Curving Shot and the Problem With Wasted Turns

There is a particular kind of failure in D&D that I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with: the wasted turn.

Your fighter waits while the wizard considers six spells, the cleric checks whether anyone needs healing, the rogue figures out how to get Sneak Attack, and the monsters take their turns. Finally, you’re up. You swing, you miss, and your turn is over.

Failure belongs in D&D. I don’t want characters protected from bad rolls, and I certainly don’t want every failed attack transformed into some sort of consolation prize. But there’s a difference between failure that affects the game and failure that simply removes a player from it for another round.

That’s why I’m intrigued by the revised Arcane Archer’s Curving Shot, a feature discussed in the original article, “The Revised Arcane Archer Is Almost Here”.

Missing Doesn’t Have to Mean Doing Nothing

Curving Shot gives an Arcane Archer another possibility after missing a ranged attack. The fighter can use a Bonus Action to redirect the shot toward another creature and make another attack.

The fact that the first attack still missed is important. The game hasn’t quietly changed the result to make the player feel better. Instead, the character gets another opportunity because of something the character can actually do.

I’ve seen mechanics like this described as bad-luck protection, but I’m not sure that’s what interests me about them. I don’t particularly want D&D to protect characters from bad luck. Sometimes the fighter rolls a 4. Sometimes the dragon makes its saving throw. Sometimes the rogue misses the jump. That’s why we’re rolling dice instead of sitting around the table telling one another how awesome our characters are.

What I want the game to create are opportunities for players to remain consequential even when the dice go against them.

A failed roll should be allowed to hurt. A failed turn shouldn’t necessarily mean the player contributed nothing to the encounter.

Martial characters particularly benefit from this kind of thinking because so much of their contribution to combat is traditionally tied to attack rolls. When those rolls fail, their entire turn can sometimes amount to nothing.

Compare that with many spellcasters. A spell might deal half damage on a successful save. It might create difficult terrain, move a creature, change visibility, impose a condition, summon something, or reshape the battlefield. Even when things don’t go perfectly, the player’s decision can still leave fingerprints on the encounter.

Martials deserve some fingerprints too.

Let Heroes Be Heroic

I’m interested in mechanics that give martial characters more ways to influence combat than simply choosing which enemy to attack and rolling for damage. Even something as straightforward as an expanded critical-hit range can help a martial character occasionally feel extraordinary, but Curving Shot does something I find more interesting: it creates another decision.

A fighter scoring a critical hit on a 19 feels powerful, but the die created that moment. A fighter choosing to send a missed arrow toward the goblin threatening the cleric is making a decision.

Both can make a heroic character feel heroic, but I would rather give martial characters more meaningful decisions than simply more damage.

We’re playing heroic fantasy. A veteran fighter ricocheting an arrow toward another enemy after the first target ducks isn’t particularly outrageous in a world where someone standing twenty feet away can summon a wall of fire. Let the fighter be extraordinary too, but without eliminating the possibility of failure.

Don’t Hand Out Participation Trophies

I don’t want a design philosophy that amounts to:

You missed, so here’s something nice anyway.

If every failure automatically produces a benefit, failure stops carrying much weight. Eventually we’re just finding increasingly elaborate ways of assuring players that their characters are awesome regardless of what they choose or what the dice say.

Heroism shouldn’t be a participation trophy.

The better approach is:

You failed. What can you do now?

Curving Shot works for me because the player still has to make a decision. Is there another valid target? Is redirecting the shot worth using the Bonus Action? Which enemy should receive the second attack?

That Bonus Action matters. The character isn’t simply handed another roll because the first one went badly. Failure has created an opportunity, and the player has to decide whether that opportunity is worth pursuing.

The cost helps create the decision.

That’s an important distinction. A Bonus Action, Reaction, superiority die, or another limited resource means the player is making a choice about what happens next. The mechanic isn’t compensating the player for failure; it’s giving the player another way to engage with its consequences.

What Else Could Failure Open Up?

Curving Shot makes me curious about where this design idea might go next.

Not every missed attack needs a secondary effect, but there is plenty of room for subclass abilities, weapon features, or class mechanics that let a martial character spend another resource after failure and try to influence the encounter in a different way.

A missed attack might allow a fighter to spend a Bonus Action to pressure the target into making a saving throw. Failure on that save might reduce the creature’s movement until the start of the fighter’s next turn.

Another feature might allow a Reaction after missing to force the target to reposition, lose some measure of defense, or expose itself to an ally. A heavily armored fighter might miss with a weapon attack but use the momentum to impose a saving throw that temporarily reduces the target’s AC.

A more mobile subclass might follow a missed strike by spending a Bonus Action to move without provoking an opportunity attack, turning failure into repositioning rather than simply ending the turn.

Another ability might let the martial character redirect attention. The attack misses, but the fighter can force a saving throw or otherwise pressure the target into suffering disadvantage when attacking someone else.

These are the kinds of mechanics I’d like to see explored. They aren’t simply different ways to inflict damage. They create opportunities to affect movement, positioning, defense, attention, and momentum.

More importantly, they give the player another question to answer:

I missed. What can I still try to accomplish?

That’s a much more interesting space for martial design. Failure creates an opportunity, the player decides whether it is worth pursuing, and the outcome can still depend on another roll or saving throw.

A Combat Encounter Should Bear the Players’ Fingerprints

At the end of a good combat encounter, I want to be able to look at the battlefield and see evidence of the players’ decisions.

The fighter held the doorway. The rogue drew the ogre away from the wizard. The cleric kept the fighter standing for one more round. The wizard turned half the room into an inferno.

The Arcane Archer’s missed arrow went sailing past the hobgoblin captain, but Curving Shot gave the fighter a chance to redirect it toward the goblin threatening the cleric. Maybe that second arrow misses too. That’s fine; the dice are allowed to say no, but the player was still playing the game.

That’s ultimately what mechanics like Curving Shot get right. The goal shouldn’t be to protect players from failure. It should be to give them meaningful decisions and enough opportunities to leave their mark on the encounter.

Because the opposite of heroic play isn’t failure. It’s irrelevance.