Fixing AC costs

[Basket Burner]

Which is why I said from the beginning it's a poorly thought out idea that just manages to break a bunch of things, and if it's replacing bonuses then you end up with a character that gets hit 95% of the time anyways. Which rather defeats the point of trying to make AC worth something.

[JaronK]

Another thought (that also helps out heavy armored classes... sorry Monks) is to revamp DR a bit and tie it into armor.  Let's say DR never reduces damage below 1 (so it never makes you totally invincible), but it stacks (so if you had DR 5/magic and DR 5/adamantine, you'd have DR 10 normally, or 5 against adamantine or magic, or 0 against adamantine and magic).  Then you have medium armor give DR/Adamantine equal to half the AC bonus of the armor (including all enhancements) and heavy armor gives DR/Adamantine equal to the AC bonus.  Adamantium armor would just increase that value (by 1 if light, 2 if medium, and 3 if heavy) and make it DR/-.

Combine that with some ability to raise the AC values given by armor (such as something where having more craft ranks allows you to increase the AC bonus of armors you make, so a Fighter can smith his own useful armor) and you could have something serious.  Right now DR doesn't mean much because it just does so little (who cares about DR 5/- at level 10?), but if you had +2 Reinforced (+1AC) Adamantine Mechanicus Gear granting DR16 at level 10, that would have a bit more effect... and make the armor a bit less binary.  Plus, Mithral wouldn't be such a default thing since making the armor count as a category lighter reduces the DR.

JaronK

[Lycanthromancer]

What about armor granting hardness instead? As it stands, DR does nothing at all against magical attacks.

[JaronK]

Well, you could just sort of extend the DR mechanic to apply to all damage (except stuff after the slash).  That way it would work like hardness, but without the halving damage effects that are supposed to come with it.

JaronK

[Basket Burner]

Damage reduction is also a flawed mechanic. Not as much as the others, but much like some other things it moves everyone towards the already best options, namely two handed weapons for obvious reasons.

That and if you're getting smacked for a hundred it hardly matters if you knock a few points off that. It's true of monsters and it's true of PCs.

Armor itself is a different subject, and something that would be fixed in a different way. Starting with removing all armor based speed penalties.

[Lycanthromancer]

Damage reduction is also a flawed mechanic. Not as much as the others, but much like some other things it moves everyone towards the already best options, namely two handed weapons for obvious reasons.

That and if you're getting smacked for a hundred it hardly matters if you knock a few points off that. It's true of monsters and it's true of PCs.

Armor itself is a different subject, and something that would be fixed in a different way. Starting with removing all armor based speed penalties.

What you say is true, especially that last bit. Apparently it's very VERY easy to move in full plate (not that I've ever worn it). It's designed to be light and maneuverable, while granting the maximum amount of protection possible.

I know I've seen people perform tumbling moves in full plate, so it's not like this is out of the question.

[veekie]

Well the armor penalties were based on what they thought the armor was like. In practice, full plate is a category of its own, since it was all properly molded and fit so that it was more like a heavy second skin. Every joint you need is articulated, and thus provides most of the degrees of motion needed. In contrast chain/ring/scale mail was fully flexible and thus applied their weight pretty much everywhere when you moved, getting in the way.
Certainly it was less mobile than wearing loose clothes, but I believe it was supposed to be less encumbering than having a 50lb backpack on you. Its not exactly representative of its armor category though, given that each suit is a work of engineering.

Armor granting hardness(though instead of setting the goalpost at 1 minimum damage, you might want to make it a formula of level) does count for a lot. On the surface it does not look like much. You take maybe 5-10 points of damage off a monster's 40 damage attack, but when you have 100 hp, and the monster is getting 3 hits per round, those points would be what makes the difference between dead, and nearly dead(at which point you have profited by a whole round's worth of counter-actions). Its like AC thats only effective against secondary attacks, it doesn't prevent the whole thing, but it does make the difference between surviving one round and surviving three.

Also I went and did the math to bang out the Class Defense Bonus.  The concept at the time of posting was to make up for the majority of paid AC, keeping the values in the normal range but not the cost(which is zero'ed). One incidental discovery is that the working range of numbers is actually rather small, it does not take much to make a character completely unhittable to 3/4 BAB melee attackers using casual optimization(the usual maxed primary attack stat with their BAB gap(and probably dualwielding) isn't going to breach full plate and shield with +BAB to AC except on a 20), so just take the cost off the misc bonuses, make it look tidier, and free up the cash for them to buy other defenses on top.

[zugschef]

acutally it's easier to move in full plate than in chainmail.

[PlzBreakMyCampaign]

Granted I am exhausted but if the higher levels of AC cost too much just make the costs flat and keep the old costs as a WBL 'check' ie you can't get that +5enh unless you have enough money for it by the RAW rules but make it cost 5 x the +1 cost.

done.

Monster AC is a different problem. I prefer low AC, high save monsters so the poor melees have it easy and the imba casters don't (as much)

[X-Codes]

Damage reduction is also a flawed mechanic. Not as much as the others, but much like some other things it moves everyone towards the already best options, namely two handed weapons for obvious reasons.

Actually, I find that DR can be useful for the right build.  If I play a Gish, I'll pick up the Heart of Stone spell and the Elusive Target feat to negate power attack and reduce the damage that doesn't scale well by 10.  Just about anything can potentially be durable with liberal and intelligent application of that feat.

[snakeman830]

I think the right idea is to tie it to class levels and not creature type.  Otherwise, you have races like Killoreans being boned by the system (even more) because they're Fey and not Humanoid.

Does anyone play Killoreans? I know that tieflings and Aasimar, maybe some others might get the short end of the stick, but basing it on classes as well as BAB is unfair to monsters because, as BB said, any monster can have one level of a class, then its insane BAB based on level starts paying off in spades that players could never hope to touch.

So...have it scale off of class levels and not HD like was suggested?  A 2 level dip or so wouldn't net a monster much (maybe a single point), but your typical character would get a heck of a lot more mileage out of it: perhaps enough to not be auto-hit by anything using an attack roll.

I think what you're thinking is "anyone with class levels gets the AC scaling with BAB" where what I'm saying is "have it scale only with class-granted BAB"  I'm thinking that getting a bonus to AC equal to 1/2 class-granted BAB might work out, but this is just off the top of my head. I haven't crunched any numbers yet.

[SneeR]

That works. i don't really like how it makes creature HD comparatively less useful, but it works.

How would you reconcile a player with a succubus character? They would be in an 12th level party with no AC bonus besides natural armor.

[Jackinthegreen]

That works. i don't really like how it makes creature HD comparatively less useful, but it works.

How would you reconcile a player with a succubus character? They would be in an 12th level party with no AC bonus besides natural armor.

Monsters as characters would need a redo of the LA, CR, and ECL mechanics to actually be viable in the majority of cases.

[veekie]

They have a +9 natural armor bonus and a difficult to penetrate damage reduction for monsters. Pretty decent for a non-melee character. And theres of course the problem of LA being a crapshoot. A Succubus's primary threat is its at-will charm ability and unless you can upgrade that you're more or less capped out without special ways to put your Cha to use.

[lans]

@BB- How much AC do you think a character needs at levels 5, 10, 15, 20 for it to matter as  defense?

[snakeman830]

That works. i don't really like how it makes creature HD comparatively less useful, but it works.

How would you reconcile a player with a succubus character? They would be in an 12th level party with no AC bonus besides natural armor.

Monsters as characters would need a redo of the LA, CR, and ECL mechanics to actually be viable in the majority of cases.

FTFY

[Basket Burner]

@BB- How much AC do you think a character needs at levels 5, 10, 15, 20 for it to matter as  defense?

25-30, 40, 55-60, 70, in that order.

[JaronK]

We just ran the calculations about two weeks ago in another thread... at level 10, you need 25 AC to do anything at all (some enemies only have an attack bonus around +13), 35AC to be secure against most enemies, and 45AC to be secure against all but the strongest enemies.  But 35AC is enough to count as a valid defense... it protects you completely from some enemies and provides an above 50% defense against the vast majority.  45 is only if you want to be off the RNG.

This was using a HUGE number of CR 10s as data.

Using that, we found it pretty hard to have enough AC to really matter at level 10 without either resorting to cheesy tricks or spending too much.  It's trivially cheap to get to an AC around 26-30 (depending on race), but after that it costs 1kgp per AC point, then rapidly becomes 4kgp per AC point.

JaronK

[Basket Burner]

25 at 10 gets you auto hit by everything that might want to physically attack you. 40 is the minimum number required to get decent mitigation. A little less and you're better off with miss chances, more than a little less and you're better off ignoring AC entirely to save your money.

Any calculations that spit out such underestimated results were bad ones.

Of course you won't get near 40, and will instead stop at 25-30, that's the point.

With the AC fix I mentioned, you'll have 8-10 higher at least, which means enemies will actually miss sometimes.

[JaronK]

Seriously BB, that included going through most of the major books and putting out the to hit numbers of melee monsters (i.e. things that would want to physically attack you) or CR 10 critters.  IIRC the attack bonuses of such creatures ranged from 13 to about 35, but the vast majority seemed to be in the low to mid twenties.  As such, an AC of 35 is sufficient to provide over 50% protection, which is better than other affordable permanent defenses at that level (but a cloak that gives 20% miss chance for 24k is obviously a solid investment by level 10).  And don't forget iterative attacks and secondary natural attacks, which are also a significant percentage of incoming attacks and yet have a lower bonus.

If you want to dispute the data, you'd have to provide some (with sourcing, not just random numbers you make up).  It's pretty hard to argue with all the Monster Manuals (as well as a few other books).  Note that MMII skewed the numbers upwards a bit due to the different standards of 3.0.

Anyway, from what we found it looks like AC is a solid investment until around level 8 or so, as more and more monsters either get overly high bonuses or simply attack something else.  So any fix should be targeted at levels above that point... any general fix that fails to do so would overpower AC at lower levels (which is where most people play anyway).  A number of the suggested fixes should work.

JaronK