The Gaming Den

We've got some discussion on 'Evasion' as a charles atlas power that causes situations where the DM can decide to take it away...

but I got another qualm with it. Evasiveness is already represented by your DEX, your reflex save, and boosts to it, but then D&D3e presents evasion as a power that doesn't interact with Dex/Ref, it just applies its damage mitigation regardless of your stats.

In my mind it's not right that a Dex 10 dude can be more evasive than a Dex 20 guy, just because of this class feature/feat.

Wouldn't it be better to make the damage mitigation of Evasion just a natural part of making your Reflex save? Say "If you beat the DC by X, you take no damage." and "If you fail within X of the DC, you take 1/2 damage"

Same with equivalent effects for WILL and FORT.

OgreBattle wrote:Evasiveness is already represented by your DEX, your reflex save, and boosts to it, but then D&D3e presents evasion as a power that doesn't interact with Dex/Ref, it just applies its damage mitigation regardless of your stats.

You still totally have to make your save before evasion applies.

In my mind it's not right that a Dex 10 dude can be more evasive than a Dex 20 guy, just because of this class feature/feat.

Why is that the case in your mind?
Is it a bad thing that the dex 10 dude has a higher reflex save because of a cloak + it's a good base save for him?
Is it a bad thing certain people are better at general things even though other people are worse in general but better in specific situations?

Wouldn't it be better to make the damage mitigation of Evasion just a natural part of making your Reflex save? Say "If you beat the DC by X, you take no damage." and "If you fail within X of the DC, you take 1/2 damage"

Same with equivalent effects for WILL and FORT.

So you want to give it to everyone?
I disagree, meeting someone with evasion and thus not casting spells that target reflex seems like a good thing.

I'm a fan of Degrees of Success mechanics, so I am down with the idea.

I played for a couple years with save-by-10 totally negating the half damage or whatever other effect a successful save had. Evasion changed to +5 Ref and Improved to +10 Ref.

Then I got rid of that rule. It works, but abilities are more flavourful if they do something other than give flat bonuses.

Prefer to find margin of success with another die (a damage check, if you will). To more easily differentiate between the rate of amazing successes and the rate of common ones.

Agree with the OP, really. Evasion itself has fluff issues. The fluff of how it works is "you dodge real well" which is indistinguishable from the fluff from a really good roll, except that doesn't give any damage mitigation.