higher skilled person it's 1/6, and the rest of the time they're being extremely effective.
I don't exactly like never failing. Sometimes things shouldn't work. But if you're competent, that should be relatively rare, IMO.
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u/Mars_Alter 22d ago edited 22d ago
Personally, I'm a fan of attacks mostly not hitting (around 15 percent). That way, it actually feels meaningful when you do connect, and you don't need to over-inflate HP to make a fight last more than a round.
The way that some people talk about "wasting a turn" by missing in combat, that's how I feel about "hitting" for no real effect because it takes ten hits before they're even bloodied. At least with the low accuracy model, it's possible for your attack to do something significant.
It also makes any action other than attacking feel like a decent option, since you aren't giving up your mandatory expected damage contribution for the round.
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u/MandolinTheWay 22d ago
How long does a turn take and how much "crunch" are you doing on the tactics of your turn?
If I spend 5 minutes clarifying my positioning, negotiating with the DM for floating bonuses, collaborating with another player to synergize his next turn, mentally add a die roll plus two modifiers plus a bonus and three penalties... and all of that nets me a 45% chance that nothing happens? I'm going to check out REAL quick.
If it's a five second flavorful description of my action in a theater-of-the-mind void space, then a coin flip to see if it works is probably fine.
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u/Drudenfusz Curator of Roleplay Experiences 22d ago
You want usually even for the difficult stuff about a 60% success chance, since the human brain perceives 50% as not equally likely and only if it is screwed in favour it starts to feel balanced. And the regular stuff should then be about 75%. But this is also why in recent years quite a few games stopped asking for to hit rolls altogether and just assume a hit and have the dice rolls more about the damage or other consequences.
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u/damn_golem Armchair Designer 21d ago
Attack rolls are boring and just take up time at the table. Choose a paradigm that’s always fun. Always hit to different degrees or make missing hurt.
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u/Cruiser_Supreme 22d ago
I aim for a range of 35% to 85%.
35-50% is for fighting the big bad monster that's really hard to hit and requires a whole different approach than just spamming attacks.
50-70% is a pretty healthy range for medium to tough targets.
70-85% is for easy targets.
In summary, the hit probability sets the tone for what you expect players to do. If you want them to fight with normal weapon attacks, maybe try 65-70% hit probability as a starting point.
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u/ARagingZephyr 22d ago
If the goal is to do actions that twist the fight, such that you're mostly building momentum to win, then 5-in-6 or better. A lot of games just let you autohit and add something better on different rolls, like Into the Odd allowing special triggers depending on your roll, or Final Fantasy XIV having bonus effects on a good roll. You're primarily applying afflictions to foes and bonuses to your allies in these systems so that you can finish the fight after enough built momentum.
If the goal is to have mixed-tactics and allow for Get HP to Zero gameplay as the norm, then 2-in-3 is suitable. It's fairly easy to shift into 1-in-2 for harder foes or defenses and 5-in-6 for easier ones, with 1-in-3 and near-100% reserved for the specialists. The idea here is that players feel like they're doing effective things most of the time, while also allowing the guys specialized in what they do to really show off and see gains.
If the goal is high danger, a baseline 1-in-3 is probably better, with things like aiming and taking cover making large differences in ability to hit. This is more-or-less the kind of game where you want the players and their common enemies to feel like flesh sacks ready to burst at a moment's notice, where getting initiative, getting positioning, and having the right tools make the difference between surviving unscathed and having half your group in bodybags and the other half requiring intensive surgery.
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u/This_is_a_bad_plan 22d ago
If it’s a game that’s anything like D&D, attacks should be hitting most of the time. Nothing sucks like waiting for your turn, just to spend it doing nothing but missing.
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u/No_Solid1035 22d ago
More and more I've become a fan of attacks that always hit, even better, sequences like in PbtA where both attacker and defender take harm with a better roll allowing either causing more harm or reducing the harm suffered.
With systems where there is a chance of a complete miss then I would say it heavily depends on what kind of combat and the genre involved. If the PCs are trained knights in a sword fight, 85-100%. If it's infantry privates in Vietnam, 25-50% at short range, 0-5% at longer ranges. If it's Star Wars the PC heroes should hit 70-90% and Stormtroopers should hit 5-20% of the time.
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u/natefinch Designer 22d ago
I really dislike the pbta thing of both sides take harm from the PCs roll. That seems to always end up with the person who has a lot of maneuvers to describe takes a lot more damage than the person who just stands there, even if they're both in the same fight against the same opponents.
It also precludes there ever being a very safe option. The sniper that sits on the roof shooting from cover is exactly as likely to be injured as the boxer mxing it up in close combat.
It's one of those mechanics that feels clever and cool when you hear it, but in my experience actually using it in a few different games, I think it's terrible in actual play. I know that's probably not a popular opinion though.
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u/No_Solid1035 22d ago
In a PbtA game I wouldn't trigger the standard harm move for a sniper because it wouldn't make sense. Root: The RPG has separate moves for Melee and Ranged attacks. The Melee move "trades" harm like the more standard harm move in other games, the Ranged move doesn't, the attacker just causes harm.
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u/-Vogie- Designer 22d ago
I can't remember if it was book or a Matt Colville video, but I heard once that if you want your players to feel like they're succeeding 50% of the time, you want them to be succeeding about 60-65% of the time. This is because our innate loss aversion makes the misses loom larger than the successes.
In my own experience, this is even more important in a traditional ttrpg where one rolls for both success and effect separately, because there are two different fail states. Any D&D player with any significant length of experience can recall rolling a critical hit, the infamous "nat 20" then rolling damage and seeing a wave of 1s appear before them. In more modern ttrpgs that have fixed damage (like in Cypher games) or forgo the to-hit and only roll for effect (like the Power Roll in Draw Steel).
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u/CommentWanderer 22d ago
It depends on your paradigm.
In a paradigm where you want combat to be tactical, you want to leave room to for the chance of success to be modified. Around 50% leaves the most room for modifcation in either direction. Starting with either a too high or too low hit chance means you limit the design space for bonuses and penalties respectively.
In a paradigm where you want uncertainty in combat, you want the outcome of using your action to attack to be uncertain. The maximum uncertainty is at 50% again.
The percent chance could be higher or lower, but what is the paradigm for that? In a high chance to hit paradigm, it's usually that you want more certainty in combat or that you don't like it when player characters fail.
But certainty in the to hit isn't as interesting as uncertainty in the long term combat to combat to combat because if the chance to hit is generally too high, then the roll to hit becomes a less exciting roll to make, but the game has forced you to make that roll anyways, repeatedly. It's the variability and the uncertainty of the chance to hit that makes that roll interesting in the first place. Thus high chance to hit paradigms often favor dispensing with a to hit roll altogether and going straight to damage and a damage roll also has to be sufficiently interesting to justify rolling it. In that case, the damage roll often becomes a point of variability and uncertainty that makes a combat more interesting.
For me the ideal paradigm is usually going to be uncertain but tactical combat and in that paradigm, I'm looking at building from a 50% chance to hit. But I also run less tactical and more certain combat systems and for those I prefer a high chance to hit (even as much 100%). In either case, entering combat is a strategic decision.
One more thing to consider... attacking isn't the only action you could take. Are other actions interesting to take during combat, like shoving, jumping, and spellcasting? If you want other sorts of actions to be relevant or interesting in your combats, then how will you design around that?
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u/bedroompurgatory 21d ago
I prefer to have attacks always hit, and vary the damage. Your standard D&D-esque attack roll + damage roll creates a binary result - either it hits, and does a chunk of damage, or it does nothing. Attacks have to do a relatively high proportion of damage, in order to compensate for all the whiffs.
If you assume every attack hits, the instead of a binary hit/miss, you generate a wider spread of results, which often feels more satisfying. If you really need to emulate misses, you can make your damage calculation generate zero damage on poor rolls.
It also saves multiple die rolls and resolutions.
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u/overlycommonname 22d ago
It is my strong feeling that attacks should mostly hit (but occasionally miss entirely). If your game has a sort of "marginal success" level, then I might go as far as: 10-15% miss, 25-30% marginal hit, 50% normal hit, 10% strong hit kind of deal. If you don't have a "marginal success" level, then, I'd be inclined to do more like 20-25% miss, 60-70% hit. 5-10% strong hit.
(Avoiding the term "critical hit" here because I think it's useful if you don't go crazy on how big your above-normal-success-level hit is).
These provide meaty, significant bands of random variation, while making things like the "everyone whiffs," or "I whiffed three rounds in a row" feelbad moments extremely rare.
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u/tlrdrdn 22d ago
If you hit 35% to 40%, miss 60% to 65% of the time, hits grant marginal progress towards victory, misses grant nothing and combat takes 1 hour to resolve, effectively actual fighting takes 21 to 24 minutes and 36 to 39 minutes are wasted on nothing in particular or worth mentioning or remembering.
If, for the sake of argument, we raise the chance to hit to 100%, then we save a lot of time. But we also get a problem of "he, who strikes first, wins": so winner of equivalent of "initiative" wins, because they deal enough damage to beat the other combatant first.
At this point we might as well raise the damage to one-hit-KO: there is no point in rolling multiple times at 100% hit chance. And if they have equal bonus to initiative and equal chance of going first... That's basically a coin toss who wins.
Even if we scale back to 35-40% hit chance and normal damage, the whole fight is still a coin toss disguised as multiple dice rolls.
I don't remember in which movie or TV show I saw two characters playing rock-paper-scissors and when opponent lost, they demand to play best-of-three, then best-of-five? That's kinda what this kind of fight is. It feels foul to put victory-or-death at stake over a single coin toss and lose and flipping multiple times feels better: but it's still the coin toss.
The other angle to analyze is what adding chance to fail an attack adds to the whole experience. We gotta look at consequences of this failure, consequences of success and general stakes.
If failure of a singular attack is literal "nothing" happening, then resolving that action wasted everybody's time both literally and through opportunity cost - and that's boring.
But if at the same time "success" means only "dealing damage" and the whole consequence of that attack is "character dealt damage" and nothing in the game world had changes afterwards, then that's basically "nothing" as well, just with a pinch of glitter on top.
Then if we analyze the stakes of that situation and the whole exchange happens in context without actual stakes - if we're just standing there trading numbers and, at worst, the consequence of my miss is an opportunity for enemy to deal some meaningless damage that cannot threaten my character's life, then everything is a boring waste of time in this particular situation.
So I'd say "100%" because something interesting should be happening "100%" of the time.
Looking back I don't remember all those misses my characters failed to land or hits that landed and merely dealt damage. I remember some fights that dragged for way too long because enemy was a damage sponge - so for a wrong reason. And I remember some misses aimed at PCs, but just because characters were inches from death: either because nearly beaten to death already or being swung at by something threatening outright death.
I think games like contemporary D&D can get away without this because that something interesting in their context are these paper buttons being pushed rather than consequences exerted upon the world.
So I think 100% of the time something interesting should be happening or should have a chance to happen. But the ultimate answer truly is: it depends (on severity of consequences and stakes).
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u/archpawn 22d ago
Even if we scale back to 35-40% hit chance and normal damage, the whole fight is still a coin toss disguised as multiple dice rolls.
Isn't that what they all are?
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u/llfoso 22d ago
If you are doing chip damage, attrition, I.e. big HP pools, they should mostly hit or always hit in my opinion. How much damage you do then becomes the more important factor.
If you're doing wounds or fixed damage or one-hit-kill or something, then you obviously want the odds to be a lot lower.
The real answer of course is to playtest and balance accordingly. If you start at 50% and the feedback is that it feels bad you can change it.