Roleplay vs. Combat

How do you define a "roleplay heavy system", is it simply a lack of combat rules? Would you call D&D more or less roleplay based than WFRP for example?

Personally I think a system is 'role-play-friendly' if it has rules that makes sense and at leasts tries to model things accurately.

Hoe do you even explain that heavy armor makes you less likely to be hit, or anything related to HP, in DnD? You just can't, not in any satisfactory way, which means that you can't picture it, which means that it's harder to 'be there' and roleplay.

This may blow your mind, but how your character acts in combat is actually roleplaying.

"Roleplay heavy" is just a buzzword more elitist people like to describe their games/campaigns as.

A system non focused on combat situations, I guess.

It's a false dichotomy, as points out.

Although I don't think it's just an elitist buzzword. It can be used that way, certainly, but there are also cases of systems which focus more on the RP side than others.

Some systems seek to facilitate roleplay through simplicity, getting the rules out of the way for the most part, which is one method that can work. Having super granular mechanics you're meant to keep using and referencing is something people love, but personally I find it gets in the way of the RP at least with my playstyle.

However, other games do this by trying to structure mechanics to directly support the theme, tone and genre they're trying to emulate. This is an approach I love, since it makes interacting with the rules conducive to roleplay, as those mechanical interactions will produce results in line with what the genre expects.

This is also entirely compatible with combat. Legends of the Wulin takes this genre emulation approach, putting the high action combat of the Wuxia genre right at the heart of its storytelling.

>how your character acts in combat is actually roleplaying.
I hit him with my sword.
I hit him with my sword.
l hit him with my sword.
I hit him with my sword.
I hit him with my sword.
l hit him with my sword.
I hit him with my sword.
I hit him with my sword.
l hit him with my sword.
I hit him with my sword.
I hit him with my sword.
l hit him with my sword.
I hit him with my sword.
I hit him with my sword.
l hit him with my sword.
I hit him with my sword.
I hit him with my sword.
l hit him with my sword.
I hit him with my sword.
I hit him with my sword.
l hit him with my sword.
I hit him with my sword.
I hit him with my sword.

>Let the players write 99% of the campaign with their paranoid conjecture.
Wait, does that actually work? I can use the rantings and mad theories of my players?

...AC and HP are abstractions?

I mean, that might not satisfy you, and you're entitled to your preferences and opinions, but trying to use it as a general point isn't accurate. AC/HP has never bothered me in D&D, because I can accept the abstraction.

>2017
>Still playing martials

Abstractions for what?

Not OP, but I do this all the time.

Not 99% of it, but a decent chunk. I toss out ideas and elements of the setting and I might have a vague idea how they fit together, but players very often come up with theories that are way, way more interesting than whatever I had in mind, so I just twist things a bit and then use those instead.

How do you mean? They're mechanical abstractions designed to make things simple and easy. Durability and getting hit in combat are very broad, complex things that D&D distils down to simple systems that are easy to manage.

Although being fair the system does an awful job of actually explaining this, or being consistent. Despite saying HP is an abstraction it then treats them as meatpoints in a lot of places, and it never directly states that an attack roll failing doesn't necessarily mean you actually miss the target. In 3.PF, an attack which exceeds touch AC but doesn't beat their AC is one that did strike the target, but not with enough force to overcome their armour or do meaningful damage. In D&D, 'miss' includes ineffectual hits.

> so what's in the shop
>[read clearly random shit from phb equipment]
> they latch on to holy water
> ask me how many, what cost etc
> spend half hour plus arguing about do we need it
> can't agree to pool money
(1st levels who's already blown their starting coin on rations because I made them keep track)
> argument boils down to "if we get there and need it we'll run back"

Guess what was down the first hallway?

Actually that was my wizard. It's a little thing called role play friend.

>In D&D, 'miss' includes ineffectual hits.
I tell my players this, it's not just a single chop per roll.

So you have a character with a leather armor and one with heavy armor, the heavy armor will have lower AC. Why will the person with heavy armor be hit less than the one with the leather armor? What does the rolls mean? What is happening in the actual in-game-world? Is the GM supposed to decide if it was an innefectual hit or a miss himself (which is reasonable, but still a bit icky)?

HP is just a complete clusterfuck of shit though, that can't be argued. If it is 'fate-points', why will health potion and healing magic restore it? If it is 'meat-points' , why can you take a halberd to the face and survive? It just makes it very difficult to visualize the events as anything but a mmorpg or something.

Wow. I normally just let them think whatever they want to think while I sit there smugly with the "real", and often simplest, answer. When they reach the end and learn of this simple answer (It really was the obviously evil advisor, or something similar), they go, "Oooh, I wish we had thought of that."
Zombies? Man, I need to do this kind of stuff, but probably not too much or they'll catch on. My players tell me I'm a good GM, but I'm wondering if I can finally transcend into next level GMing.

Again, you might suffer from that, but don't generalise it without thinking about it. A lot of people have similar issues with it, but I personally don't.

And see Each attack roll is not a single strike. It's an abstraction for the general ebb and flow of combat. A failure to meet their AC doesn't mean you never hit them, it means that your attacks didn't achieve anything. How you fluff that is generally dependent on context. It's just something D&D does an awful job explaining.


The abstraction that is HP includes luck, physical toughness, stamina, lesser magical or divine protections and all other sorts of things. The game deals with it inconsistently, but I tend to find it pretty easy to visualise.

>So you have a character with a leather armor and one with heavy armor, the heavy armor will have lower AC

Is this some sort of universal rule or do you mean for this scenario?

> Why will the person with heavy armor be hit less than the one with the leather armor?

Usually this is because the one with lighter armor has very good reflexes (high dex) or magic (Mage armor, Shield, etc.) to make up for having lighter armor.

> What does the rolls mean?

Your ability to convert an opportunity to a hit that reduces the target's ability to stay in the fight.

> What is happening in the actual in-game-world? Is the GM supposed to decide if it was an innefectual hit or a miss himself (which is reasonable, but still a bit icky)?

Since mechanically there's no difference... yes? Why not? Why is it icky? The DM makes something up that sounds good and in theme ("he gracefully dodged away/blocked it with his shield/bounced off his armor").

> If it is 'fate-points', why will health potion and healing magic restore it?

Cause it's magic. Why do you assume a potion that mends your wounds doesn't also affect your fate?

> If it is 'meat-points' , why can you take a halberd to the face and survive?

'tis not tho, that'd be retarded. And even if it was, you can just understand it as a hit that does in-universe damage relative to the HP loss. i.e. if a 100HP fighter loses 10 HP he's as "damaged" as a 10 HP wizard losing 1.

> It just makes it very difficult to visualize the events as anything but a mmorpg or something.

For you.

Well, if you're a boring cunt, sure.

Being fair, good descriptions can't save a bad combat system. Although being a boring cunt can't help.

>So autistic if the system he's playing doesn't have rules for whether or not he can scratch his ass sufficiently, you can't do it
Get a load of this nigger, thinks he plays "role-play heavy systems"

Which enemy do you hit with your sword? The one directly in front of you or the one that's about to hit your downed wizard best friend?

I don't think it's quite that cut and dry. Roleplay heavy, at least as I've seen it, indicates that while the whole thing might be combat, it's still driven by narrative and the mechanical crunch either reinforces that, or is nebulous enough that it doesn't matter.
In many campaigns, the application of the rules means there is an optimal way to go about combat and deviation from a script is a bad plan. It might make sense, in universe and from a character perspective, to recklessly jump from this second floor balcony down at the beast in the atrium and stab it with this sword, but I'm less likely to take damage, and am more likely to get more rounds of doing damage to it, if I remain up top and throw spells, arrows or bullets down at the thing. Like even ignoring the pragmatic cowardice vs courage part, some systems or GMs will say "okay, you need an athletics check for the leap and an attack roll. and since that's two actions, there's a penalty to do both in one round."

It's not really a system thing in itself. Systems can be reasonable, and the right players/GMs can enable even the in-character-but-harder stuff to feel rewarding. But if the game isn't managed properly, it ends up feeling like being punished for trying to make the game more fun for everyone, and can actually negatively affect the rest of the party, since one guy trying and failing to jump on a monster instead of shooting from cover like the squad makes the rest of the team work that much harder and expend that many more resources while the other guy is unconscious on the floor from a failed athletics check landing on his head.

Goblin mcDick face hits you with his sword. You try to move out of the way as you are want to do when swords are swung at you. It hits you on the shoulder
Without armor: That cuts your skin, you're hurt
With armor: The sword glances off your armor, nothing happens
I mean I kinda hate DnD and most of it's systems, but there are better things to complain about

Have you played any other system than DnD?

It's unnecessary responsibility to put on the GM to have to interpret every strike because the rules are so awkward.

...It's effortless fluff that you can spend a couple of seconds on before moving on?

Why though? It's just bad rules.

How can you take "he takes 5hp-damage" and "I chug a a health potion to recover HP" even slightly seriously in any way? It's literally the same mechanics as Diablo (I don't care that DnD was first, it's an extremely gamey system).

Because, and this might be a shock to you- Your opinion is not fact.

It's a mechanical abstraction that describes a more complex, nuanced set of actions going on in the game world. The rules do not map onto what is happening one to one. And I am entirely okay with that, as are many other people.

Well you are obviously stupid then.

Our group has explanation that hp is the plot armor and the AC is everything that stands between you and getting hurt.

If you want blow by blow descriptions interpreting each roll's exact and unique sequence and series of hits in detail, including how, why and in what way they damage, don't damage, miss or are deflected, blocked, repelled or whatever then that's totally possible. You just need to find a DM willing to do that (and creative enough that it doesn't get stale) and other gamers willing to wait through the description before they roll which is probably going to be quite difficult in every aspect. It's possible, but not likely.

but god help you if you try to take that away from some GMs
>"I raise my great axe over my head, swinging it downwards with a-"
>JUST ROLL
>"k. with modifiers it's 18."
>that hits. roll your damage.
>"it's 5."
>the goblin takes 5 HP of damage. Next in the initiative-

fuck social encounters with those kinds of GMs too, it just turns into a roll off.

Or I just play a better game, like Eon

The issue isnt that some systems are "role play friendly" and that is necessary or good, it's that some systems do have mechanical issues that make roleplay more difficult.

Dungoens and Dragons is the mot visible propogator of these thypes of things. Class systems limit player choices, which is good in somesituations, but is also, of course, limiting, and so restricts roleplay options by forcing you to conform to a set model.

The dice mechanic is also designed with a high failure rate. Generally, even if you are good at hitting things, you will miss around 25% to 50% of the time. That is calculated into the combat mechanics, and enemies are balanced toward it. But when you go into a social encounter, or a stealth scenario, or a skill challenge type thing, it becomes a real issue. In a fight, it's okay to miss half the time, because the math accounts for it. But with skill checks, you frequently are eitehr given single roll which you must pass, or you are forced to make multiple rolls, such as in stealth situations, and must pass them all. The system is not designed to grant you that success rate, and so these types of skill tests become very difficult. Which makes players ignore them.

It isn't accidental that a lot of players consider social skills worthless or consider stealth checks suicide, because the d20 system reinforces that. If you go play some other games, it isn't really the same, and you can reasonably expect that if you are the thief, you can sneak past a shit ton of guys and not get spotted, passing numerous checks one after another, because the math is arranged in such a way that that is possible with very high skills. But some systems don't allow that, and it causes "roleplay" situations to feel like they are always against you.

>or you are forced to make multiple rolls, such as in stealth situations, and must pass them all
What kind of DM forces a new Stealth check for every guy the sneaker passes? That's asinine. You make ONE Stealth check, and the result of that check is the DC that anyone who might detect you has to beat.

In 5e, if they're not actively searching for you, they don't even get to roll. If your Stealth check beats their passive Perception, they do not detect you, and passive Perception scores usually don't even break 14.

>What kind of DM forces a new Stealth check for every guy the sneaker passes?

Say it's dumb or wrong all you want, but that is how virtually every game master does it. I have rarely ever seen a stealth scene that didn't end with, "well, you passed your first three checks, but that fourth one got you" or some variation thereof.

As someone who has played or run a lot of D&D, that is fucking awful GMing.

It's also how some versions of the game tell you to run it, so you can't entirely blame people, but it's still fucking stupid.

Below base AC they miss.
Above base, below armoured, it's deflected.
Above AC they hit.

How the fuck is that hard to do?

It's not a matter of combat rules. There's plenty of systems with just a large a portion of the rulebook devoted to combat and combat accessories as D&D that don't have that stigma. D&D is considered "combat-centric" because it has a class based system where characters are defined by their combat role. You can't have a character whose focus isn't combat, that's just going to be a gimped version of whatever they're "supposed" to do. You don't need a complex social combat system to be "roleplay heavy," you just need roleplaying to have some kind of mechanical support and be integrated into everything else instead of the game being sharply divided into combat and not-combat.

Which ever one has lower hit-points unless I'm sure the wizard will be killed by that blow but could otherwise be brought back into the fight and contribute damage greater than what wasn't dealt due to using action economy to up him OR the fight is basically over and no one else stands a chance at dying, in which case I prioritize minimizing resource expenditure and save the wizard.

Congrats you've successfully role played a violent idiot.

and thats why i dont say out loud most of the theories i think of. i want to see if the gm made any effort to his story.

as a gm, sure, the input is nice but i use it to enhance my own things, not for the player to do my job in place of me. the job of the players is to make believable characters. roleplay them, ya know.

It should. happens, tough, but generally players at least TALK with NPCs in social situations.

>all D&D is 3.5
It strikes again!

>all D&D is 3.5
It’s like it’s a pattern in all complaints about D&D or something.

Might as well ask in this thread. Me and a friend do a lot of straight-up normal roleplay. Often we take turns 'GMing' events/arcs affecting the other's character and such shenanigannery. My question is, if we wanted to use a system to dictate combat results with dice rolls and such, what would be best used? We've tried Risus & 1d6 3e but they're not made exclusively for combat. On the other end, I looked at Ops & Tactics, but that game's character creation is a clusterFUCK.

What's the theme and tone of your game? What aspects of combat do you want to emphasise and focus on? What do you enjoy in a game?

"RP Heavy" systems literally just have their own guided, open-ended questions baked into it. Done well it will have some sort of latent mechanical structure that welcomes player interaction on a narrative level.

A mindful GM can run an RP-centric campaign in literally anything, it's just a matter of maintaining your own expectations moment-to-moment procedure of the thing to create those openings and prompt those interactions. Make sure the players are comfortable and interested, place those opportunities around them that can engage them in different ways, and start asking questions to catalyze the whole thing.
Obviously its easier said than done, depending on the system and how much work it might otherwise take, but it's at least simple in abstract.

I don't think narrative systems really count, as they're more about story than straight roleplay.

That image is solid gold advice

If you really want to be autistic about it, you can draw up an "AC Stack", telling you exactly what each possible missed roll means.

Suppose your AC is 18 (+2 Dex, +2 Shield, +4 Armor). You could write up a little table, and compare it to each attack against you:

9 or less: Your opponent's swing doesn't even come close to you.
10-11: Your opponent nearly hits you, but you step out of the way at the last moment.
12-13: Your opponent is fast, but your shield is faster.
14-17: Your opponent strikes a glancing blow. You might have a bruise in the morning, but you've got more important things to worry about right now.
18 or higher: Yikes, that hurt! Take [however much] damage.

Of course, in sensible editions, 50% of this work is already done when you calculate your Touch AC and your Flat-Footed AC.

Being roleplay focused or not is entirely based on the opinion of the person reading the book.

You survive the halbard to the face because it didn't do enough damage to kill you.
"It grazes your cheek cutting deep and hurting like hell but not enough to take you out of the fight. " Or
" The blow aimed for your head, you try to avoid it, pulling your head back you narrowly avoid what would have certainly been a fatal wound but only just. The halbard's blade bites into your forehead. The wound is deep, but you're alive"
Something like that. Also just because the attack "hits" and deals damage doesn't mean it hits exactly where they wanted. Now this is just how I do it but, all a successful roll to "hit" means is that the blow made it past their defenses. The degree is up to me the DM.
"You thrust your sword into him aiming for the heart, the thief tried to guard against the blow and manages to throw the blade of course but it isn't enough, and you drive your blade deep into his stomach."

>I hit him with my sword.

I have tightened it down to just
>*move mini 6 squares*
>*point at enemy mini*
>"Warhammer"
>*rolls d20*

avoiding harm and stamina

> Your suspension of disbelief in this game of make believe is stupid and you're stupid too.

Well ok then.

>18 or higher: Yikes, that hurt! Take [however much] damage.
Until you start leveling up and suddenly a hit goes from being a decent chuck of your HP to nothing. And a sword stays 1d8+str damage the entire leveling scheme.
This leads to stupid things like a wizard being squishy until they aren't.

>roleplay heavy system
it has socio-psychological rules. even the hunger mechanic in the new vampire would qualify towards that end.

>spotted the deendeefag

you could but a 45% of your enemy's swings not even coming close to you isn't very evocative of heroic combats.

This right here. The absolute worst is when GMs brag about their game being "roleplay heavy" then proceed to run every enemy in combat like a video game AI.

here's the point: if the GM has to make that up instead of basing it on a die roll, why not skip rolling altogether and have him narrate the entire combat without a single dice rolled?

Reminder: A level 5 Wizard can survive a ballista bolt to the chest if they invest into as little as 14 CON and rolled max on their HP rolls in 3.PF.

The dice rolls in D&D are abstract enough to allow for multiple reasonable interpretations by the GM.

Consider: even though AC is a flat constant, it is unreasonable to assume that a person's defense is completely static. When somebody rolls a 2 to hit it could mean that their attack was lousy. Or, it could mean that the defender unusually ready for that attack. Or the attacker was hampered by some kind of outside influence. Since the d20 roll carries with it all the randomness associated with the situation, all of these things can happen.

You know there are systems that do exactly what you want. Hackmaster 5E for example has realistic armor, shields, and weapons.

More cumbersome armor makes you easier to hit. Shields ain't for pussies. Melee, ranged, and magic are reasonably balanced with each other.

It even 'fixes' hp to some degree and scales levels to a more reasonable and slow incline.

Odds are pretty good that a halberd might kill any human, and the best part is that even a dagger might straight up do it too.

Nobody likes slow combat, and sometimes combat can be finished in a single blow due to the pain system.

Nonsense. A ballista bolt to the chest would kill a wizard of almost any level. Since the wizard was hit by the ballista and isn't dead, he obviously wasn't hit in the chest.

This is how you run D&D -- by applying description and narrative after the fact to legitimize game outcomes. If you don't do it this way you are doing it wrong. If you don't want to do it this way, there are plenty of other less abstract systems that will better fit your tastes.

>Dungoens and Dragons is the mot visible propogator of these thypes of things. Class systems limit player choices, which is good in somesituations, but is also, of course, limiting, and so restricts roleplay options by forcing you to conform to a set model.

This is such a fucking stupid complaint. It's like... let's say that there's infinite character concepts out there. Playing in ANY setting/campaign concept you'll only have the option to play a subset of those. Having classes and other mechanical constraints comes after that, and is still much less of a limit.... but the point is that the number of concepts is _still_ infinite. So you got all the rational numbers, okay? And then you say "we'll be using only the odd rational numbers" guess what, that's still infinite. Even "Everybody is John" has infinite possible character concepts and I don't think you can get much more limiting than "split personality living in the head of a dude called John".

That's basically homebrewing stuff to make DnD more easy to visualize, the need to do this in the first place confirms the complaint.

Why do things become more likely to graze me as I level up then? Every 'fix' to the HP-system just raises more questions.

What is a healing potion and healing spell then? Should a red bull heal HP?

I wonder how some of these people who have real difficulty with abstractions would react to AD&D's rounds being a minute long.

>Until you start leveling up and suddenly a hit goes from being a decent chuck of your HP to nothing.

This is what is bad, though. This is the core of many complaints, the fact that this is needed, that we need to come up with explanations for the dice rolls so that they make sense in any way, is bad. In a well-designed systems the dice rolls should be basically self-explanatory, you should not need to interpret them.

Efficient.

Combat is not at all in the way of RP. Heavy rules are, sometimes, because they often stifle creative approaches. But that's often also because they are designed in an unclever manner.

As an example, let's take the DSA feat "Dirty Tricks". It's a feat that ALLOWS you to use tricks in combat like for example, often used, "I throw dirt in my opponents eyes.". This kind of ruling has a direct consequence - everyone who DOESN'T have the feat, cannot attempt that kind of creative action by RAW. This is why I am a fan of such feats (if they exist at all) only influencing modifiers - for example, without the feat you get -x to the roll, and with the feat you roll unmodified. Or in D&D, you get to add your proficiency bonus if you have the feat. That way, they don't necessarily stand in the way of your characters trying to cut the gordian knot by stating "YOU DON'T HAVE THE KNOT-CUTTING FEAT!".

Having the freedom to interpret the results can be fun. If dice rolls are self explanatory, you don't have that freedom. It's just a different style.

>the fact that this is needed, that we need to come up with explanations for the dice rolls so that they make sense in any way, is bad. In a well-designed systems the dice rolls should be basically self-explanatory, you should not need to interpret them.
I think the absolute opposite: Explaining dice rolls so they turn from a mechanic into a part of the narrative is the absolute core of any RPG, and I am not sure which system that you consider well-designed wouldn't require that. Can you give me an example of a system where the outcome of dice rolls is self-explanatory?

>The dice rolls in D&D are abstract enough to allow for multiple reasonable interpretations by the GM.
the same can be said for any system that resolves any combat with two rolls. allowing for a huge amount of itnerpretation. is that an attractive proposition though?

>is that an attractive proposition though?
Yes.

>Why do things become more likely to graze me as I level up then?

Because you become better protected by dodging/plot.

>Every 'fix' to the HP-system just raises more questions.

No, that's just your autism.

I'm waiting for him to post the MERP hit tables.

I'd also say that to me, it is. It means that me and the GM get to describe the actual action pretty much any way we want to.

And actually even though I didn't like HP for being "ablative armor" (meaning you go from perfectly healthy to KO/dieing without any in between steps), I've grown to see the potential in this too: it means if I describe a super dextrous hero, a monk for example, I can theoretically go and describe hits as very close dodges or exhausting relocations of force, and have the only, decisive hit that fells me, be the one that takes me to 0 HP. Or when I play a burly fighter in full plate, I can describe taking every single fucking hit.

>not flavoring your blows

Do you even d&d?

(contd.)
And that's a potential of the abstract HP number that I didn't see before I played D&D again last year: Since the concept is so abstract, the only description that arguably really matters and where you're somewhat bound to a certain end of the narration, is the one that takes you out of the fight.

Every other successful attack/damage on you can look just like you want to. If you play Jet Li, only every second or third hit can look like it actually hit you - the rest can be described as ambitious attacks that put you on the defensive, if you want. It changes nothing about the amount of HP you actually lose, but it really gives you a lot of potential freedom in the way you want it to look.

Realized it in a campaign where we had a Monk and a Paladin. The Monk taking damage would look like he barely dodged or diverted the energy of the blow, and so on (he'd reserve actual hits for when he was either critted, dropped, or taken down a huge amount in one blow). The Paladin (heavy armor master feat) would literally move INTO the blows most of the time, taking every single one moving ever so slightly so the blow would hit the strongest parts of the armor at a slight slope.

Their combat styles looked completely different from level 1 on and were handled with the same, simple abstract system.

>healing spell

Ahhhh, so you are from /a/ and have never actually played roleplaying games.

In D&D this sorta breaks down occasionally because of legacy bullshit, but yeah, this is basically how HP systems are meant to be used.

I'll go further and say that HP as a thing only makes sense in a combat scenario, or scenarios that can be handled as combats, just to get past the whole "but what happens if they try to execute the barbarian, but he has 200 HP and the executioner is a level 1 commoner?" and the like.

Yes agreed, that holds true for every dang system too - you could argue that a holdout pistol cannot penetrate a Troll skull in Shadowrun, which clearly wasn't the intention of the game. If someone has a gun to the back of your head out of nowhere, and that thing is not some weird adamantium superpower story thing, this isn't a combat rules situation. It's narrative and that means you may die.

Wouldn't that would be a coup de gras?

CDG rules are usually reserved for combat situations, and may run into the same sort of problems (the above barb would still survive a bunch of CDGs, for example).

Of course, you could finnagle it to make a CDG an actual CDG, and make the in-combat use tied to being out of HP already (5e's "a hit while down means 2 failed saves" is basically this I think).

Some systems have explicit rules for it, Shadowrun for example doesn't (or didn't when I played it regularly, which is quite a while back).

"Coup de grace", user, it means "blow of mercy". The killing blow that releases another from their suffering and grants them a fast death.

"Coup de gras" would be "blow of liver".

Foie grace.

I believe "foie" means liver, while "gras" means fat. I guess one could translate it as "fat blow"?

I like a fat blow.

>Hoe do you even explain that heavy armor makes you less likely to be hit
Attacks are deflected and blocked by the armor. How hard a concept is that?

Of course you do, you wouldn't want to body shame them, would you know?

martials in d&d/PF can be interesting to play, but your average encounter has to be a little more complex than just one big dude alone in a room.

When you're playing on a grid (not an approximate map on a dirty piece of paper where you can't clearly make out threat zones), the game is great for martials, even if you're only attacking, placement becomes crucial, teamwork becomes obvious, players start weighing the options of combat maneuvers and using terrain.

But you have to be actually playing the game, not almost playing it while ignoring half the rules and not committing to a strict system for your battle map.

No, a fat blow could be one dealt by a barbarian with a sledgehammer. A blow of fat would be the rogue blinding his adersvary with an improvised weapon at the tavern brawl, or the grandad dwarf choking his with what's left of his triceps. Maybe a weird name for the kind of trick lazy people get away with ?

In the example I gave above for example, playing the Heavy Armor Master Paladin I described probably more than 50% of the MISSES on my character as HITS (the direct opposite of what my friend with the Monk did). The Paladin would just block the blow so it glanced off ineffectively, or step so far into the attack so barely any of the force would come to bear.