Each weapon, spell, and harmful monster ability specifies the damage it deals. You roll the damage die or dice, add any modifiers, and apply the damage to your target. Magic weapons, special abilities, and other factors can grant a bonus to damage.
With a penalty, it is possible to deal 0 damage, but never negative damage.
When attacking with a weapon, you add your ability modifier--the same modifier used for the attack roll--to the damage. A spell tells you which dice to roll for damage and whether to add any modifiers.
Different attacks, damaging spells, and other harmful effects deal different types of damage. Damage types have no rules of their own, but other rules, such as damage resistance, rely on the types.
Some creatures have vulnerability, resistance, or immunity to certain types of damage. Particular creatures are even resistant or immune to damage from nonmagical attacks (a magical attack is an attack delivered by a spell, a magic item, or another magical source). In addition, some creatures are immune to certain conditions.
Some creatures and objects are exceedingly difficult or unusually easy to hurt with certain types of damage.
If a creature or an object has resistance to a damage type, damage of that type is halved against it. If a creature or an object has vulnerability to a damage type, damage of that type is doubled against it.
Resistance and then vulnerability are applied after all other modifiers to damage. For example, a creature has resistance to bludgeoning damage and is hit by an attack that deals 25 bludgeoning damage. The creature is also within a magical aura that reduces all damage by 5. The 25 damage is first reduced by 5 and then halved, so the creature takes 10 damage.
Multiple instances of resistance or vulnerability that affect the same damage type count as only one instance. For example, if a creature has resistance to fire damage as well as resistance to all nonmagical damage, the damage of a nonmagical fire is reduced by half against the creature, not reduced by three-quarters.
There’s one more general rule you need to know at the outset. Whenever you divide a number in the game, round down if you end up with a fraction, even if the fraction is one-half or greater.
If you are 1st-4th level and hit a creature with Fire Bolt, you have just “hit with an attack that deals 1d10 fire damage.” By default, that attack must deal a minimum of 1 fire damage, and for the sake of this example, we will assume the minimum was rolled.
If you hit a Banshee with that attack that deals 1 fire damage, that damage would get reduced to 1/2 fire damage, which gets rounded down and the Banshee takes 0 damage. Math was used and integers were generated. ”That attack dealt fire damage to that monster, but the monster lost no HP.”
If you hit an Azer with that attack it would take “no” fire damage as it is immune. There is no calculation involved, no integers, damage need not even be rolled. “That attack dealt no damage to hat creature.”
Well, great so we are back to being unsure if dealing 0 damage is the same as dealing no damage at all per RAW. Thanks WotC.
To be fair, the designers have stated that the game relies on plain English, in which dealing 0 damage is absolutely the same as dealing no damage.
Is it? Just because it didn't harm doesn't mean it didn't hurt.
It is, yes, in the same way that giving you 0 dollars and giving you no dollars are the same thing. Normal people using plain language do not worry about the difference between 0 and NULL. That's a highly technical distinction only relevant in very specific contexts. The rules are welcome to define this as such a context, but as far as I know, they do not.
Occam's Razor isn't satisfying, and it's far from definitive when a situation is ill-defined, as it is here. But it's reasonable, I think.
Well, great so we are back to being unsure if dealing 0 damage is the same as dealing no damage at all per RAW. Thanks WotC.
To be fair, the designers have stated that the game relies on plain English, in which dealing 0 damage is absolutely the same as dealing no damage.
Is it? Just because it didn't harm doesn't mean it didn't hurt.
It is, yes, in the same way that giving you 0 dollars and giving you no dollars are the same thing. Normal people using plain language do not worry about the difference between 0 and NULL. That's a highly technical distinction only relevant in very specific contexts. The rules are welcome to define this as such a context, but as far as I know, they do not.
See but if I charge 0 dollars to a debit card, that transaction still shows up in history. A charge happened, it was just a charge with a value of 0.
Harm/hurt, injure/feel. Imagine a slap. Most of the time they don't do any damage, but they sting.
Well, great so we are back to being unsure if dealing 0 damage is the same as dealing no damage at all per RAW. Thanks WotC.
To be fair, the designers have stated that the game relies on plain English, in which dealing 0 damage is absolutely the same as dealing no damage.
Is it? Just because it didn't harm doesn't mean it didn't hurt.
It is, yes, in the same way that giving you 0 dollars and giving you no dollars are the same thing. Normal people using plain language do not worry about the difference between 0 and NULL. That's a highly technical distinction only relevant in very specific contexts. The rules are welcome to define this as such a context, but as far as I know, they do not.
See but if I charge 0 dollars to a debit card, that transaction still shows up in history. A charge happened, it was just a charge with a value of 0.
Harm/hurt, injure/feel. Imagine a slap. Most of the time they don't do any damage, but they sting.
I fully agree, that transaction shows up in history, but you still haven't paid anyone any money, which is the salient point. You were charged, but you weren't actually charged any money. To bring it back to the D&D situation, if you're immune to bludgeoning damage, you've been hit with an attack! But you haven't been hit with an attack that dealt any damage.
If you're immune to bludgeoning damage, maybe it still stings when I hit you, I don't know. But even if it stings, my hit was not one that dealt damage, because the damage was 0.
There are tons of legalistic arguments in favor of one ruling or the other, and I'm definitely not ruling out the possibility of Crawford tweeting "well technically, blah blah blah." All I'm saying is that normal people in normal conversation use "0 damage" and "no damage" entirely interchangeably, and that in the absence of some rules text to the contrary, that's the usage it's most reasonable to default to.
This isn't the same question as the movement speed thing; I would say that a mace attack's damage type is still bludgeoning, even if the damage is fully resisted, in the same way that a shark has a land speed, even if that speed is 0. The question is whether the damage is actually dealt. Does a shark on land expend any of its 0 ft. movement when it spends its turn standing still? I think if you say 0 damage counts as dealing damage, you have to say that standing still counts as expending movement. And I don't think that's necessarily invalid; it's just not how normal people talk when they're talking normally.
"All I'm saying is that normal people in normal conversation use "0 damage" and "no damage" entirely interchangeably, and that in the absence of some rules text to the contrary, that's the usage it's most reasonable to default to... I think if you say 0 damage counts as dealing damage, you have to say that standing still counts as expending movement. And I don't think that's necessarily invalid; it's just not how normal people talk when they're talking normally"
I would agree here.
Saying zero damage counts as dealing damage is the same as saying moving zero feet counts as movement. If this were the case, it could be argued that a rogue would never be able to use steady shot, because he would already have moved on his turn (albeit that movement was zero feet).
That said, in this case there is a rule which could be used to support "zero damage is damage", which comes from the PHB: "With a penalty, it is possible to deal 0 damage, but never negative damage." This is where some of the ambiguity comes in. However, as I have said earlier, I do not believe this is intended to say that zero damage is damage, more to clarify that it can be reduced to zero (you don't get a minimum of 1, the attack can deal no damage) and that it cannot be negative (giving HP back to the target).
Okay then, after considering your arguments and applying them to the evidence I sighted, how about this as an alternative set of possible extrapolations:
If you are 1st-4th level and hit a creature with Fire Bolt, you have just “hit with an attack that deals 1d10 fire damage.” By default, that attack must deal a minimum of 1 fire damage, and for the sake of this example, assume the minimum was rolled.
If you hit a Banshee with that attack that deals 1 fire damage, that damage would get reduced to 1/2 fire damage, which gets rounded down and the Banshee takes 0 damage. “The actual damage dealt by the spell is reduced to 0, therefore the attack no longer deals any damage.
If you hit an Azer with that attack, there are no modifiers to the damage. "The attack still dealt fire damage, but the creature ignored that damage.”
Okay then, after considering your arguments and applying them to the evidence I sighted, how about this as an alternative set of possible extrapolations:
If you are 1st-4th level and hit a creature with Fire Bolt, you have just “hit with an attack that deals 1d10 fire damage.” By default, that attack must deal a minimum of 1 fire damage, and for the sake of this example, assume the minimum was rolled.
If you hit a Banshee with that attack that deals 1 fire damage, that damage would get reduced to 1/2 fire damage, which gets rounded down and the Banshee takes 0 damage. “The actual damage dealt by the spell is reduced to 0, therefore the attack no longer deals any damage.
If you hit an Azer with that attack, there are no modifiers to the damage. "The attack still dealt fire damage, but the creature ignored that damage.”
Thoughts?
So you've swapped the conclusions from your first example? XD The problem I have is that, intuitively (again, the "typical language usage" standard), damage dealt to a thing and and damage taken by that thing should be the same: if nothing takes damage, no damage has been dealt.
Now, I have a vague memory of some really niche circumstance where there was a suggestion that that wasn't the case? Some spell that uses language like "something heals an amount equal to damage dealt" or something like that, and there was a question about what happens when the damage is dealt to something with resistance, would that decrease the healing, and I think there was an erratum that basically punted the question by saying that the damage couldn't be reduced in any way. That solves the problem in that particular circumstance but also fails to answer the question, in the general case, of whether or not damage dealt always equals damage taken.
But, once again, I think it's most reasonable to go back to how people normally talk. If I roll 87 damage to something that's immune to that damage, and someone asks me how much damage I dealt, I'm not going to say 87, I'm going to say "Well, I didn't actually manage to deal any damage... but I rolled 87!" And then my interlocutor will roll their eyes, because rolling 87 doesn't mean squat if it doesn't translate to any damage actually being dealt.
[EDIT] On a related note, is damage immunity actually defined anywhere? I went looking, and I couldn't find anything. Resistance is discussed, and the Monster Manual references damage immunities but fails to explain what a damage immunity actually does, mechanically. I know everyone knows what "immune" means, but that still feels like a bit of an oversight.
If the requirement was "you do damage with an attack" I would say it needs at least 1 point of damage, but if the requirement is "An attack that does bludgeoning damaging" I would say it's fine for the final damage to be zero (say, attack that does 1d6-1, or 2 points vs heavy armor mastery, or 1 point vs resistant, or any amount vs immune).
Once again, even in plain English, 0 is not null/none. You agreed to the example about your debit card, so how about this:
You make a purchase on your debit card. The transaction is in GBP, despite the fact that you have an American banking account. Then, the store manager learns that the packaging is torn and negates the sale. Transaction amount is 0 GBP. Later, your banking account checks to see if there are any foreign transactions on your card. Does it find 0 foreign transactions, or one?
I think it is clear that this would register as YES, FOREIGN TRANSACTIONS. (Having formerly worked in accounting, yes, yes it would see a foreign transaction.)
So, let's fix the language:
You make [an attack]. The [damage type] is [bludgeoning]. Then, the [monster has resistance and so the damage is reduced]. [Damage] amount is 0 [bludgeoning]. Later, your [Crusher feat] checks to see if there are any [bludgeoning attacks] on your [turn]. Does it find 0 [bludgeoning attacks], or one?
No major changes to otherwise simple English.
By RAW (assuming you feel that SA Compendium is RAW), I've come to believe it is pretty clear that dealing 0 damage with an attack is still dealing damage with an attack. The damage type is distinct from the loss of HP. (Weirdly enough, it is also the Temporary HP rules that give a great reason as to why -- otherwise a lot of things wouldn't work as clearly intended if you strictly considered "doing damage" as meaning "reducing HP".)
[EDIT] On a related note, is damage immunity actually defined anywhere? I went looking, and I couldn't find anything. Resistance is discussed, and the Monster Manual references damage immunities but fails to explain what a damage immunity actually does, mechanically. I know everyone knows what "immune" means, but that still feels like a bit of an oversight.
No, no it is not. It's kinda amazing that it isn't.
Given the "plain English" reading of immunity (which we must go on, due to the fact that there's no rule about it), that means that taking damage of a certain type reduces that damage to zero.
Let me Schrodinger you on this: A banshee is immune to cold damage. I, foolishly, attack it with Chromatic Orb (cold) and hit. However, that damage must be reduced to zero. I have to deal the cold damage in order to trigger the immunity -- otherwise the immunity would not be triggered. Otherwise, what happened on that turn? I attacked with a spell, and it just... didn't have the effect listed in the spell description? What was the point of the damage immunity then -- it took a damage type, it was just reduced to zero. If the attack never dealt that type of damage then the immunity basically had no real effect.
Wow. I can't believe how much is missing from the rules. You'd think this was a small company's first game that they barely proofread. Instead it is a multi-million dollar company's like 8th game (because counting is hard) that they barely proofread.
MTG has spoiled me for comprehensive rules. Why couldn't the same company that made those rules have made D&D? Oh wait...
Sorry these complaints are off topic, I just really hate arguing and if the rules were written better I wouldn't have to.
So you've swapped the conclusions from your first example? XD The problem I have is that, intuitively (again, the "typical language usage" standard), damage dealt to a thing and and damage taken by that thing should be the same: if nothing takes damage, no damage has been dealt.
Well, this is a debate after all. The point of a debate is to bring all possible interpretations to light so they can be considered and discussed towards one of three purposes:
Determining the truth.
Finding a consensus.
Enabling people to make their own informed decision.
[EDIT] On a related note, is damage immunity actually defined anywhere? I went looking, and I couldn't find anything. Resistance is discussed, and the Monster Manual references damage immunities but fails to explain what a damage immunity actually does, mechanically. I know everyone knows what "immune" means, but that still feels like a bit of an oversight.
No, it isn’t. I spent a while doing that research just for this thread, if it existed anywhere I would have found it. I looked for anything that could help determine anything that might shed any light on this topic. I would have found it.
In my mind, “not dealing damage” is not the same as “dealing 0 damage” from a mechanical gameplay point of view. In one instance, the event didn’t happen, and in the other instance it happened but was insufficient to count numerically. Like, when you’re playing one of those video games where you’re just wailing away on something and it’s damage bar is decreasing microscopically and their natural healing just refills it before the attack animation even finishes and you realize you are definitely on the wrong effing map for your level. Know what I mean? You dealt some damage, it just did absolutely nothing. The entire combat system including HP and numerical damage is just an absurd abstraction for what it is actually supposed to be representing. 🤷♂️
The only other rule that could possibly apply would be:
Specific Beats General
This book contains rules, especially in parts 2 and 3, that govern how the game plays. That said, many racial traits, class features, spells, magic items, monster abilities, and other game elements break the general rules in some way, creating an exception to how the rest of the game works. Remember this: If a specific rule contradicts a general rule, the specific rule wins.
Exceptions to the rules are often minor. For instance, many adventurers don’t have proficiency with longbows, but every wood elf does because of a racial trait. That trait creates a minor exception in the game. Other examples of rule-breaking are more conspicuous. For instance, an adventurer can’t normally pass through walls, but some spells make that possible. Magic accounts for most of the major exceptions to the rules.
If that rule applies, then it would really all depends on two things I suppose:
How granularly or grossly one considers/applies the rules.
How granularly or grossly one thinks the designers consider/apply their rules.
I mean like:
A Quarterstaff deals bludgeoning damage, so attacks with a Quarterstaff deal bludgeoning damage. Therefore, if you attack something with a Quarterstaff you have made an attack that deals bludgeoning damage.
Fin
Or like:
A Quarterstaff deals bludgeoning damage, so attacks with a Quarterstaff deal bludgeoning damage. But werewolves are “immune to Bludgeoning, Piercing, and Slashing from Nonmagical Attacks that aren't Silvered,” so a nonmagical Quarterstaff that isn’t silvered does (0/no) damage to a Werewolf. Therefore, if you attack a Werewolf with a nonmagical Quarterstaff you have made an attack that does not deal bludgeoning damage.
Fin
Is this a matter of Truth, Consensus, or Informed Personal Decision? Is this a case of specific beats general? I don’t know. All I know is that every gaming and game design instinct I have tells me that “dealing 0 damage ≠ not dealing damage.” Therefore, IMO, this all comes down to the answer to a single question: is this a mathematical question, or a linguistic one?
Wow. I can't believe how much is missing from the rules. You'd think this was a small company's first game that they barely proofread. Instead it is a multi-million dollar company's like 8th game (because counting is hard) that they barely proofread.
MTG has spoiled me for comprehensive rules. Why couldn't the same company that made those rules have made D&D? Oh wait...
Sorry these complaints are off topic, I just really hate arguing and if the rules were written better I wouldn't have to.
Dude. The MTG rules are tight. Clear as Crystal, and easily interpretable. If laws were that concise, explicit, and clear, the entire legal code would fit in standard 60 card starter deck. We wouldn’t need lawyers.
How the eff did 5e happen like this?!? Teh fawk?!? This is why I say Crawford did a terrible job. He is responsible for this nonsense. If I were this imprecise at my job I would be fired. And I have to do it all verbally in person for groups of three and allow each one individual opportunities to practice supervised, all in 1:45 per class, and I have to do it standardized. That means I am one of a group of up to 14 people that all have to teach the exact same things every time to every group, and then the students rotate twice so if any one of us is off we will get reported. There are 7 colleges per week, so each one of us has to do each system approximately 42 times and we all have to be standardized and consistent.
There are 6 basic systems, several advanced maneuvers, I don’t even know how many practice cases, plus all the exams and other projects. And every year, every one of those systems and cases gets a set of errata. There are almost 100 of us working there all on different things all the time, and our boss has to keep us all standardized and consistent, and we have to do it all live and in person year after year. My boss has to keep all of those plates spinning (and make no mistake, we are talking platenado here) every freaking year or she would lose her job.
Crawford had to organize one single set of rules, he had time, and a team helping him, and he only had to do it once. He had a ton of play testing done, and he had plenty of time for several editing passes. He had a lot of opportunity to make sure that everything was spot on, all “T”s crossed, all “I“s dotted, and absolutely everything just so like a Swiss clock, or a symphony. As Marisa Tomei’s character put it so eloquently in her Academy Award winning role in My Cousin Vinny: “dead on balls accurate. It’s a technical term.”
And instead we got 5e RAW, and his completely unofficial Twitter feed....
The best part about the internet. You find all the people who claim they could do a job better than the person currently doing it and also not fired for their apparent failure.
D&D and MTG have two different target audiences and also have two different goals. If you think 5e is such a horrible deal “there’s the door.” 90 percent of “the rules are horrible” issues come from interactions that are niche. Something a card fake can more easily test honestly and also something that is also just as prevalent in MTG - why do you think they ban cards - becuase of horrible rules/card interactions.
The rules for 5e being vague is because they were trying to exorcise everything that was 4e, and one of the features of 4e was that they created a formal language with terms of art for everything a power was doing, which meant 5e had to use natural language, and natural language is fundamentally vague -- that's why people create formal languages.
While it is possible that the intent of the rules was that 0 damage is different to no damage, and/or that damage dealt against a creature is not the same as damage taken by the creature, I find it completely counterintuitive.
Going by your transaction example, I have worked for various financial institutions. I have yet to see a "zero transaction". They are not recorded, because they are unnecessary. If you try to send a bank transfer of $0, it will be refused, because why would you? There may, on occasion, be card transactions with a zero value shown, but that will be something like an authorisation for an amount greater than zero, but that authorisation was never presented (e.g. a credit card authorised at a hotel in case of damage/charges, but never "used" because there was nothing to charge). Even if it shows up on your statement as a "zero transaction", it isn't. That's just the way way for the bank to display it to you. It is actually a "reservation" of a set amount, and then a "release" of the reservation, with no actual transaction (transfer of funds) taking place at all. It is actually identical to no transaction, with a couple of markers added to the database to record things which are not transactions.
Also, even if it was a transaction, I disagree that this is the same anyway. The transaction is more like the hit, the dollar value is the damage. Even if there is a transaction/hit, the zero dollars is the same as no dollars, and the effect of that transaction is identical to that of the transaction not being there in the first place.
Finally, we come back to natural language. I am willing to bet that 99% of people would consider the phrases "I have no apples" and "I have zero apples" to be identical, because there is fundamentally no difference: they express exactly the same information. Having a quantity of zero of something is identical to having an absence of something. Having zero dollars is the same as not having any dollars, performing zero transactions is the same as not performing any transactions, owning zero cars is the same as not owning any cars, and dealing zero damage is the same as not dealing any damage.
The best part about the internet. You find all the people who claim they could do a job better than the person currently doing it and also not fired for their apparent failure.
D&D and MTG have two different target audiences and also have two different goals. If you think 5e is such a horrible deal “there’s the door.” 90 percent of “the rules are horrible” issues come from interactions that are niche. Something a card fake can more easily test honestly and also something that is also just as prevalent in MTG - why do you think they ban cards - becuase of horrible rules/card interactions.
If it were only one or two “niche interactions” I wouldn’t be complaining. I know you spend time in these forums, I see you around. How many times have you seen confusions with the whole “ an unarmed strikes are melee weapon attacks but not attacks made with a weapon” issue? It came up just a few posts ago. Or how about the “a thrown weapon is a ranged weapon attack but not an attack with a ranged weapon, unless it’s a dart” issue? Or the never ending questions about casting two spells in the same turn? Or any of these chestnuts?
Everyone agrees that the language for 5e is somewhere between “room for improvement” and “💩” depending on who you ask. Nobody is of the impression that this is anything even remotely resembling what anyone would call a “clean” ruleset. (Although it is the cleanest D&D ruleset I have ever seen, but that is a loowww bar.) With the modern state of gaming, Hasbro’s available resources, and the sheer market share that D&D dominates, there is no reason for this to not be the gold standard of game design.
But it isn’t the gold standard. It isn’t even on the list. Forget the award, it was’t even nominated. Who’s job was it to make 5e the easiest to understand TTRPG on the market today? That was the goal after all. To make a game so simple, that no body would need someone to explain it to them, they could just read the book and be able to understand it. I have a player who is an experienced gamer, an Army veteran in the medical core, and currently pushes papers for a bank. She is smart enough to learn other games, how to save lives in combat, and how to properly navigate US banking regulations. Smart as she is, she struggles with 5e. Why? Because Crawford thought writing a ruleset where “melee weapon attack” ≠ “attack with a melee weapon.” So yeah, as a customer of both D&D and M:tG (among many others) for almost 30 years, I feel safe stating that my relatively experienced opinion is that Crawford totally dropped the ball on this one.
Well, great so we are back to being unsure if dealing 0 damage is the same as dealing no damage at all per RAW. Thanks WotC.
To be fair, the designers have stated that the game relies on plain English, in which dealing 0 damage is absolutely the same as dealing no damage.
Is it? Just because it didn't harm doesn't mean it didn't hurt.
Evidence:
Extrapolation:
If you are 1st-4th level and hit a creature with Fire Bolt, you have just “hit with an attack that deals 1d10 fire damage.” By default, that attack must deal a minimum of 1 fire damage, and for the sake of this example, we will assume the minimum was rolled.
If you hit a Banshee with that attack that deals 1 fire damage, that damage would get reduced to 1/2 fire damage, which gets rounded down and the Banshee takes 0 damage. Math was used and integers were generated. ”That attack dealt fire damage to that monster, but the monster lost no HP.”
If you hit an Azer with that attack it would take “no” fire damage as it is immune. There is no calculation involved, no integers, damage need not even be rolled. “That attack dealt no damage to hat creature.”
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It is, yes, in the same way that giving you 0 dollars and giving you no dollars are the same thing. Normal people using plain language do not worry about the difference between 0 and NULL. That's a highly technical distinction only relevant in very specific contexts. The rules are welcome to define this as such a context, but as far as I know, they do not.
Occam's Razor isn't satisfying, and it's far from definitive when a situation is ill-defined, as it is here. But it's reasonable, I think.
I don't follow the harm/hurt thing at all, sorry.
See but if I charge 0 dollars to a debit card, that transaction still shows up in history. A charge happened, it was just a charge with a value of 0.
Harm/hurt, injure/feel. Imagine a slap. Most of the time they don't do any damage, but they sting.
I fully agree, that transaction shows up in history, but you still haven't paid anyone any money, which is the salient point. You were charged, but you weren't actually charged any money. To bring it back to the D&D situation, if you're immune to bludgeoning damage, you've been hit with an attack! But you haven't been hit with an attack that dealt any damage.
If you're immune to bludgeoning damage, maybe it still stings when I hit you, I don't know. But even if it stings, my hit was not one that dealt damage, because the damage was 0.
There are tons of legalistic arguments in favor of one ruling or the other, and I'm definitely not ruling out the possibility of Crawford tweeting "well technically, blah blah blah." All I'm saying is that normal people in normal conversation use "0 damage" and "no damage" entirely interchangeably, and that in the absence of some rules text to the contrary, that's the usage it's most reasonable to default to.
This isn't the same question as the movement speed thing; I would say that a mace attack's damage type is still bludgeoning, even if the damage is fully resisted, in the same way that a shark has a land speed, even if that speed is 0. The question is whether the damage is actually dealt. Does a shark on land expend any of its 0 ft. movement when it spends its turn standing still? I think if you say 0 damage counts as dealing damage, you have to say that standing still counts as expending movement. And I don't think that's necessarily invalid; it's just not how normal people talk when they're talking normally.
"All I'm saying is that normal people in normal conversation use "0 damage" and "no damage" entirely interchangeably, and that in the absence of some rules text to the contrary, that's the usage it's most reasonable to default to... I think if you say 0 damage counts as dealing damage, you have to say that standing still counts as expending movement. And I don't think that's necessarily invalid; it's just not how normal people talk when they're talking normally"
I would agree here.
Saying zero damage counts as dealing damage is the same as saying moving zero feet counts as movement. If this were the case, it could be argued that a rogue would never be able to use steady shot, because he would already have moved on his turn (albeit that movement was zero feet).
That said, in this case there is a rule which could be used to support "zero damage is damage", which comes from the PHB: "With a penalty, it is possible to deal 0 damage, but never negative damage." This is where some of the ambiguity comes in. However, as I have said earlier, I do not believe this is intended to say that zero damage is damage, more to clarify that it can be reduced to zero (you don't get a minimum of 1, the attack can deal no damage) and that it cannot be negative (giving HP back to the target).
Okay then, after considering your arguments and applying them to the evidence I sighted, how about this as an alternative set of possible extrapolations:
If you are 1st-4th level and hit a creature with Fire Bolt, you have just “hit with an attack that deals 1d10 fire damage.” By default, that attack must deal a minimum of 1 fire damage, and for the sake of this example, assume the minimum was rolled.
If you hit a Banshee with that attack that deals 1 fire damage, that damage would get reduced to 1/2 fire damage, which gets rounded down and the Banshee takes 0 damage. “The actual damage dealt by the spell is reduced to 0, therefore the attack no longer deals any damage.
If you hit an Azer with that attack, there are no modifiers to the damage. "The attack still dealt fire damage, but the creature ignored that damage.”
Thoughts?
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So you've swapped the conclusions from your first example? XD The problem I have is that, intuitively (again, the "typical language usage" standard), damage dealt to a thing and and damage taken by that thing should be the same: if nothing takes damage, no damage has been dealt.
Now, I have a vague memory of some really niche circumstance where there was a suggestion that that wasn't the case? Some spell that uses language like "something heals an amount equal to damage dealt" or something like that, and there was a question about what happens when the damage is dealt to something with resistance, would that decrease the healing, and I think there was an erratum that basically punted the question by saying that the damage couldn't be reduced in any way. That solves the problem in that particular circumstance but also fails to answer the question, in the general case, of whether or not damage dealt always equals damage taken.
But, once again, I think it's most reasonable to go back to how people normally talk. If I roll 87 damage to something that's immune to that damage, and someone asks me how much damage I dealt, I'm not going to say 87, I'm going to say "Well, I didn't actually manage to deal any damage... but I rolled 87!" And then my interlocutor will roll their eyes, because rolling 87 doesn't mean squat if it doesn't translate to any damage actually being dealt.
[EDIT] On a related note, is damage immunity actually defined anywhere? I went looking, and I couldn't find anything. Resistance is discussed, and the Monster Manual references damage immunities but fails to explain what a damage immunity actually does, mechanically. I know everyone knows what "immune" means, but that still feels like a bit of an oversight.
If the requirement was "you do damage with an attack" I would say it needs at least 1 point of damage, but if the requirement is "An attack that does bludgeoning damaging" I would say it's fine for the final damage to be zero (say, attack that does 1d6-1, or 2 points vs heavy armor mastery, or 1 point vs resistant, or any amount vs immune).
Once again, even in plain English, 0 is not null/none. You agreed to the example about your debit card, so how about this:
You make a purchase on your debit card. The transaction is in GBP, despite the fact that you have an American banking account. Then, the store manager learns that the packaging is torn and negates the sale. Transaction amount is 0 GBP. Later, your banking account checks to see if there are any foreign transactions on your card. Does it find 0 foreign transactions, or one?
I think it is clear that this would register as YES, FOREIGN TRANSACTIONS. (Having formerly worked in accounting, yes, yes it would see a foreign transaction.)
So, let's fix the language:
You make [an attack]. The [damage type] is [bludgeoning]. Then, the [monster has resistance and so the damage is reduced]. [Damage] amount is 0 [bludgeoning]. Later, your [Crusher feat] checks to see if there are any [bludgeoning attacks] on your [turn]. Does it find 0 [bludgeoning attacks], or one?
No major changes to otherwise simple English.
By RAW (assuming you feel that SA Compendium is RAW), I've come to believe it is pretty clear that dealing 0 damage with an attack is still dealing damage with an attack. The damage type is distinct from the loss of HP. (Weirdly enough, it is also the Temporary HP rules that give a great reason as to why -- otherwise a lot of things wouldn't work as clearly intended if you strictly considered "doing damage" as meaning "reducing HP".)
No, no it is not. It's kinda amazing that it isn't.
Given the "plain English" reading of immunity (which we must go on, due to the fact that there's no rule about it), that means that taking damage of a certain type reduces that damage to zero.
Let me Schrodinger you on this: A banshee is immune to cold damage. I, foolishly, attack it with Chromatic Orb (cold) and hit. However, that damage must be reduced to zero. I have to deal the cold damage in order to trigger the immunity -- otherwise the immunity would not be triggered. Otherwise, what happened on that turn? I attacked with a spell, and it just... didn't have the effect listed in the spell description? What was the point of the damage immunity then -- it took a damage type, it was just reduced to zero. If the attack never dealt that type of damage then the immunity basically had no real effect.
Wow. I can't believe how much is missing from the rules. You'd think this was a small company's first game that they barely proofread. Instead it is a multi-million dollar company's like 8th game (because counting is hard) that they barely proofread.
MTG has spoiled me for comprehensive rules. Why couldn't the same company that made those rules have made D&D? Oh wait...
Sorry these complaints are off topic, I just really hate arguing and if the rules were written better I wouldn't have to.
Well, this is a debate after all. The point of a debate is to bring all possible interpretations to light so they can be considered and discussed towards one of three purposes:
No, it isn’t. I spent a while doing that research just for this thread, if it existed anywhere I would have found it. I looked for anything that could help determine anything that might shed any light on this topic. I would have found it.
In my mind, “not dealing damage” is not the same as “dealing 0 damage” from a mechanical gameplay point of view. In one instance, the event didn’t happen, and in the other instance it happened but was insufficient to count numerically. Like, when you’re playing one of those video games where you’re just wailing away on something and it’s damage bar is decreasing microscopically and their natural healing just refills it before the attack animation even finishes and you realize you are definitely on the wrong effing map for your level. Know what I mean? You dealt some damage, it just did absolutely nothing. The entire combat system including HP and numerical damage is just an absurd abstraction for what it is actually supposed to be representing. 🤷♂️
The only other rule that could possibly apply would be:
If that rule applies, then it would really all depends on two things I suppose:
I mean like:
A Quarterstaff deals bludgeoning damage, so attacks with a Quarterstaff deal bludgeoning damage. Therefore, if you attack something with a Quarterstaff you have made an attack that deals bludgeoning damage.
Fin
Or like:
A Quarterstaff deals bludgeoning damage, so attacks with a Quarterstaff deal bludgeoning damage. But werewolves are “immune to Bludgeoning, Piercing, and Slashing from Nonmagical Attacks that aren't Silvered,” so a nonmagical Quarterstaff that isn’t silvered does (0/no) damage to a Werewolf. Therefore, if you attack a Werewolf with a nonmagical Quarterstaff you have made an attack that does not deal bludgeoning damage.
Fin
Is this a matter of Truth, Consensus, or Informed Personal Decision? Is this a case of specific beats general? I don’t know. All I know is that every gaming and game design instinct I have tells me that “dealing 0 damage ≠ not dealing damage.” Therefore, IMO, this all comes down to the answer to a single question: is this a mathematical question, or a linguistic one?
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Dude. The MTG rules are tight. Clear as Crystal, and easily interpretable. If laws were that concise, explicit, and clear, the entire legal code would fit in standard 60 card starter deck. We wouldn’t need lawyers.
How the eff did 5e happen like this?!? Teh fawk?!? This is why I say Crawford did a terrible job. He is responsible for this nonsense. If I were this imprecise at my job I would be fired. And I have to do it all verbally in person for groups of three and allow each one individual opportunities to practice supervised, all in 1:45 per class, and I have to do it standardized. That means I am one of a group of up to 14 people that all have to teach the exact same things every time to every group, and then the students rotate twice so if any one of us is off we will get reported. There are 7 colleges per week, so each one of us has to do each system approximately 42 times and we all have to be standardized and consistent.
There are 6 basic systems, several advanced maneuvers, I don’t even know how many practice cases, plus all the exams and other projects. And every year, every one of those systems and cases gets a set of errata. There are almost 100 of us working there all on different things all the time, and our boss has to keep us all standardized and consistent, and we have to do it all live and in person year after year. My boss has to keep all of those plates spinning (and make no mistake, we are talking platenado here) every freaking year or she would lose her job.
Crawford had to organize one single set of rules, he had time, and a team helping him, and he only had to do it once. He had a ton of play testing done, and he had plenty of time for several editing passes. He had a lot of opportunity to make sure that everything was spot on, all “T”s crossed, all “I“s dotted, and absolutely everything just so like a Swiss clock, or a symphony. As Marisa Tomei’s character put it so eloquently in her Academy Award winning role in My Cousin Vinny: “dead on balls accurate. It’s a technical term.”
And instead we got 5e RAW, and his completely unofficial Twitter feed....
I wish my job was that forgiving. Just sayin’.
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The best part about the internet. You find all the people who claim they could do a job better than the person currently doing it and also not fired for their apparent failure.
D&D and MTG have two different target audiences and also have two different goals. If you think 5e is such a horrible deal “there’s the door.” 90 percent of “the rules are horrible” issues come from interactions that are niche. Something a card fake can more easily test honestly and also something that is also just as prevalent in MTG - why do you think they ban cards - becuase of horrible rules/card interactions.
The rules for 5e being vague is because they were trying to exorcise everything that was 4e, and one of the features of 4e was that they created a formal language with terms of art for everything a power was doing, which meant 5e had to use natural language, and natural language is fundamentally vague -- that's why people create formal languages.
While it is possible that the intent of the rules was that 0 damage is different to no damage, and/or that damage dealt against a creature is not the same as damage taken by the creature, I find it completely counterintuitive.
Going by your transaction example, I have worked for various financial institutions. I have yet to see a "zero transaction". They are not recorded, because they are unnecessary. If you try to send a bank transfer of $0, it will be refused, because why would you? There may, on occasion, be card transactions with a zero value shown, but that will be something like an authorisation for an amount greater than zero, but that authorisation was never presented (e.g. a credit card authorised at a hotel in case of damage/charges, but never "used" because there was nothing to charge). Even if it shows up on your statement as a "zero transaction", it isn't. That's just the way way for the bank to display it to you. It is actually a "reservation" of a set amount, and then a "release" of the reservation, with no actual transaction (transfer of funds) taking place at all. It is actually identical to no transaction, with a couple of markers added to the database to record things which are not transactions.
Also, even if it was a transaction, I disagree that this is the same anyway. The transaction is more like the hit, the dollar value is the damage. Even if there is a transaction/hit, the zero dollars is the same as no dollars, and the effect of that transaction is identical to that of the transaction not being there in the first place.
Finally, we come back to natural language. I am willing to bet that 99% of people would consider the phrases "I have no apples" and "I have zero apples" to be identical, because there is fundamentally no difference: they express exactly the same information. Having a quantity of zero of something is identical to having an absence of something. Having zero dollars is the same as not having any dollars, performing zero transactions is the same as not performing any transactions, owning zero cars is the same as not owning any cars, and dealing zero damage is the same as not dealing any damage.
If it were only one or two “niche interactions” I wouldn’t be complaining. I know you spend time in these forums, I see you around. How many times have you seen confusions with the whole “ an unarmed strikes are melee weapon attacks but not attacks made with a weapon” issue? It came up just a few posts ago. Or how about the “a thrown weapon is a ranged weapon attack but not an attack with a ranged weapon, unless it’s a dart” issue? Or the never ending questions about casting two spells in the same turn? Or any of these chestnuts?
Or how about any of these other 6,600+ questions on this site alone?
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/dungeons-dragons-discussion/rules-game-mechanics
Everyone agrees that the language for 5e is somewhere between “room for improvement” and “💩” depending on who you ask. Nobody is of the impression that this is anything even remotely resembling what anyone would call a “clean” ruleset. (Although it is the cleanest D&D ruleset I have ever seen, but that is a loowww bar.) With the modern state of gaming, Hasbro’s available resources, and the sheer market share that D&D dominates, there is no reason for this to not be the gold standard of game design.
But it isn’t the gold standard. It isn’t even on the list. Forget the award, it was’t even nominated. Who’s job was it to make 5e the easiest to understand TTRPG on the market today? That was the goal after all. To make a game so simple, that no body would need someone to explain it to them, they could just read the book and be able to understand it. I have a player who is an experienced gamer, an Army veteran in the medical core, and currently pushes papers for a bank. She is smart enough to learn other games, how to save lives in combat, and how to properly navigate US banking regulations. Smart as she is, she struggles with 5e. Why? Because Crawford thought writing a ruleset where “melee weapon attack” ≠ “attack with a melee weapon.” So yeah, as a customer of both D&D and M:tG (among many others) for almost 30 years, I feel safe stating that my relatively experienced opinion is that Crawford totally dropped the ball on this one.
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