Reason why miss chance is after AC?

[StreamOfTheSky]

Just curious what the reasoning for checking for miss chance after the attack roll is.  The rules spell it out clear as day, but I don't see why it should matter, and coul see good reason that if you miss due to concealment, the foe never has to dodge / deflect / block with chest the attack to begin with, so if anything miss % would logically come first.

It's just frustrating.  Was looking forward to playing a character with the Ghostly Defense stance from ToB, but that only functions when the foe misses you due to concealment.  I don't plan to slack on her AC (planning to use Elusive Target's cause ovvereach a bunch, so I want her to be as hard to hit as possible), so the order of operations is just...very dsheartening and frustrating.

[Eagle of Fire]

Simply because if you roll a natural 20 on an attack you automatically hit, no? (NOTE: NOT a critical lower than natural 20) It came up in my last session. I was rolling miss chance first simply to speed things up but my most experienced players told me that if I do that we would never get to roll the actuall attack and see if they roll a natural 20. To which I blinked twice and said that he was perfectly right. I was simply caught up in the moment inside a tedious battle.

and coul see good reason that if you miss due to concealment, the foe never has to dodge / deflect / block with chest the attack to begin with, so if anything miss % would logically come first.

Hit roll VS AC is exactly that: dodging, deflect, block etc. So if you miss with your attack, why roll for a concealment miss? It's already gone. On the other hand, what concealment really mean is that you still see vaguely the target but not well enough to make all of it. So even if you do succeed in your roll hit as normal, maybe you didn't see something critically important while you were swinging so you end up completely missing or you simply bounce on the target armor, etc. So in this very specific case, I simply treat it as a second chance for the target to avoid the blow somehow.

[kurashu]

I have my players roll both at the same time. Hell, I might have them start rolling damage at the same time as well. Nothing much more fun than rolling a handful of dice.

[DonQuixote]

Simply because if you roll a natural 20 on an attack you automatically hit, no? (NOTE: NOT a critical lower than natural 20) It came up in my last session. I was rolling miss chance first simply to speed things up but my most experienced players told me that if I do that we would never get to roll the actuall attack and see if they roll a natural 20. To which I blinked twice and said that he was perfectly right. I was simply caught up in the moment inside a tedious battle.

I have never heard that natural 20 trumps concealment.  Can I get a citation on this?

[zook1shoe]

Simply because if you roll a natural 20 on an attack you automatically hit, no? (NOTE: NOT a critical lower than natural 20) It came up in my last session. I was rolling miss chance first simply to speed things up but my most experienced players told me that if I do that we would never get to roll the actuall attack and see if they roll a natural 20. To which I blinked twice and said that he was perfectly right. I was simply caught up in the moment inside a tedious battle.

I have never heard that natural 20 trumps concealment.  Can I get a citation on this?

+1

[Eagle of Fire]

It is part of an encart (a colored box) somewhere in the player book I think. It's actually supposed to be an alternate or optional rule so I always thought it would override the standard rules.

So did my players.

[DonQuixote]

The sidebar on critical hits (Player's Handbook, page 140) simply says that, on a natural 20, you hit "regardless of your target's Armor Class".  The sidebar on speeding up combat (Player's Handbook, page 142) says that "if the concealment roll indicates a miss, just ignore the attack roll."

The bit that says "ignore the attack roll" leads me to believe that, even on a natural 20, a miss due to concealment is still a miss.

[NunoM]

I think it's simply because of who is making each roll.

The attack roll is made by the attacker, the % for concealment is made by the defender (PHB - pag. 152).

This kind of makes sense - although the rules for concealment were greatly (and badly, IMO) simplified from 3.0 to 3.5 - because when you, as defender, use, for example, "Blur" you appear surrounded by ghostly images of movement. Speed blurs, if you will... You move an arm, and the attacker only realizes your arm isn't there when he's sure he was supposed to hit your arm but hits fog instead... In other words: you dodged the attack, but the attacker only realizes it when he misses a sure strike against you..

In 3.0 this was even more evident, as you had various degrees of concealment. Imagine trying to hit someone in a really dense fog IRL. You see a faint blurry shadow in front of you, and strike where (you guess) it's supposed to be, only to realize the person isn't there when the blow landed.

That's the way we (in my game group) see it, anyway...

[Eagle of Fire]

Well, maybe we play under some kind of house rule... But we always played with "you hit regardless if you roll a natural 20". We consider that an "heroic roll" which can't actually fail.

I guess I really need to keep my books handy when I answer questions here. I was sure it was an optional rule? Encarts often are, at least in the DM book.

[Halinn]

It might very well be an optional rule from an earlier edition, or a houserule you've had so long you forgot that it was one. But in D&D 3.5, it's neither an official rule nor a printed optional rule.

[Kethrian]

My group plays online, so we can't roll handfuls of dice at once.  But when concealment comes into play, I always try to get my players to roll that first, and if it doesn't indicate an auto-miss, then they can go ahead with the attack roll.

[Eagle of Fire]

It might very well be an optional rule from an earlier edition, or a houserule you've had so long you forgot that it was one. But in D&D 3.5, it's neither an official rule nor a printed optional rule.

Good point. What was the rule(s) for 2nd edition?

[NunoM]

The only rule i remember from AD&D is that a natural 20 is always a hit, no matter the opponent's AC and your THAC0 (uhuhh! It's been a long time since i had the chance to type this abbreviation ...

If i remember correctly, there weren't any modifiers or opposed rolls for concealment in the rules. There were some for conditions, which migrated smoothly into the "modern" rules (ex.: defender is prone, attacker is invisible, etc.), but nothing for concealment.

...but i didn't have all the sourcebooks for AD&D, so maybe there were rules somewhere i don't know about.

[Unbeliever]

(click to show/hide)

The only rule i remember from AD&D is that a natural 20 is always a hit, no matter the opponent's AC and your THAC0 (uhuhh! It's been a long time since i had the chance to type this abbreviation ...

My lovely girlfriend played AD&D before we met with some people whom I peripherally know (my high school sweetheart and she went to college, which is how we met).  About a year or so ago, I made some off-hand comment about THAC0, probably b/c we were using an old Planescape screen or something, and I happened to spell out what the acronym stood for.

And she said:  "oh!  It's an acronym.  That makes so much more sense now!" For some reason that always amuses me.