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D&D Rules Laywer Alert!

DR Correction: DR is a simple damage subtraction. If you hit the enemy for 6 damage who has DR 5/-, 6-5=1 point of damage. Its possible to ignore DR if you attack with the same type of attack as what's after the / . Example: For DR 5/Piercing, if you attack with a piercing weapon, it completely ignores the DR.


Magic spells accuracy depends on the spell itself. Ray spells need to beat your touch AC for example, which is just the spell hitting the player and not deflecting off of armour, a shield, tough hide, ect. Other spells always hit if the player is in range but the player gets a Reflex save to take half/no damage. The save is completely independent of AC, DR, and most other stats (It depends on your Dexterity stat and your class levels). Fighters and other high defence characters generally suck against spells since they just simply ignore the tank's best qualities, but they can suck it up better than the harder to hit rogues and monks since they have better HP (barring some interesting builds and bad hit die rolls)


Also AC is horrible at higher levels for avoiding damage. Enemies get obsurd bonuses to hit at higher levels to the point where anything short of a natural one is a hit. AC helps with the full attacks (each subsequent hit goes for -5 to hit until the attacker runs out of attacks), but there are raw % to avoid attack abilities. A Cloak of Displacement, I think, has a 20% of the wearer dodging an attack which is independent of the attack roll (even the auto-hit natural twenty doesn't let a hit land if they failed the 20% chance roll)


End D&D Rule Lawyering

Speed is more important than just how often you can attack. Even attacking alone, if speed = more turns, there'd be less damage overrun when you kill something. For example, lets say...

Your attacker does 60 damage/turn and gets one turn in. Two enemies are alive, one has 20 HP and the other has >60. You'd kill the weak enemy so there's one less enemy after you, but 40 HP of damage goes down the drain.

Now, if your attacker does 30 damage/turn and gets two turns in with the same enemies, the attacker could finish off the first enemy (wasting 10 damage) and attack the second for 30 damage.

What if the enemy you target has a resistance you don't know about? You could waste your heavy attack and have the enemy laugh at you, while the faster character would waste half the damage potential and could switch attacks/targets for the second.

Speed isn't always better in cases like Shadowtext's example too. If you can't overcome an enemy's defence while the heavy hitter could, the speed guy is going to have to find something else to do.


Other scenarios: A healer!
You could have your healer heal more HP by giving them more INT/WIS/whatever, but if your healer takes forever to get a turn in, a character could die when you wait for your healer to act. If two enemies hit the same character (lets say they have a buff too that a character gave them) and kill him, it doesn't matter how much the healer can heal for. Even if they can revive the character, they've lost the buff and you've lost the bonus of the buff and/or a turn to recast it. Now if your healer was faster, they could've gotten a turn in between the enemies, heal the targetted character, and have them survive.

Speed isn't just a DPS matter. It does depend on the game/battle system though, for its importance. A turn based game like FF1, I'd rather have a very fast/slow (fast preferred) character who could reliable act at the start/end of turns.



On the note of constant max HP, I personally think that it would be a bad idea. There's no bigger numbers being thrown around, no real appearance of growth (I am a Disgaea fan so I'll let that speak for itself :\ ). There'd be a few issues with healing too. I'd see the following situations if you had constant health:
- Initial healing items would be shit, as you get richer to the point where you can buy more healing items better ones would be available. Makes the start of the game suck. (and if the defence character loses a fifth of their health when they get hit and the faster outright dies...)
- Good healing items are immediately available. Once you start making more cash, the cost of healing becomes negliable and mid/late game attrition damage is thrown out since you'd have enough healing items that its a nonfactor.
- Effect of healing items/spells is reduced as you level up. I guess this works but its the same deal as having more HP. Or cost of healing items could go up I guess. Maybe on the level. (but then what about spells?)

I'd require some good design work to have it comparable to/better than growing HP I think.

*edit*
Holy shit

Nice to see the participation falling apart already and there's still a week left ;)

author=Shadowtext link=topic=1189.msg19909#msg19909 date=1213371229
I'm not that familiar with rogue rules, but wouldn't that also make them super-susceptible to Sneak Attack?

Because if so, having a tank that NOT ONLY stops the enemy from being able to attack your mages, but makes it so your Striker can STAB THE HELL OUT OF THEM is pretty sweet.

I forgot about that; You can sneak attack any enemy (that isn't immune to critical hits) whenever they'd be denied their dexterity bonus. Too bad the party didn't have any Rogues in it.


Craze: That sounds pretty sweet. Good luck with it!

One solution my D&D group had for the low HP aspect of the game was the HP on your first level was quadrupled. It helped with being able to play on the first level and not have to worry about anybody with a half decent weapon rolling high on damage (or someone actually lands a crit, that usually kills anyone on low levels). The wizard really liked it with his flimsy d4 hitdie; 16 HP goes a lot farther than 4 should anything bad happen.

The best Fighter trips enemies instead of attackign during an Attack of Opportunity, aka AoO, (unless its some quadpedal, large, high strength monster). It negates the enmies attack (their move ends when they're tripped, and I think they lose their action for the turn too) so they can't hit the fleshy and flimsy mages. And then they're flatfooted by being prone, which makes them lose their Dex bonus to AC making them easier to hit (generally, if their Dex sucks they don't get a bonus to begin with) and when they waste their move action on the next turn they draw another attack of opportunity which can be used to hit them (they're still prone during the AoO so you can't trip them again).

That is a fantastic tank in my mind. There's no 'draw aggro' magic which makes everyone want to target him. Instead its because of other abilities that if enemies don't, they're screwing themselves over. So they'll have to find other ways to hit the weak mages (ranged attack for example) or kill the fighter first (or just resist the trip). The only flaw really is that the fighter can give only so many AoO a turn.

It'd be fantastic if something like this could be implemented with proper enemy AI so they don't random keep drawing AoO and figure out to kill the fighter.

(My fighter like this rocked. He was always on the front line completely messing with the enemies trying to move around and actually hit stuff. He also had a reach weapon so just to hit him with a non-reach melee weapon usually drew a AoO. Everybody loved him until the Wizard learnt the kick ass spells and could fend for himself.)


Offtopic: I had ideas about trying to implement a kind of AoO in a game. Similar mechanic: When the battle reaches a certain state, characters with appropriate skills can take a turn right then and there. Not just enemies leaving your threatened zone and you can take an attack action, but something like "A Character reaches critical HP status", then a healer can immediately take their turn (even if it isn't their turn yet) to do something, like heal. Taking an action there would have a cost and its something I'm still fiddling with.

I really like the D&D mechanics. They're so fun and different than what I'm used to.

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