BAB v. AC: Is it a war we need?

[K]

OK, as a character levels in DnD, they get more BAB. They also tend to get more Str or Dex, bigger magic weapon bonuses, and even get odder bonuses to hit like "+1 if you and opponent are standing on ground".

While this is happening, AC is also going up with bigger bonuses to magic armor and shields, Dex again, and bizarre bonuses like luck or insight bonuses or straight "stacks with anything" bonuses like the Defending weapon property.

My question is this: If HPs and attack damage go up with level, as well as passive bonuses like DR and Resistance and SR and Concealment and craziness like tactical advantages like Blink or Web, then:

Why do we need by-level bonuses to-hit when we still get bonuses to AC?

The fact that more powerful guys get BOTH more damage AND more attacks is actually balanced with their HPs, since a horde of small guys will have few attacks with small damage, and you will can both take more punishment and drop them faster than they can drop you.

I mean, if four kobolds have 1d6 attacks and 6 HPs and you have 20 HPs and two 2d6 attacks, you could kill them all even if your attack numbers and AC were exactly the same and they had you surrounded (which depending on terrain might not even happen). Sure, you'd take HP damage but you'd objectively win.

Lets say that you both have 50% chance of hitting the others, and this generally favors them as they are acting first and have you surrounded:

Round 1:
Two hit you, and you take 2d6 damage (average 7, you are at 13). You hit one, and he drops(average 7, and they have 6 HPs).

Round 2:
Three attack. Two hit you (you are at 7)(this is statistically in the favor of the Ks, but we'll give it to them). You drop another.

Rounds 3:
Two attack. One hits you (you are at 3 or 4). You drop another .

Round 4:
One misses(Probability swings back). You drop him.

You may end with 3 HPs, but you win. In a situation where you attack first and/or only let two or three at a time attack you, you win handily and this doesn't even take into account the greater tactical ability of a higher level character.

----------------


Considering that both AC and hit numbers get juiced more often than any other stats in DnD, do we even need them? Are they anything more than temptation for abuse?

What if armor just added to AC and subtracted from to-hit, so that heavily armored guys had some trade-off against the lightly armored archer who needs to-hit since they are taking ranged penalties but are not in the thick of melee being hit?

[Voss]

I think it just needs to be handled better. Its when stupid shit like third edition's bloody stupid progression of (potentially) infinite bonus types that it falls to pieces.

base + stat + [preferably nothing, but an item bonus if you absolutely have to] ought to be enough.

[JonSetanta]

My solution: shrink the variety of bonus types.
Rather than by arbitrary, however imaginative, types one could simply state where the bonus comes from, and bonuses from the same source just plain don't stack.

Example:

• 
  
• Class bonus
  
• Magic bonus
  
• Race bonus
  
• Situation bonus
  

But you mean, K, that we'd do away with BAB and level-based AC bonuses entirely?
I'm not quite sure of what you are asking.
Is your hypothetical situation between tanker and archer describing the difficulties a ranged attacker should have against a knight in full plate? I agree, in a fantasy setting at least, the tanks need an advantage for their focus to wrap themselves in metal, but making them impossible to hit (by giving no level-based attack bonus to anyone) doesn't seem the best choice.

I'd do armor-as-DR (or maybe Hardness)

[Aycarus]

As I understand it, you're proposing removing level-based BAB and AC simultaneously in favor of more emphasis on # of attacks and damage dealt?

This option certainly lets you stay on the RNG more easily. Although it seems to me that it would leave heroes more vulnerable to masses of mooks as well. Imagine being attacked by a hundred buzzing critters that have 1 hit point and do 1 damage each. Sure - you could always guarantee kills equal to your # of attacks per round, but they would totally wipe you out if you had no DR.

Otherwise I think such a change would be relatively minor -- except where there's a huge level difference between sides.

[K]

1202704128[/unixtime]]As I understand it, you're proposing removing level-based BAB and AC simultaneously in favor of more emphasis on # of attacks and damage dealt?

This option certainly lets you stay on the RNG more easily. Although it seems to me that it would leave heroes more vulnerable to masses of mooks as well. Imagine being attacked by a hundred buzzing critters that have 1 hit point and do 1 damage each. Sure - you could always guarantee kills equal to your # of attacks per round, but they would totally wipe you out if you had no DR.

Otherwise I think such a change would be relatively minor -- except where there's a huge level difference between sides.

Well, 1 HP guys who do 1 damage can't exist.

Masses of mooks are handled with AoE attacks and special effects. If 20 mooks with 10 HPs attack, maybe only 8 can attack you at once, but you cover six squares with a 10 damage attack.

-----------------

So think of it like this. Plate mail guys have an AC of 18, so you need to roll a d20 for an 18 to hit them. But wearing Plate mail reduces your attack roll by 6.

So two guys in plate can't use basic attacks to hurt each other. Maybe they need to use a special attack like a Called Shots or a Grapple to hurt each other.

But a guy in leather armor only has a -1 so he can hit a plate guy with a 19 or 20 with a basic attack.

-------------

Levels means better kinds of attacks, more HPs, and more damage

So two guys in chain are fighting:

One is Red, a 6th level fighter with 60 HPs and awesome 3rd, 2nd and 1st attacks that do 6d6 damage.

The other is Blue, a 2nd level Fighter with 20 HPs, 2d6 attacks, and 1st level attacks.

Blue attacks Red with a 1st level Melee Strike that only does Blue's normal damage. He needs to roll a 14 to beat chain armor when he's also wearing chain.

Red can use a powerful 3rd level Knockback Attack that does normal damage and tosses a person back 5-14 feet if he also fails a Body Save. He also needs a 14 to hit a guy in chain since he is in chain and thats how the system works.

Blue's normal damage is 2d6, while Red's is 6d6. They may both need a 14 to hit, but Red is winning this fight.

Red also has a 2nd level attack called Sweeping Slash that attacks everything in three squares of his choice next to him and it does half normal damage(3d6). So if three guys just like Blue in chainmail attack, Red is still winning this fight even though everyone needs to roll a 14 to beat chain mail.

------

Regarding ranged attacks: Armor confers a penalty and so does range, so three guys in chain may only hit Red on an 18 when they shoot arrows from 40ft away.

[Jacob_Orlove]

That sounds pretty good. It seems like a much better idea to scale DR, damage, and possibly HPs with level, because of Frank's point about Bell Curves. That way, we can have damage and DR increase in a very controllable fashion that still firmly sets you up to beat up lower level people easily, and generally lose to higher level people.

It's much more fun to fight a higher level guy with a lot of DR than one with a high AC, too. If every hit does minimal damage, well, at least you're not all swinging and missing until someone lands a killing blow.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

I don't see how these rules are better than the ever-increasing bab/ac rules if we are assuming they are tight, reasonable, and on the RNG. It seems like in your examples, the damage and hp could go into Final Fantasy levels before epic. If there are twenty or thirty levels, and we want a doubling of power every two levels, how do the damage dice and hp scale? (A serious question)

[K]

1202714356[/unixtime]] If there are twenty or thirty levels, and we want a doubling of power every two levels, how do the damage dice and hp scale? (A serious question)

Damage dice and HPs won't scale at the "doubling" rate past a certain point because abilities will. They are basically there to give people some HPs and attacks to play with before they start getting real abilities.

Huge numbers of HPs and damage are a pain, so the idea is that you create abilities that take advantage of the fact that good tactics/abilities win fights in a much more satisfying way than bigger numbers beating smaller numbers.

Thats the reason I can't get behind DR. It just leads people to either wanting some "penetrate DR ability" and needing a sword caddie for all their silver, cold iron, holy, etc swords OR they want more raw damage so they can roll a retarded amount of dice.

I mean, I've rolled 30 dice for a single attack, but I've never felt good about it.

[Username17]

Giving out increases in Attack and Armor Class is a decent way to cause power discrepancies between strong and weak opponents. Simply increasing hit points and damage output needs to scale up exponentially and that gets pretty ugly pretty fast.

But shifting attack matrices goes on a very limited random number generator, so it allows for large adjustments from small numerical differences. Going from an 11+ to a 19+ makes your offensive output one fifth, at the cost of only a real modifier of +/-8.

I mean, hit points and damage output can just rise by 31% every level, and that will get you through twice as many enemies two levels lower than you - but in 10 levels you've had your hit points go up by over 15 times. By level 20 you have 184 times the hit points of the original pile.

-Username17

[K]

1202758106[/unixtime]]Giving out increases in Attack and Armor Class is a decent way to cause power discrepancies between strong and weak opponents. Simply increasing hit points and damage output needs to scale up exponentially and that gets pretty ugly pretty fast.

But shifting attack matrices goes on a very limited random number generator, so it allows for large adjustments from small numerical differences. Going from an 11+ to a 19+ makes your offensive output one fifth, at the cost of only a real modifier of +/-8.

I mean, hit points and damage output can just rise by 31% every level, and that will get you through twice as many enemies two levels lower than you - but in 10 levels you've had your hit points go up by over 15 times. By level 20 you have 184 times the hit points of the original pile.

-Username17

I don't support the idea of large stacks of HPs or damage, on top of my not supporting the endless war between to-hit and AC.

I'm actually thinking that the smallest number of dice you'll ever roll your whole life is six. Tossing around low numbers of dice which are opposed by piles of HPs is fine when you don't have a lot of tactical options, but its a low-level thing.

I mean, from a tactical view the most beautifully elegant mathematical model of level-based damage v. level-based AC gets tossed out the window once someone tosses in a tactic like "cause half the enemies to lose this round of actions" or "split the enemy's party in half with a wall so we can focus our attacks on two guys instead of four."

I think that this kind of thing should be built into the sytem and "high level" should be represented by better tactics as opposed to "bigger numbers."

I mean, as a DnD player, when has bigger numbers ever stopped you? We all know the old rule of "we shouldn't stat out the gods because players will find a way to kill them."

[Aycarus]

1202761528[/unixtime]]I mean, from a tactical view the most beautifully elegant mathematical model of level-based damage v. level-based AC gets tossed out the window once someone tosses in a tactic like "cause half the enemies to lose this round of actions" or "split the enemy's party in half with a wall so we can focus our attacks on two guys instead of four."

Yes! I've come to the conclusion that designing a RPG system that is both a) balanced and b) flexible is hard. Like... worse than NP-hard. We're talking PhD level work here.

[rapanui]

K, let me see if I follow your reasoning.

By high levels, the way to win a battle isn't by "rolling higher numbers" but by dictating the terms of the encounter. Thus, it is pointless to implement a system where you're slowly creating differentials in the "rolling higher numbers" part of the game as by the time the differentials truly begin to manifest themselves, the fundamental nature of the game has changed.

Something like that?

[Jacob_Orlove]

I wasn't suggesting that HP and damage both increase with level, but that DR and damage can be used for whatever amount of that "arms race" we actually need.

As long as you keep HP low, tiny increases in damage and DR make a big difference.

For example, let's say that first level characters start out with Frank's suggestion of 3d6 damage/round and DR 7 (same average damage as 1d6 with no DR, but much better distribution).

If we give everyone 10 hp, that means people go down in 3-4 hits.

Now, increase damage and DR by, say, 1 point per level. Every four levels you can replace 4 flat damage with an extra D6 (leading to slightly longer fights at higher levels). By level 20, that's a manageable 9d6 per hit. A few more dice than I'd like, but it could easily be 6d6 + 10 or something instead. DR at that point would be 27.

Hit points could remain constant at 10.

So now we have level 1 guy vs level 3 guy. Level one guy hits for an average of 10 damage, vs level 3 guy's DR 9. Level 3 guy swings back for 12 damage vs a DR 7. That's 10 hits for the former, two for the latter. A clear and easy win for level 3 guy, even against two opponents.

[K]

1202772721[/unixtime]]K, let me see if I follow your reasoning.

By high levels, the way to win a battle isn't by "rolling higher numbers" but by dictating the terms of the encounter. Thus, it is pointless to implement a system where you're slowly creating differentials in the "rolling higher numbers" part of the game as by the time the differentials truly begin to manifest themselves, the fundamental nature of the game has changed.

Something like that?

Pretty much.

At low levels, a Sleep is as powerful as a Barbarians swing. Around 7th level, killing people with raw damage is a waste of time as non-fighters have better ways of doing it. Four wizards blasting Fireballs can demolish an encounter in a way that four barbarians just can't.

Arms races of DR or AC vs damage is obsolete by level 7 as most people either have figured out a way to kill guys without doing damage, or they've optimized their character to a sufficient degree that they are no longer even playing the arms races.

Fighters finally have their feats in a synergistic row, have boosted their Str to a stupid level, and are generally armored to an insane degree. Rogues are auto-flanking or auto-Hiding or have some other way of getting sneak damage every turn, Wizards have giant DCs or just the actual raw number of spells to do something tactically useful to do every round of combat.

Arms races are just over. That being said, I'm trying to figure out why they are even needed,

[Jacob_Orlove]

Well, presumably we'd be doing away with stuff like Sleep in the new edition, at least in the sense of it having a save-or-die mechanic instead of working the same way as normal attacks.

Likewise, damage bonuses would simply not be available under this paradigm, and spells would be in line with melee attacks (both in terms of spells doing less damage, melee attacks having AoE effects, and DR applying to all damage period).

I think part of the problem is that we're using terms from current D&D that may have different meanings in the new edition. I should have been more clear that when I was talking about DR and damage scaling, there wouldn't be crazy bonus stacking or stat boosting for massive damage, and there wouldn't be energy and magic attacks and special materials that ignored DR and so on and so forth, but a lot of that is part of 3.X implementation without being intrinsic to the use of the mechanics

[Username17]

Arms races are just over. That being said, I'm trying to figure out why they are even needed

To keep high level people from getting pasted in large melees by flubbing their initiative check. Sure we're all on the same page that having people get their Spell Focus and their Headband of Acuity and their Rod of Dark Reward and their Bracers of the Perfect Shit and so on and so forth and adding them all together to blow the fvck out of you is bad for the game. It's even worse for the game than putting together your magic shiny pants with your gloves of dexterity with your boots of dancing dodge with your shield of pure jazz and becoming essentially indestructible.

But you still want people to have the basic resilience to be subjected to the attacks of a small horde of "minor" enemies and not go down right away. And at the core there are really only a couple of ways to do that.

And one of the ways is to decrease the chance of a lower level attack hitting. I mean sure you can jack up the number of lower level hits that need to land before you care, but that comes with a built-in requirement to increase the number of lower level attacks which a higher level attack substitutes for by a comparable amount.

---

Yes, the majority of the ass whupping you hand out to lower level enemies should be based on your wall of fire and your doom tide - because those attack forms strongly interfere with your enemies getting attacks against you and can eliminate lower level enemies in large numbers. But you still don't want to pincushion into nonexistence the first time you roll a 2 on your Initiative.

And a modest and non-collectible increase in the difficulty of landing attacks against higher level opponents does that job pretty well.

---

Note that the modest bonus to your own attacks landing against lower level opponents isn't even required. It's largely pointless in fact. You missing on an 8 or less isn't spectacularly different from you missing on a 3 or less. But it's not especially problematic for attacks against weaker foes to become more deterministic. And a consistent and non-collectible bonus to attacks and defenses is one of the easier schema for generating less hits by weaker opponents against stronger ones. Not the only one, just one that happens to be really easy to explain and conceptualize.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

Probably preaching to the choir here...
Arms races mostly depend on resource production. When one side can materialize anything out of air and bend reality to their personal taste, doing the same can best such a strategy, and little else.

Although, nullifying anything the reality-warpers can dish out works too.
But D&D isn't set up for that, since it requires magic to create Antimagic Fields, which is just stupid.

[K]

1202818120[/unixtime]]

Arms races are just over. That being said, I'm trying to figure out why they are even needed

To keep high level people from getting pasted in large melees by flubbing their initiative check. Sure we're all on the same page that having people get their Spell Focus and their Headband of Acuity and their Rod of Dark Reward and their Bracers of the Perfect Shit and so on and so forth and adding them all together to blow the fvck out of you is bad for the game. It's even worse for the game than putting together your magic shiny pants with your gloves of dexterity with your boots of dancing dodge with your shield of pure jazz and becoming essentially indestructible.

But you still want people to have the basic resilience to be subjected to the attacks of a small horde of "minor" enemies and not go down right away. And at the core there are really only a couple of ways to do that.

And one of the ways is to decrease the chance of a lower level attack hitting. I mean sure you can jack up the number of lower level hits that need to land before you care, but that comes with a built-in requirement to increase the number of lower level attacks which a higher level attack substitutes for by a comparable amount.

---

Yes, the majority of the ass whupping you hand out to lower level enemies should be based on your wall of fire and your doom tide - because those attack forms strongly interfere with your enemies getting attacks against you and can eliminate lower level enemies in large numbers. But you still don't want to pincushion into nonexistence the first time you roll a 2 on your Initiative.

And a modest and non-collectible increase in the difficulty of landing attacks against higher level opponents does that job pretty well.

---

Note that the modest bonus to your own attacks landing against lower level opponents isn't even required. It's largely pointless in fact. You missing on an 8 or less isn't spectacularly different from you missing on a 3 or less. But it's not especially problematic for attacks against weaker foes to become more deterministic. And a consistent and non-collectible bonus to attacks and defenses is one of the easier schema for generating less hits by weaker opponents against stronger ones. Not the only one, just one that happens to be really easy to explain and conceptualize.

-Username17

Well, we already have a way to avoid being overrun by hoards: HPs. Higher level guys have a lot more.

Even if we posit a situation where you are always going to lose initiative and facing hoards of guys who can always attack you first by popping out of a closet (and thats a very specific and rare situation), we still are facing the situation that if you have more HPs and they are doing a balanced amount of damage for their level, you still have AoEs and are going to win because only so many of those guys can surround you at once AND only so many will potentially do damage and once you pop off your attack they die.

Heck, if you can't trust that, we can still just give people an Initiative bonus based on level, or some other rewrite of initiative. The basic idea of "its hard to get the drop on experienced people" isn't far fetched at all. Heck, that actually fixes a few problems at once.

[Jacob_Orlove]

But giving higher level guys more HP means that higher level attacks have to do more damage, and that escalates really quickly.

It's also pretty lame to have the boss fight be "miss miss miss miss hit! miss miss hit! Okay, he's down". Using DR and damage keeps all the numbers from going totally crazy, and lets you have attacks that matter in more than just the "oh, well, I'll hit him one time in ten".

[rapanui]

K, what you are proposing sounds a little like Final Fantasy: hit rates don't change much as the game goes along (HPs and damage do), and high level characters in those systems could probably take out thousands of the initial mooks from the start of the game without batting an eye.

The only problem I can see with going that route is that it may reduce tactical depth.

[K]

1202859657[/unixtime]]But giving higher level guys more HP means that higher level attacks have to do more damage, and that escalates really quickly.

It's also pretty lame to have the boss fight be "miss miss miss miss hit! miss miss hit! Okay, he's down". Using DR and damage keeps all the numbers from going totally crazy, and lets you have attacks that matter in more than just the "oh, well, I'll hit him one time in ten".

DR is fundamentally flawed. It leaves only two situations:

You completely ignore low-level guys because your DR is bigger than their max damage. This means that PC contempt of most everyone in your setting is complete as the PCs can now do their taxes in the middle of combat. At that point you might as well handwave combats vs lower-level guys altogether..."yes you beat the whole army because no one was bigger than 4th level."

This also means that as a PC there are things you can't ever hurt. The Lich King comes to town and you die. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

You get the worse of both worlds: arrogance and helplessness, with a thin margin of things you can have a challenging fight with at all.

I prefer a world where anyone can be a threat to a hero simply because that means that the heroes can be a threat to any villain. I understand that people want to be invulnerable and unbeatable to at least someone in the setting, but that kind of self-insertion gaming is just a public form of masturbation.

[Jacob_Orlove]

Is that really something people care about? I mean, you can't fight stuff thats too high/low level for you anyway, and if the increases in DR and damage are small, then you have a really wide band of possible foes--probably wider than whatever CR analogue we end up with would support.

If damage starts at 3d6, goes up by 1 point per level, and DR starts at 7 and again goes up by one point per level, then you'd have to be 11 levels higher than someone to ignore them completely. That's a pretty big gap, and one you mostly won't encounter in actual play.

I agree, though, that it'd be best to have the maximum level of the game be less than the level where DR immunity to anyone kicks in. A slower increase would help, as would more starting dice.

For example, at 5d6 base and DR 14, with damage going up 1 every even level, and DR up 1 every odd level, you could play through 30 levels without having immunity to peasants.

[JonSetanta]

1202869602[/unixtime]]
You completely ignore low-level guys because your DR is bigger than their max damage. This means that PC contempt of most everyone in your setting is complete as the PCs can now do their taxes in the middle of combat. At that point you might as well handwave combats vs lower-level guys altogether..."yes you beat the whole army because no one was bigger than 4th level."

This seems entirely unpredictable.
Or rather, it's easily predictable in that there will always be someone, somewhere, with the right spell or weapon or build to best your (essentially limited) DR.

No, you'd have to limit the maximum damage output for each level.
And that's no fun.

HP seems the way to go, but effects ignore HP quite commonly.
You'd have to restrict an entire game's worth of attack types and spells to shape the desired outcome of "higher levels pwn lower levels easily", and I wish you luck on that since I really can't wrap my mind around such a scope of effort.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

I prefer a world where anyone can be a threat to a hero simply because that means that the heroes can be a threat to any villain. I understand that people want to be invulnerable and unbeatable to at least someone in the setting, but that kind of self-insertion gaming is just a public form of masturbation.

Hah. You should have stated this was your intent in your first post. I was under the assumption (and I believe others were as well) that you were trying to make alternate rules to replace bab/ac which reflected DnD's assumption that you became immune to people many levels lower than you are. You are not trying to find alternate rules to find the same solution, you are trying to find alternate rules to find a different solution. Am I wrong?

That said, why is it impossible to have "...a world where anyone can be a threat to a hero..." with bab/ac? You just need to make some sort of special critical hit or instant kill rules. Why is this not satisfactory?

[the_taken]

Like open die rolls?