I'm Stumped: Scaling AC, Armor, and the RNG?

[Psychic Robot]

That's my dumb question for today: how can one have a scaling AC bonus that "keeps up" with leveling? The scaling AC bonus, to me, represents one's skill in combat. But if one has armor and shields providing an AC bonus, this can quickly get thrown out of whack, pooping on the RNG.

Take, for instance, 3.5: let us say that I have a level 4 fighter wearing full plate (+8), a tower shield (+4), and a 12 Dexterity, giving him a total AC of 23. Now, if I have a scaling AC bonus--let us say, equal to 1/2 BAB--he will have an additional +2 AC. Against that character, a fighter of equal level--let us say a 19 Strength, no Weapon Focus feats or anything--has a 15% chance of hitting. (Dropping the scaling AC bonus brings it to a more acceptable 25%, but that's still pretty lame.)

Fast-forward to level 10. (Let's assume no magical gear for the sake of discussion.) The first fighter still has a base AC of 23. If he has a scaling AC bonus, that will bring it up to +28. The second fighter has an attack bonus of +15 (20 Strength at this point), giving him a 35% chance to hit the first fighter. (Dropping the scaling AC bonus brings it to 60%). Essentially, the first fighter has gotten significantly worse at defending himself from the attacks of an even-level opponent.

So, I'm stumped. How can these things coexist?

[ubernoob]

You scale the base rate to be equal. That means if you have a scaling to hit then you have a scaling to not get hit at the same rate.

Simply put: Fuck armor as 3E has it. Have BAB add to AC as well and dump or reduce all of the AC boosters that make the numbers insane.

[Username17]

Ubernoob got it in one. If you give people a base AC rate to go with their base to-hit rate, then differences in armor will always have the same relative bonus for people of the same level. Where all editions of D&D have gone horribly wrong is in giving out additional "optional" bonuses to AC an attack roles that were equal in magnitude overall to the entire die.

Keeping things scaling together is easy - just take away all the optional bonuses like ever more superior equipment and feat chains of raw bonuses. Keeping things interesting in a game where you know that your attacks are just going to keep up and you don't have to evolve or change to fight new foes - that's hard.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

BAB comes in 3 types: 1/2, 3/4, and 1/1 (although Frank says it's stupid, it really does actually matter if there's no access to Haste and Divine Power)
I'll assume that after level 7 everyone has the best BAB due to Divine Power or very good CharOpping. People find a way.

The attack roll is 1d20 + level vs. base AC of 10.
At level 1 it's simplest: 1d20 + 5 or less vs. 10 + at most about 8 or so.
Obvious, but this is the starting point.
You add bonuses to each side that more or less fall within expected range, although magic of course always fucks things up.

If you want AC to fall within an expected range, you could add a Dodge or Armor bonuses, or other non-stacking bonus to AC at a rate of 1/2, 3/4, and 1/1 compared to level.
Putting on armor and maxing out DEX at early levels would provide a jumpstart but as levels progress this nonstacking "level defense" would eventually override those bonuses.

This would mean that it instead becomes 1d20 + level vs. 10 + level, with varied bonuses on each side of course. K mentioned something like this in a proposal thread just to gather consensus; it had something to do with removing BAB and similar entirely since defense doesn't scale (normally).

The result here, though, is that the RNG once more becomes like it was back at level 1.
You'd end up with mid to high level characters wearing much, much less since they don't have to struggle constantly just to stay effective in warding off a portion of attacks.

However, this change makes physical combat longer while magical combat still ends battlers in as little time as a single round...

In essence, pretty much what ubernoob said.

[Psychic Robot]

You scale the base rate to be equal. That means if you have a scaling to hit then you have a scaling to not get hit at the same rate.

Simply put: Fuck armor as 3E has it. Have BAB add to AC as well and dump or reduce all of the AC boosters that make the numbers insane.

Aye, this is what I feared. (Armor as DR, here we come. Glad I have a back-up copy of my unaltered work.)

Another two questions, then.

One: should AC scale exactly equally to attack bonus, or should it be slightly less? (I'm thinking the latter so that shields have a role, as I'm not sure what they could do aside from providing AC.)

Two: Is it acceptable to have approximately a 50% miss chance? I think that the "sweet spot" (for fighters) would be closer to around 80%, giving players leeway for Power Attacks and whatnot.

[RandomCasualty2]

The idea si that armor needs to grant a static bonus (no more of the +X plate mail or +X shields). Then each level you simply add a static number to both ends of the equation.

This can be +1 in 3.5 or the +1/2 per level in 4E. It really doesn't matter. Obviously the larger your level bonus, the more that levels matter, but for balance purposes it won't do much.

The idea is basically to get a starting set of numbers you like and then just add one number to each side, thus keeping the equation balanced.

So if you like people hitting a full plate warrior on a 15 or better, then you just set it up so that the basic numbers at level 1 require that, then add the same amount each level to AC and attack as a leveling bonus. You then just have to cut out all miscellaneous bonuses for the most part.

[Voss]

I'd aim for a 55% hit chance, with a lowered AC if people want to do special things:
more attacks (for the TWF otakus)
more damage (greatsword folks)
etc

Thing to be careful of is not punishing people with suboptimal choices. 3e has a pretty decent selection of armor in theory, but there are essentially 5 [6 if you count 'none') viable choices out of the entire list. And 3 only matter if your dex is somewhere on the series between very high and absurdly high.

4e managed to scale AC vs attack roll in a fairly functional way. If you put any effort at all into it, you're somewhere on a 4 point variation 90% of the time. If you're intelligent, you actually get something for that trade off.

[Psychic Robot]

Piece of shit computer imploded when I was making a post.

Anyway, my problem with 4e is that it's still equipment-dependent. Want to stay on the RNG for AC? You have to keep buying shit. I hate that. I like characters to be awesome because of intrinsic qualities.

[SunTzuWarmaster]

Here we come +1/3 levels scaling magic equipment!

[Voss]

Eh. You don't really. If you take plus weapons and plus armor out, the range stays exactly the same. Just smack all the monsters with Attack/Defense penalties that bring them in line with whatever level they are. Probably can use that stupid magic item threshold as a base.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Note that 4th Edition has the opposite problem. All things being equal, AC bonuses and hp scale faster than attack bonuses. This gets worse when you throw in magical armor and class abilities, since they're slanted towards giving defensive bonuses and situations in the basic book.

[Tequila Sunrise]

Piece of shit computer imploded when I was making a post.

Anyway, my problem with 4e is that it's still equipment-dependent. Want to stay on the RNG for AC? You have to keep buying shit. I hate that. I like characters to be awesome because of intrinsic qualities.

All you have to do is drop those enhancement bonuses, as Voss said, and make up for crit dice and masterwork armor if you don't want to hand out those either. +1 or +3 at 11th and 21st levels, depending on whether a PC wears light or heavy armor should do the trick. And if you don't want to fiddle with monster stats to make up for lower PC stats, you can use the Item Independence rule from my Tome of House Rules. (visit http://lucasbuchanan.com/Dungeons%20&%20Dragons to read it)

TS

[Psychic Robot]

Sub-question, then: How can damage reduction be made viable without resulting in a situation where two-hundred low-level kobolds pitching spears at you can't hurt you?

[CatharzGodfoot]

Sub-question, then: How can damage reduction be made viable without resulting in a situation where two-hundred low-level kobolds pitching spears at you can't hurt you?

Use per-round DR rather than per-attack DR (essentially per-round temporary HP).

[Psychic Robot]

...Huh. That's a really easy solution.

[ubernoob]

Sub-question, then: How can damage reduction be made viable without resulting in a situation where two-hundred low-level kobolds pitching spears at you can't hurt you?

Use per-round DR rather than per-attack DR (essentially per-round temporary HP).

Fuck that is really fucking simple. That's brilliant. Why the fuck haven't I seen this idea before? Really, this is a fucking good idea.

[RandomCasualty2]

Sub-question, then: How can damage reduction be made viable without resulting in a situation where two-hundred low-level kobolds pitching spears at you can't hurt you?

This is a problem that has plagued me for a while with armor as DR.

I don't really like the per round temp hp solution, mainly because it doesn't provide much in the way of a counter system, because armor is equally good against everything.

I'd really like a more Starcraft feel where heavily armored stuff is actually good agaisnt a bunch of low damage weenies attacking at it, or really any flurry type attacker. So against a monk spamming fist attacks, having heavy armor is really useful, but against a giant swinging a greatsword who hits in one massive blow, armor sucks. The agility guy should beat the giant by having powers that dodge individual attacks.

That's how I'd like it to work ideally anyway. Thus far I haven't really found a great way to implement that yet however.

A few armor mechanics to get it to work that way:

-Make the range of damage values larger. The main problem with DR and kobolds is that weenies tend to have d4 weapons, which means that their range is very low. If we gave every weapon a 2d6 range for instance, but instead of different dice types we handed out bonuses/penalties, we'd be a bit better off. Like for instance, maybe a dagger deals -4 damage. Which still means you can deal 8 damage if you roll really well.

-Have minimum damage of 1, regardless of armor DR, and keep hit points relatively small. This means that no matter how armored, eventually you will get worn down. Of course, this probably means shrinking HP in some way.

-Have some kind of secondary roll versus armor to see if armor applies.

[IGTN]

You could, of course, split DR into two numbers, one is a cap per attack and one a cap per round; each attack has an amount taken off equal to the per attack cap, but your DR can only absorb up to the per round cap. Damage reduction 5 (30) would hold against 6 attacks each doing at least 5 damage, or 15 attacks averaging two damage apiece (provided none of them did more than 5); any more than that and it goes away.

You could even make it three numbers, where the first number is an amount of "free" damage reduction that is applied first and doesn't count against the cap, or which might only be applied after the cap is reached.

In this case, you might have 1 4 24 armor, which reduces all attacks by 1 damage, then shunts up to 4 damage from each attack to a stack of 24 HP that replenishes every round. This needs a separator that isn't a space, but I don't know what.

The second case does almost the same thing, but with the notation 5 30 1; the 5 30 behaves the same way as 5 (30) does above, but after you lose the 30, your DR drops to 1. These two cases work identically against big attacks, but differently against lots of low-damage attacks; it takes only 15 attacks at 2 damage apiece, 10 at 3 apiece, or 7.5 at 4 apiece to break your damage reduction in this case, while the first case takes 24 attacks at 2 damage apiece, 12 at 3 apiece, and 8 at 4 apiece. At 5 apiece, both take 6 and then behave the same way against higher damages.

This has the downside of being slightly more convoluted than simple per-round temp HP or per attack DR.

For duels against high-damage opponents, you can give an action that, once per round (or slightly less frequently) allows you to dump your entire armor reserve on one attack.

A minimum damage of one, after armor, actually makes things worse for what you want; if you're damaging under their armor and can split your 1 attack for n damage into 2 for n/2 damage apiece, this becomes the superior option; it always becomes the superior choice to make lots of attacks. Of course, SC had this problem, too.

[JonSetanta]

Piece of shit computer imploded when I was making a post.

Anyway, my problem with 4e is that it's still equipment-dependent. Want to stay on the RNG for AC? You have to keep buying shit. I hate that. I like characters to be awesome because of intrinsic qualities.

It's not just 4e, most RPGs are like that.

And read my post (or again, if you or anyone ever did) for the suggestion about a level-scaling bonus that does not stack with Armor or Dodge bonuses; it overlaps.
Essentially it makes armor obsolete.
By mid levels only the best would ever matter.
By high levels armor would be used only for special effects it provides, or just for looks.

Vote in for full AC bonus on a 1:1 ratio with level.

[ckafrica]

I had suggested at one point a fractional/Percentage DR which would reduce all attacks by a certain percentage of their full value. The big problem is you either need a reference chart (which are not hard to pop out with EXCEL) or you need to have a calculator handy.

I like it because it means to hit is ever rendered completely ineffective while still giving good armor a reason to exist(assuming better armor has better DR) and you will care about it just as much at level 1 as 20.

My question is if Armor is no longer AC how do we make heavy both heavy armor and light armor (I think 4e is right and medium is dumb) attractive mechanically? what should be the balances and trade offs?

[Psychic Robot]

ckafrica: Yes, a percentile system would be dandy. Unfortunately, that would be a pain in the ass without a computer automatically doing all the work for one. (Therefore, I'm against it.) Heavy armor should be attractive because it absorbs a lot of damage but makes you slow. Light armor should be attractive because you're agile and stuff while wearing it.

[ckafrica]

Honestly I made a 1/8th staged chart that went from 1 to 100 points of damage on EXCEL which fit on a single page and was easy to read when printed. It took maybe 10 minutes. You print a copy for each player and you're good to go.

Where I got stuck was how to balance different armor. I tend to favor just having light and heavy, that's it. No chain mail or leather, it just flavor with maybe a special trait for the material type. How would 1/4 DR for light and 1/2 DR for heavy be. You could have cheap which is minus 1/8 and superior (or magic) which is +1/8.

So what are the rest of the stats for them? Do we do max dex and skill penalties or what? Maybe heavy only gives 1/2 Dex bonus to AC while light gives you full?

[Psychic Robot]

Question numero tres:

Let's say we live in a perfect world with a scaling AC bonus, where armor provides DR, where everything is supposed to stay on the RNG...

Why not convert saves to defense scores (a lá Saga Edition) and have AC be Reflex Defense?

[RandomCasualty2]

My question is if Armor is no longer AC how do we make heavy both heavy armor and light armor (I think 4e is right and medium is dumb) attractive mechanically? what should be the balances and trade offs?

Here's what I would suggest.

Heavy armor:
Pros- Grants DR against attacks, making you good against a swarm of monsters.

Cons- Makes it hard to move around, be stealthy and prevents use of agility based powers. Possibly makes it easier for you to be hit.


And yeah, I don't think medium armor should really exist unless you can think of a good middle ground between heavy and light, but honestly I dont' even think it's a big deal. Really I don't even support there being a lot of armor types. You should be wearing "Heavy" armor and get to flavor it as banded mail, chain mail, or plate armor, depending on what you want.

Similarly, light armor could be leather, ring, studded leather or a chain shirt.

[Draco_Argentum]

I don't like heavy armour slows solutions. We typically want people to melee in that shit. They already take a penalty by having to get into melee. Why would they wear something that makes that harder?