This blog started as an exclusively World of Warcraft-specific blog. The game, which will hit its 22nd anniversary this year (and in September I'll have played it for 20) has gone through a lot of system changes, with biannual expansions giving them the biggest opportunities to overhaul things.
Back in the day, you had to have Hit Rating on your gear (or Spell Hit Rating when they made those things separate - Light help you if you were a magic/melee hybrid like an Enhancement Shaman) spells/abilities and auto-attacks had a chance to just miss the target. You could also find pieces of gear that raised your skill with a weapon type, which was later turned into Expertise (which worked for all weapons) and thus reduce the chance that a creature could dodge, block, or parry your attacks (because monsters could only dodge attacks from behind them, damage-dealing melee characters could be satisfied with enough expertise to eliminate dodging, while tanks were expected to get enough to prevent any parrying as well).
At some point (I want to say Warlords of Draenor,) they ripped this out of the game - from then to today, if you are fighting level-appropriate foes (and given the scaling world of the game, that's more or less any you'll come across) your spells and abilities (things with a name you push a button for) will always connect, and the only thing that has a chance to miss is your auto-attacks if you are dual-wielding weapons (auto-attacks, which used to be a huge portion of player damage, have also been de-emphasized as a source of damage compared to active abilities).
The only thing that was lost was a weird sort of stat-juggling where you wanted to have just enough Hit and Expertise ratings to meet your threshold but not have much more than that, as it would be redundant. Gameplay-wise, though, that meant that, properly geared, missing wasn't really a thing.
It is, kind of, a distinction between D&D and games that don't bother with attack rolls like Draw Steel (I know they're not the first to try this, but it was a big part of their pitch to the audience).
Missing in D&D is not really fun. It's especially not fun in early levels where your entire turn might have no effect because you only have one attack. Extra Attack or the unique scaling of the Eldritch Blast cantrip can smooth this out - if you have a 75% chance to hit, getting another chance to hit means that the chance of not getting a single hit during your turn goes from 25% to 6.25%.
Essentially, the more attacks you're making, the more your actual damage output is going to resemble what your average damage output ought to be, because there's a larger sample size and each outlier has a diluted influence.
Still, even if the chance that you get nothing for your turn's efforts drops as you get some of these mid-to-late-game enhancements, it doesn't eliminate the problem completely. You could have a 95% chance to hit (the most you can get without advantage because a Nat 1 always misses) and even with four attacks, technically you could just get really unlucky (though that would be vanishingly rare).
And furthermore, the game slows down as you get to higher levels because there are more actions taking place. Extra Attack doubles the time it takes for a character to describe their action. Now, sure, it's still going to probably take way less time than someone casting nearly any spell.
But let's talk about it in terms of fantasy:
Draw Steel eliminates attack rolls in part because the point of the game is for the player characters (and the monsters) to feel awesome. The game pumps everyone up to be these epic heroes (with a little superheroics at work) and an epic hero totally whiffing doesn't really feel like it's true to the tone they're seeking out.
Deathblow, the kernel of a game system that I'm rolling around in my head (other than DMing a lot of D&D, I should note that my game design experience is largely limited to homebrew monsters and obviously a lot of homebrew adventures - I'd love for this all to turn into something real, but I make zero promises,) is not quite that in tone.
The Night Hunters in Deathblow are not epic heroes, and they're not the kind of people who are going to save an entire city from a rampaging Kaiju (unless I really figure out the game system and find it can scale up beyond where I've conceived it). While Night Hunters are meant to be more capable and prepared to fight gothic monsters than the villagers they come to protect, they're still very much mere mortals for whom victory is no guarantee.
So, does that mean they should have a chance to miss?
Here's the thing: missing as a player in D&D feels bad. Getting missed by a monster in D&D feels awesome. My long-running Eldritch Knight Fighter was built around having an absurd AC - between a +1 Shield, the Defense Fighting Style, and the Shield Spell, once I got plate armor I effectively had an AC of 27 as long as I had any spell slots left. While I've found in the past that AC isn't really as good at reducing average damage taken as things like Rage or even Deflect Attacks, that might start to change when you start pushing the AC to those absurd limits.
But more than that, on a feeling level, it felt really good to be so untouchable. In a recent episode of Critical Role, Luis Carazo's character Azune is a Sorcerer/Paladin multiclass, and so could combine the high AC of a Paladin with the Shield spell, so that when pitted against a group of what I assume were Bandits, each needed to roll a natural 20 to hit him, and none did (evidently DM Brennan Lee Mulligan rolled several 19s, but to no avail).
In early design for Draw Steel (then just "The MCDM RPG") they gave some classes triggered actions that could fully negate a foe's damage to them, but the final design at best let damage be reduced, but never eliminated. For both players and the Director, the intent is for every turn to move things forward.
Again, though, I think that there's an efficiency to removing attack rolls - while Extra Attack doubles a martial character's damage at level 5 (not to mention the higher hit chance due to a bump in proficiency bonus,) I actually think the "feels-good" part of getting it is more about that statistical smoothing effect. Even if you miss on one attack, getting one in will at least make you feel like you did something. In a system without attack rolls, though, you could double damage simply by... doubling damage. Sure, there are cases where you might prefer the split damage (like if you can kill a monster with one attack and then move on to the other with the second attack) but especially in a game where I'm imagining most monsters should be fought solo, pouring it all into one bit of damage is probably ideal (especially given Deathblow mechanics, where you need to hit their threshold with a single attack to get the kill).
I think the only thing, then, to really consider is how this impacts things like equipment.
In Draw Steel, armor is very abstractly represented via Kits as just higher Stamina. The argument for this was that if heavier armor reduced the damage you took by 20% on average because of the higher chance for monsters to miss you, you could achieve the same effect by increasing your Stamina and healing received by 25% (given that healing in Draw Steel is almost always proportionate to your max Stamina). (I think I have that math right - 100 is 80% of 125, just as 80 is 80% of 100).
I'd be tempted to use armor as damage reduction, but damage reduction always runs into two problems: first, if it's a percentage reduction, that might require everyone bust out calculators (something you generally want to avoid in TTRPG design) unless it's always something flat and easily done in one's head, like the 50% reduction from resistances in 5E. But if you want different kinds of armor reducing damage by different percentages, it gets messy. Alternatively, if you have subtractive damage reduction, it becomes insanely powerful against a lot of little hits and proportionately weaker against individual, massive blows.
So, yeah, without a hit chance to consider, I guess I'll hand this to the MCDM folks - just raising Stamina is probably the most elegant solution.
That being said:
The subtractive damage reduction issues might not be as big of a deal when we're dealing with a game that focuses on individual, powerful monsters. Minion fights against, say, zombies or wicker blights (the latter being the kind of minions I think a Hexen would have, which are sort of this game's version of hags) might really favor Night Hunters with heavy armor, because they might be able to shrug off the minions' blows unless they can roll particularly high on their damage, but then when facing off against the starring monster, that reduction is less proportionately powerful because every attack is going to do at least a bit of damage.
On the other (are we on third or fourth now?) hand, subtractive damage reduction might be too powerful if PCs are also only killed on a Deathblow.
Eh, yeah, for now, I think sticking to the Draw Steel style of armor is probably the best course.
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