Reverse Missiles - Can you dodge?

[Otaku]

Originally Posted by Kromm

As for misses, the idea is that for the sake of drama, you treat all misses as near-misses: hair-parting grazes, last minute flinches, etc. They would've hit but for random bad luck. The effect extends at most to the target's hair, clothing, etc. so that this can happen. Wide misses with more air between them and the target don't occur ". . . because magic."

I think I get it. This might not quite be a RAW accurate example, but a PC archer targeting an NPC mage he doesn't realize is protected by Reverse Missile rolls a miss by 1 for an area where that doesn't hit anywhere else. A generous GM could treat it as being so close of a shot that it triggers "Reverse Missile"; as the shot would have barely grazed the mage's hair or clothes, the GM has the returned arrow similarly barely miss the archer, who likely now realizes that the mage is indeed protected.

Am I close?

[DouglasCole]

Targeting a hex with an area-effect or explosive attack gives a +4 bonus to hit a hex. It's not precisely apropos, but you could say that if you miss by 5+, you miss so badly that you don't trigger the spell.

[Kromm]

Misses in GURPS are near-misses in almost all cases. I'd be extremely reluctant to hang a specific margin of failure on it. A miss by just 1 can still hit the target when attacking the eye, skull, face, groin, neck, or vitals; as DouglasCole says, a miss by 4 is canonically still in your hex; and even a miss by 9 when targeting the eyes (-9) might mean "just whizzed by the side of the head," because if you hadn't aimed there, you would've hit. Also, hitting the wrong target is restricted to a one-hex-wide strip for an arbitrarily large miss . . . if you have modified skill 6 and roll a 15, your miss by 9 still travels down a 3'-wide corridor mostly filled by you would-be target, meaning it zipped past mere inches away from a linebacker-sized warrior in armor. The exception is scatter, which only applies to attacks on areas with the sorts of weapons that don't attack point targets in the first place.

For most purposes, letting Reverse Missiles reflect misses isn't saying anything extravagant about the spell's area of effect. The difference between "me" and "me and an inch-wide fringe wide around me" covers a margin of failure of up to 9. It's really no different from saying the spell protects your gear as well as you.