Quote:
Originally Posted by Blackguard
Say you lay out your nice pattern of bends that covers the targets you want... and then miss the attack roll on your cone. Do you scatter the end point and rotate the whole pattern appropriately?
|
That does seem to be the obvious consequence of mis-aiming a cone effect, even one with zig-zags. It's complicated by the fact that a cone's aim point could be 1 yard away or 100. If your aim point was 100 yards away, then a scatter of a couple yards (your margin of failure) won't affect the cone's placement very much. But if your aim point was 1 yard away, a 1-yard scatter (since you round up) could throw your aim off by 60 degrees.
A cone attack, even with a malediction effect, is an aimed attack. Laying out a precise pattern of bends, when you're looking at it from the origin point not from overhead (with some of the legs of the path possibly going sideways or coming back towards you...), seems like a complicated thing to do. I think it makes sense to require an attack roll to precisely orient each bend (with distance penalties along the path to that bend's target). The fact that you might miss some of your targets is offset by the fact that you can get your chain back on track with the next bend (unless you have a nuisance effect preventing further attacks after a miss, or some such), and has similarities to how Spraying Fire works. I think you would still need to specify where all your bends are going to be before you make your attack though (or at least specify your intended targets). It might be interesting to penalize successive attack rolls with your cumulative margin of failure from previous misses to represent the attack being harder and harder to get back on track from your point of view (a nuisance effect).
If multiple attack rolls would slow down play, another way to do it would be to make a single attack roll, and your margin of success (possibly zero) determines how many bends are oriented correctly (and simply ignore scatter -- missed bends are just wasted). Fast and easy.