this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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Yes, assuming we're talking about DND, the player is asking if his total attack roll with modifiers is equal to or greater than the enemies armor class, which only the DM knows. If so, the attack hits. If not, it misses. An AC of 19 or more is pretty high for low level player characters.
My confusion was that the meme said rolls an 18 and the title said 18 doesn't hit, which makes it sound like in one instance its referring to the roll and in the other the roll with modifiers, but I'm unfamiliar with the parlance.
Yeah, generally we already add the modifiers to the roll even when we speak it, so if we say “I rolled 18” it could mean “18 + 0”, “16 + 2”, “19 - 1” etc.
In games like D&D and Pathfinder, it's pretty much never important what's on the die without modifiers.
If we do refer to what the die itself shows, we often say “natural” or “nat” in front of it; “That's a nat 18, so I rolled 20 total”, for example.
In video game terms, nat 20 and nat 1 are critical (success and fail respectively). They (almost) always succeed or fail, so modifiers don't effect them. Obviously you can't succeed to fly by flapping your arms or anything that like, but you will successfully flap your arms really well (or on a 1 maybe fall on your face).
Well, in D&D, as well as any other TTRPG I've played, players don't have to roll for obviously trivial tasks like pushing a door open or saying something.
So flapping arms wouldn't need a skill check.
But yes, in D&D, only the natural 20 and sometimes natural 1 are relevant, so we can talk about them by adding the word “natural” in front of them.
In any other case, the end result including the modifiers matters, so when we say we roll a certain number like 18, we mean after adding in any relevant modifiers.
True, but if you jump off a building trying to fly I'd expect an athletics check probably to see how bad you hurt yourself. A nat 20 won't make it work, but may prevent injury.