"You see this."

Lots of tables have home-brew rules for firing into melee. I pick the idea apart because mechanically, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

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What is a “miss”?

Everyone knows that a missed attack in a TTRPG doesn’t necessarily mean you completely whiff. A miss just means your attempt(s) to attack failed to penetrate your target’s defenses for that round, whether that means a wide miss, a narrow miss, a deflected/absorbed miss, or in the case of melee, 6 seconds worth of actions that failed to inflict damage. This is a fact, written into the mechanics; your Armor Class improves not just for having the dexterity to avoid or mitigate contact, but for wearing heavier, denser armor that deflects or absorbs incoming attacks.

So straight from square one, the very notion that a missed missile attack could hit something or someone else is a very deliberate adjudication; an extrajudicial, non-rules-based decision made by the referee that your missile attack not only failed, but failed so widely that you did not connect with the target at all… so widely that the missile went utterly astray, far enough astray to hit another unintended target.

1. You miss your target, you hit an ally.

Of all the adjudications that should not be, this is in the top five for me.

In order to hit an enemy, you roll an attack against the target’s AC. It’s apparently hard to hit someone armored or agile. So it makes no sense that an attack roll that misses one target should just automatically hit anything else—much less an ally— free of intent.

Consider this; if we extend that logic, a PC has a 100% chance of hitting if they fire at random into melee intending to miss, because the result is apparently that a missed shot is guaranteed to automatically hit for damage against any AC on the board… all that’s left to do is determine whether the shot hits friend or foe.

And that problem doesn’t get fixed by rolling against the ally’s AC on a miss either. Firstly, the miss could have gone high, low, long, hook or slice… it’s still the Referee’s decision that the miss goes anywhere near an ally in the first place.

Additionally, the PC wasn’t aiming for their ally—was not trying to penetrate their AC, was not aiming for a gap, or waiting for a shield to drop—so even if the shot does approach an ally, it should at least merit a steep penalty against the ally’s AC.

Roll for miss vector

There are varying systems for this; roll a d8 or d12, each value has a different vector ascribed to it; miss high, low, left, right, or by a number of degrees, etc.

The system is actually irrelevant; the fact that the Referee is importing a reference system from a crunchier game to determine where a missed attack went should tell you everything you need to know: The Referee wants that shot to do something deleterious. They want it to happen so badly that they will shoehorn a mechanic in from somewhere else to discourage you from trying to fire into melee in the first place.

Best case scenario? Once the vector is determined, at least one more roll determines what deleterious effect the miss has had (hit through ally AC, destroy something valuable, etc). Worst case scenario, the vector points toward an ally, and the Referee decides that the missile automatically hits.

Miss by factor

This system is simple, but still superfluous. You roll a d20. You need an 18 to hit. If you miss by 5 (13) the shot is true, but does no damage. Miss by 5 more (8), and the shot goes astray. Miss by 5 more (3) and you hit an ally. Or similar, you get the idea. My favorite DM uses this, and I’d never object, it’s all good fun. But this is an idealogical takedown:

There is some objectivity here, but it falls apart: A roll of 13 might have hit a poorer armor class, a roll of 8 isn’t enough to hit a target with no armor, a roll of 3 is nearly attacking with one’s eyes closed so ok, you might hit an ally… but a roll of 1 always misses. Basic rules. A 1 always misses. You can’t hit an ally on a 1. You can’t hit the broad side of a barn with a 1. If you practice critical hits and misses, maybe the weapon breaks, but the attack shouldn’t hit shit. So somehow, it’s worse to roll a 3 than a 1 in this example.

More importantly, whatever the system, it’s still inventing ways to make things “go more wrongly” than the game intended for an action to go.

Just missiles, huh?

When the Fighter misses with their sword, it would never occur to that same Referee that the blade could strike a comrade. If a spell requires touch (and thus a to-hit roll), no Referee would assume that the caster somehow managed to touch someone else. This punitive failure state is explicitly tied to missile attacks.

I can imagine justification, of course. Missile combat is low-risk to the attacker, and this introduces a degree of risk. Failure for Melee attack restricts your movement, casters can’t move and can be interrupted to fail, so logically, archers can fail and hit allies.

But again, it’s not in the game. And that’s always the bottom line of this blog.

Just allies, huh?

Somehow I got to the end of this blog entry without raising the question, “why not hit another monster?” The notion of missing an attack on one monster and hitting a nearby ally effectively takes the other monsters completely off the board. You didn’t miss against all the monsters, you missed against one specific monster. And if there’s a chance to hit other combatants, they should be included.

In your game?

Sure, you can add it to your table’s home brew rules. But in order to do it in a way that doesn’t defy multiple established RAW mechanics, you have to import a fairly crunchy system of determining vector, degree, distance, and then fairly penalizing the shot against an unintended, unexpected Armor Class for the missile to hit an ally, enemy, or object.

And by the time you’re done with that, you really should be asking yourself, “Was it worth all those rolls just to f*ck with one missed shot?”

Anyway, thanks for taking the time! As always, your table is yours, food for thought.