What do you think of Chance to Hit?

[SangoProduction]

I am playing Pokemon Tabletop Unite again. Helping a GM through his first campaign. Feels amazing.
There is one notable difference between 3.5 and PTU (ignoring the obvious).

The most typical (and especially low level) attacks in PTU only miss on a roll of 1 (before accuracy and evasion). Similar to how most attacks in the video game basically always hit (before accuracy and evasion).

Now, compare that to the expected accuracy of a typical attack or spell being around 50%-75%, with the expectation that it will become increasingly difficult to hit / have enemies fail saves, unless you specifically invest therein. And unless you really stack things, that investment is likely to mostly just stagnate the chances, rather than increase it compared to previous levels and challenges. (Unless you're talking Combat Maneuvers, then you top out at level 1 human and it's down hill from there.)
(This does assume that you don't go back to low level challenges - or more accurately, don't bother going through all the motions, and just sum it up - because, obviously, you do improve relative to challenges that don't.)

And I wanted to know what you guys think of it. I personally like that in each turn of PTU, I am most probably going to be doing *something,* unless I'm going for known-risky moves like Sing with only a 75% chance to hit (ignoring acc/ev). Which is still pretty good odds, even if they end up waking up next turn. (It feels nice that, when you get that one turn in combat in god-knows-how-long, you actually get to do something to progress the game state.)

But also... in 3.5... there's nonsense like Hold Person as early as character level 3. Can't really have that going off, guaranteed, every time it's up. And that's level 3.

And thus, I feel there could be quite some fun discussion about what you guys think about Chance to Hit.

[rel]

In my experience, chance to hit trends towards hitting on a 2 as levels go up. And a martial character has usually reached that point before their level reaches double digits.

Unless the players are going out of their way to keep their numbers reasonable, the sheer number of available bonuses in 3.x rapidly outstrip defenses for CR appropriate opponents.

If everyone is making an effort to preserve the integrity of the combat minigame, and keeping accuracy in the 50% - 75% range as suggested then fights can feel very... wiffy. That's probably the best word for it.

The PC's feel like they're missing quite often, even if it's only a quarter of the time.
And strings of bad luck completely negating a PC's contribution to a fight will come up noticeably often.
In spite of that, the combat minigame works better with that level of to hit chance.

However keeping things at that level, especially at that level for ALL the PC's is actually quite difficult in 3.5 because of the sheer breadth of build options that are available.

[NichG]

I'm a fan of the idea of 'roll to see what it costs' versus 'roll to see if it happens'. It can be tricky to design for. Something like Hold Person for example, I'd say you'd want an HP threshold or a 'choose between serious HP damage or losing an action, Wis modifier acts as DR' or just a weaker effect entirely.

[AsuraKyoko]

Ooh, cool to see another PTU player!

PTU is an interesting case, because chance to hit actually tends to go down as your level increases. Higher stats mean higher Evasion values, and accuracy generally stays more static. This makes anything that gives accuracy boosts very valuable.

The consequences of having such a high hit rate is somewhat tricky to determine, but I think that it contributes to how status moves tend to be rather bad. Spending an action doing something like boosting your stats is often a waste, because you were pretty likely to hit the enemy with whatever attack you would have otherwise used. (The other thing that contributes is that Combat Stages are really weak in the system, but that's another issue entirely. In fact, my group has made some house rules about combat stages and status moves; I can elaborate on them if you are interested)

In other systems I use, typical hit rate can vary a bit. In Savage Worlds it really depends on your character and the types of thing you are fighting, but generally a character has somewhere between 50%-80% chance to hit, depending on circumstances. A well invested character can actually boost their chance to hit to over 90% with the Edges. Interestingly, in Savage Worlds if you beat the target number by a wide enough margin, you do more damage.

The Song of Ice and Fire RPG system does something kind of interesting with chance to hit. Basically, armor give damage reduction, but penalizes your AC; the more heavily armored you are, the easier it is to hit you, but the less damage you take. It's a pretty cool idea, but unfortunately, (like many other things in the system) it has some problems. First of all, it is relatively easy to get your combat skill to be pretty high, which means that, against armored opponents you are going to beat their AC by a pretty large margin (like 15-20). The way damage works is that, for every 5 points you beat the target's AC, you deal 100% more damage. This means that hitting well can very easily negate any benefit that the armor provides.

The other problem is that it is possible, with the right build options, to make your AC exceed the maximum possible attack result. This is, obviously, problematic, but it actually is a bigger problem that it might initially seem; by simply building a character that follows a relatively simple archetype (the nimble fencer), and taking the obvious character options for that archetype, a player can stumble into this unsuspectingly, like I did.

I got a bit off topic here, but if anyone is interested in my experiences with that very janky system, let me know, and I'll be happy to talk about it.