The reason why I think Morrowind does it wrong is because it tricks you into thinking that what you're seeing is what's happening. There are no indicators of this arbitrary system under the hood which relies on random chance other than your weapon clipping through the enemy without making contact.
Indeed, that's the problem with most RPGs in existence - that they treat audiovisual representation of world and mechanics as token rather than thing in itself.
Deus Ex (...) random dice rolling.
Nope. Deus Ex had honest firing cone mechanics AND visual indicator for spread. It never applied roll to see if you actually hit what you hit. It merely added random targeting error within bounds shown to you via expanding/contracting crosshair BEFORE you did the hitting part.
Play mage instead.
Without exploiting alchemy, abusing trainers or using any form of melee as anything but last resort backup.
I've read that mages are getting terribly whopped ater by mobs with magic resistance or spell reflecting. True/false?
Both. Reflect is indeed a bit of PITA, and not exactly fair, but there are means to reduce its impact to insignificance if you make the right spells and use them correctly.
I am assuming full suite of magic skills here, otherwise you might miss some important components. OTOH if you don't have all magic skills in your build, then you'll probably have some other useful skills. And won't be a 'pure' mage.
Or you're making a role playing game and you want to hit chance to be based on character skill.
You mean a game that plays itself and player is there just to watch.
Well, the thing is that having *character's* skill separate from *player's* skill is pretty much the core of what makes game an RPG.
Complaining about it is like buying a sport game and complaining that nothing ever happens in it but a bunch of morons chasing a ball all the time - well duh.
Now, I don't think that player skill and character skill need to be mutually exclusive, but the thing is that character skill must necessarily be the part that limits what you can do for a game to be considered an RPG. For example if you define your character as superb swordsman, but really lousy shot, then the game mechanics must successfully prevent you from applying your 1337 41m1n6 5k1772 with this character, no matter how 1337 they are - for example by not allowing you to pinpoint where your shot will actually hit. Other penalties, like reducing rate of attacks, their latency, and adding other inconveniences can help, but they alone aren't limiting.
It doesn't matter if I can fire very slowly - if I can still shoot someone in the eye from a kilometre away I'm still a pretty good shoot.
In particular trying to replace to-hit rolls with stuff like damage scaling is failure incarnate, because not only it isn't limiting (because the skill is still perfectly reliable, even with low damage you can continue to lay into the enemy until they drop and build your tactics around this continuous damage output), but it also lets to situations far more unrealistic than to hit rolls.
Why?
To hit rolls are pretty sketchy representation of actual combat and look bad up close, but they conserve some important properties of actual combat.
For example:
-being skewered on a sword or getting an arrow through the eye is lethal no matter who holds the weapon
-combat generally revolves around hitting while not getting hit yourself which is facilitated by having more skill
Damage scaling, OTOH don't conserve those properties:
-being shot in the eye or brained with a two-handed axe results with only minor irritation or bruising as long as the person inflicting the injury isn't particularly apt at using their weapon
-combat skills generally revolves around just standing there while hitting and getting hit, until one of you drops. Amount of hits dropping the target is decided by skill.
You *might* conserve those properties, if you for example make skill affect attack and parry speed and outcome of miss or parry, for example by introducing balance mechanics of some sort:
-first point is like in the first example.
-superior combatant will generally manage to reliably parry or dodge inferior combatant's attacks, with effects leaving the opponent vulnerable to counters.
You'd still benefit from some accuracy mechanics, though, if only to allow skilled characters to make precise attacks targetting gaps in defences and weak points of armour.
That's in melee, with ranged weapons accuracy is simply indispensable.
So,
tl;dr:
To hit rolls may not be necessary, but an RPG absolutely needs some success/failure mechanics that cannot be overridden by player's skill.
Also something I overlooked when going over that one update:
