The Gaming Den

What? One is dodging blows entirely and occasionally bearing the full brunt of them, the other is constantly getting hit for small amounts of damage. To make them any more different you'd have to make an entire half of the characters overall less prone to damage, and unless you're going to rewrite every single one of the fuckin' classes and monsters to balance this new fact(at which point why not make a whole new game?) then the game itself will objectively favor one type of character over another; do we really need another wizard/fighter style divide in this game?

Maybe that's not what you meant, but I cannot personally understand you're meaning from an a completely unexplained complaint.

Yeah, technically speaking that is different. But really, all that is changing is damage frequency. Your sample duelist and knight are still going to do fine against both giants and pixies. Why bother with such a system, if the characters will behave as if nothing changed at all?

If you go with flat DR however (and manage to balance the numbers so average damage taken stays the same) the night will just ignore pixies, because they can't get through his DR and the duelist will excel against the giant, because his dodge score works just fine, while the knight's DR is too small to really matter.

You would probably also want to work on the other side of the equation - precision and damage. If rapiers are precise and do little damage and waraxes are hard to hit with but do a truckload of damage there is suddenly a reason to use rapiers in duels to the first blood. There is a reason to bust out the poleaxe when a dragon is tearing up the city.

I know this is considered bad form, but I am going to argue point by point so I don't start ranting at you.

Murtak wrote:But really, all that is changing is damage frequency.

The only other thing you could change is total average damage taken, which, as I explained before, would favor one archetype over the other and by definition be unbalancing.

Murtak wrote:Your sample duelist and knight are still going to do fine against both giants and pixies. Why bother with such a system, if the characters will behave as if nothing changed at all?

The design intent was never to make each kind vulnerable to different kinds of monsters; this is because the request was for different mechanical feel, not for someone to write an entirely new game. Furthermore to make speedy characters vulnerable to pixie pinpricks and tanks vulnerable to giant clubs, or vice-versa, would be unbalanced because pixie pinpricks aren't dangerous under any damage ablation system due to the nature of HP; honestly I would think this would be painfully obvious and don't understand how you could be seriously arguing that one half of characters be physically vulnerable to very physically dangerous creatures and the other be physically vulnerable to physically negligible creatures.

murtak wrote:If you go with flat DR however (and manage to balance the numbers so average damage taken stays the same) the night will just ignore pixies, because they can't get through his DR and the duelist will excel against the giant, because his dodge score works just fine, while the knight's DR is too small to really matter.

I did go with a small flat DR to accompany the meaningful percentage based DR expressly for the purpose of making the tanks immune to paper cuts. Also, you once again reiterate your desire to make the dodgy characters effective against the heavy hitters and the tank's defenses "too small to really matter". Do you have a bias against heavily armored characters? Because at first I had thought you merely wrote without thinking, but in your previous statement you clearly and explicitly advocate tanks immune to physically negligible enemies and highly vulnerable to the heavy hitters. I am honestly asking.

Murtak wrote:You would probably also want to work on the other side of the equation - precision and damage. If rapiers are precise and do little damage and waraxes are hard to hit with but do a truckload of damage there is suddenly a reason to use rapiers in duels to the first blood.

NO U

I fulfilled the request of helping make speedy and tankish characters have a different mechanical feel, and did so purely as a favor to a stranger in need and a mental exercise; I have no interest in the results and will certainly not make an entirely new game system on your whim. I've got enough of that kind of stuff on my mind at the moment, I'm working on an epic fantasy, sword & sorcery game from whole cloth as well as my Beast Wars Transformers RPG I started working on again recently. Not to mention I'm in the process of scripting an abridged series for Cyborg 009, getting ready to go back to college, and looking for a job.

Well my attempt not to go no a rant failed miserably, but I believe I've explained myself as clearly as I'm capable of; so I'm going to consider my part in this discussion closed unless you come up with a legitimately new point.

You are talking nonsense.

1. Changing the average damage taken (per individual monster - overall damage taken stays the same) is the entire point of the exercise. Different characters should play differently.

2. If all you wanted to do was "to get a different feel" all you need to do is to give everyone an additional miss chance that can not be bypassed and a damage multiplier. Balanced, simple - and useless. Character choices do not change at all when using such a system - so why do it?

3. No goddamnit it, making speedy characters vulnerable to small, precise attacks is not unbalanced. A fucking troll uses small and precise attacks, do you think he will have any trouble at all ripping a swashbucker to shreds? Pixies are merely the most extreme examples I could find in the SRD at short notice.

4. I am not talking about small amounts of DR. I am talking about flat DR vs percentage-based DR. Flat DR changes combat dynamics, percentage-based DR does not.

5. Why the fuck do you assume I am demanding you write a new game from scratch? I am proposing general ideas here, just as you are.

Because I suspect you are going to go on a pixie rant again: I propose swashbucklers should take comparatively less damage from giants and more damage from Mariliths - vice-versa for knight types. I also propose to make precise weapons be more effective at damaging swashbuckler types and heavy weapons more effective at damaging knight types. I do believe this to be impossible to retroactively shoehorn into DnD though.

Percentage-based DR on the other hand I regard as useless, since it does not change player choices/actions - just as the current AC system does not. No need to reinvent the wheel if nothing really changes.

Of CR 5 creatures that primarily do physical damage the Troll is slightly more than 1 point behind the average damage per attack if you discount the Troll's Rend ability and don't give it a weapon. Also, I've become convinced that you are incapable of either listening to or understanding me and I am actually going to stop this futile argument this time.

Also, I never assumed you were demanding anything, I thought you meant it as an off-hand suggestion. My tone was never meant to be hostile.

If you change the average damage, what have you done? What is the design goal behind making one archetype work better than the other?

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:If you change the average damage, what have you done? What is the design goal behind making one archetype work better than the other?

I do not propose to make one archetype better than another. I propose to make them different. Currently, if two characters both have 20 AC they do not differ from another, whether that AC comes from platemail or dexterity. Now imagine we have two opponents for these characters. One of them attacks twice, for 1d6 damage each, the other attacks once, for 2d6 of damage. If you give the armored character DR 2, but lower his AC so he is hit more often (60%, to the agile character's 35%) we end up with this:

Agile character vs 2-weapon opponent: Takes 3.5 * 0.35 * 2 = 2.45 damage per turn.

Agile character vs 1-weapon opponent: Takes 7 * 0.35 = 2.45 damage per turn.

Armored character vs 2-weapon opponent: Takes 3.333 * 0.6 = 2 damage per turn.

Armored character vs 1-weapon opponent: Takes 5 * 0.6 = 3 damage per turn.

Overall the characters are balanced - but in each individual fight they differ. And in a fight with mixed opponents they will react differently.

Murtak wrote:Yeah, technically speaking that is different. But really, all that is changing is damage frequency. Your sample duelist and knight are still going to do fine against both giants and pixies. Why bother with such a system, if the characters will behave as if nothing changed at all?

If you go with flat DR however (and manage to balance the numbers so average damage taken stays the same) the night will just ignore pixies, because they can't get through his DR and the duelist will excel against the giant, because his dodge score works just fine, while the knight's DR is too small to really matter.

Yeah, that's pretty much how Starcraft works and it produces an interesting game dynamic. You have some fast firing, low damage units that are thwarted by heavy armor and big damage, slow firing stuff that tend to get thwarted by mass numbers.

Also, flat DR is better from a tabletop gaming sense because calculating percentages is a pain in the ass. Percentage based is fine for a computer game, because you can have the machine handle all the numbers. It sucks for a tabletop game though.

Hmm....

What if we do this:

Light armour: Grants a DR equal to the Armour Class Bonus

MEdium Armour: Grants a DR of x2 the Armour Class Bonus

Heavy Armour: Grants DR of x3 the Armour Class Bonus

A Chain Shirt provides a DR of 4; and a Suit of Stone Plate gives a DR of 30. While a Magical Magical Mechanus Plate for... a level 11 Character would grant about 45 DR (AC 15~).

Which is not too shabby. With a Ring of Energy Resistance, even spell damage can easily be used to prevent the damage.

Ravyn Dawnbringer wrote:How would I adjucate this? I'd like to remove it from the game, use a save instead, and make all ac boosters into DR. Is that possible, and how would it be done?

Thanks for any help, what I have now is that:

Ac is gone. (Duh)
Reflex(?) is your new not got hit stat
Any armor is DR

But I think that Attack bonuses make this auto-hit territory. Hence the question

I've actually done and am working on this myself. I've only skimmed this thread so far and I'll read it all later on. I know some of this was mentioned already but these things are some of the things that have worked for me: If you adjust saves and Bab so that they scale together this DOES involve reworking ALL your numbers, cut bonuses to bare minimum, have DR scale as Damage does (add HD to DR?). I haven't done much beyond this though I have taken a long step away from 3.x as is.

Judging__Eagle wrote:Hmm....

What if we do this:

Light armour: Grants a DR equal to the Armour Class Bonus

MEdium Armour: Grants a DR of x2 the Armour Class Bonus

Heavy Armour: Grants DR of x3 the Armour Class Bonus

Then light armor becomes useless. What is your reasoning for having a chain shirt +4 providing three times less protection than unenchanted platemail anyways? I can understand trying to scale by levels. I could understand scaling by enchantment bonus. In fact you are going to need one of these to keep up with the insane damage scaling. But by armor type? Do you seriously suggest people should run around with 20 points of DR at level 1?

I dunno, if you want armor to be supreme, sure. Then you can put higher level of armors off the first level of a class and it might be balanced.

-Crissa

Allright, this will make combat a lengthier ordeal, but will appeal to the ones who are just there because they love rolling as many dice as possible.

Replace the standard +10 AC base with a defensive roll of d20 + dex bonus/evasion etc. Whether against each attack during a round (as in hackmaster) or as a constant dodge difficulty for each opponent during a round is up to how much you long for the sound of dice against tabletop. To make the whole thing correspond with advancement in levels, add the good old BDB

BDB Base Dodge Bonus
As with attack bonuses gained by level advancement, each class and creature type gets its own accumulative ac bonus, where I imagine rogues, monks, ninjas, air and fire subtypes, fey and incorporeals would fare as the fighter's attack bonus, with a +1 bonus per level, while the clerics, bards, druids, favored souls and the unfortunate wizards retain an AC advancement equal to their attack bonus.


DR
Bear with me on this one; Going into detail, armors generally have chinks and joints and are subject to weak spots here and there. Likewise, dragons have their soft spots if your weapon finds home between scales or into relatively mushy parts like eyes, mouth and urethra. Even stone golems might be considered as having soft spots if you attack the least massive parts like ankles, wrists, elbows or fingers.

So, the DR is derived from the original AC of worn and natural armor with the following tweaks:
Damage resistance is as thrillingly variable as attack and damage rolls.
Assign a base DR die to each armor or equivalent ac.

Armor: DR:
Padded: 1d2
Leather: 1d3
Std Leather/hide: 1d4
Chain shirt: 1d5
Scale: 1d5
Chainmail: 1d6
Breastplate: 2d3
Splinters: 1d8
Band: 2d4
1/2 plate: 2d6
1/1 plate: 3d6

Monsters would also loose their base +10 AC bonus, and gain BDB and DR dice according to a suitable and entirely awesome system yet to be concieved, let alone analyzed and found balanced enough to work above lvl 3.

All right, this basically sucks, so we need to make masterwork armor. Masterwork armor grants us a +1 bonus to each DR roll. With this in mind, basically all monsters above CR 3 could be considered nature's own little masterpieces, assigning especially heavy duty badass monsters with a DR bonus equal to its Cr or CR X2, I judge not.

But this still leaves us wanting in DR efficiency compared to high level damage dealings, so we need to enchant our armors. Each level of enchantment provides DR bonus equal to the + granted, which is crap. Then you multiply the number of DR dice with the enchantment bonus, which is awesome, unless you have a +1 armor.

If you think even +1 armors deserve their moment in the sun, then just assume normal and masterwork armor is the equivalent of X1 armor, then +1 armor is granted a x2 bonus etc. If you are getting sick of all the dice rolled with every single hit now, you may opt to multiply the sum of the roll instead of adding additional die. If we add the additional DR bonus granted by enchantment before or after multiplying makes a demiplane of difference here.

Now (assuming we treat +1 armor as X2 DR, and calculate multipliers before adding enchantment bonus, a +5 platemail gives you a damage reduction of 23-113, averaging 59-72, which is befitting a real superhero and generally requiring monsters to get you with armor bypassing attacks and effects. If you add the enchantment bonus first, you get DR 48-138.

On second thought, maybe the additional DR enchantment is unnecessary, giving your +5 plate a DR of 18-90, averaging 45-60. Maybe you want to put the +5 enchantment points into the dodge instead.

This whole thing in turn leaves most weapons pretty useless, unless you give them an armor-breaching bonus: +1 weapons gain a X2 damage roll for the sole purpose of bypassing magical armor. If bypassed, remaining damage is divided by said bonus before dealt out as HP damage (or nicely vanished into natural DR.)

Since they removed the magic resistance +1/+2/+3 etc, assigning enchantment multipliers to magical creatures becomes harder, but even here the simple way would be to assume that every 4 or 5 CR increment equals X1 DR dice.

I think I would keep the base DR of barbarians and monsters as it is, a set DR as last line of defense (well, before the HP) when the variable DR has been breached.

Of course, when rewriting the entire system, you might want to enforce hardness and hp tracking for all armors and shields as well, so as not to make the armors indestructible, and force the players to cough up some serious cash getting their doubleplusgoods repaired. If they don't give a crap whether they get hit or not, as their DR is vast and all-encompassing, they might at least think twice on the cost of compromising a prized armor to the onsalught of a thousand kobolds.
Ah, who am I kidding?

Here's another example of variable DR armors, where you might apply the armor's original ac bonus as hardness and X50 or 100 for total hitpoints. It might add realism and flavor if you add negative modifiers to the DR rolls based on sustained damage (25% -1, 50%=-2 75%=-4) or simply subtract an equal percentage of total DR rolled in accordance to the total damage sustained by the armor in 10% increments.

I tried running with the basic conversion of armor values into DR and as already pointed out in several posts, it simply does not work. Then again, I haven't tried playing with my own suggestions, and as I'm just pulling it all out of my ass, I would be surprised if it resulted in an enjoyable and balanced system modification.

-Tulpa