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Blankbeard wrote:

Have you seen the Defense Bonus alternate rule from the D20 SRD site? It might do what you want.

I'd tie the defense bonus to the overall power of the class rather than its proficiencies and use the Armor as DR variant but that's just me.

That should give you a scaling AC bonus and still let armor be meaningful without messing with damage too terribly badly.

The class Defense Bonus thing didn't appeal to me for 2 reasons:

1. It makes physical armor obsolete from a certain level upward (of course that would change with Armor as DR rule)

That's going to be true of any scaling bonus except for a few edge cases though.

2. I don't like the way the AC bonus is tied to something that seems completely unrelated (how does knowing how to wear heavy armor make you better at defending against attacks?)

Yeah, I'd change which classes use which columns. I'd also consider reworking the table itself.

I went for Base Reflex/Half Base Attack because it could be explained with something and it would make sense that a good martialist should be capable of parrying and someone with good reflexes be good at dodging attacks.

Hmm. Here's the only real problem I see. You have 4 effective tracks, A is classes with a high reflex save, B is high BAB, C is medium BAB, and D is low reflex. A is always 2 points higher than B. B and C are identical for the first 3 levels then C falls a point behind at levels 4, 12, and 16. C and D are identical until level 8, when D falls one point behind. It's just not a very even progression.

Also it seems that high reflex save classes are also classes that are likely to have a high dexterity. Any way you slice it, it seems like high reflex classes will have the highest armor classes for nearly the entire game.

What if you just went with half your BAB as your defense bonus and gave a flat +2 if you have levels in a class with a high reflex save? You get a smooth progression out of that, most classes will want armor, and you avoid any multiclassing weirdness with reflex saves.

Still, if your idea works best for you, that's all that matters.

Maybe i could combine my original idea with Armor as DR, but then I have never been so sure about that rule either. It seems to put too much favor on focussing damage into less attacks. It's not like things like TWF are doing too well as is.

Personally, I'd ignore the natural armor adjustment. It just seems fiddly for not too much of a benefit.

I don't believe that 4 points of DR will hurt two weapon fighters that much but you might consider the trailblazer-esque modification of simply allowing 2 attacks at full BAB for a full attack. That is supposed to be very similar to iterative attacks in overall damage. Then two weapon fighters aren't at a disadvantage at all.

Again, these are my ideas offered for discussion only. I certainly have no claim on the "right way."

Have you seen the Defense Bonus alternate rule from the D20 SRD site? It might do what you want.

I'd tie the defense bonus to the overall power of the class rather than its proficiencies and use the Armor as DR variant but that's just me.

That should give you a scaling AC bonus and still let armor be meaningful without messing with damage too terribly badly.

Assume that INT is how well your character learns and reasons as the core rulebook says and that it follows a normal distribution like real world characteristics. Given the 3-18 range for humans, a 7 is in the bottom 20%. Including the +2 or leveling bonuses would reduce that number a bit but not enough to really change the outcome.

If you assume that INT correlates to IQ, 7 is a bit more than 1 standard deviation from the mean. Given mean of 100 and sd of 15, that equates to an IQ around 80.

Again, there are assumptions here and others may make different assumptions.

I would think that a character with a 7 Int would be characterized as slow-witted and prone to bad ideas. I'd think other characters would probably characterize him or her as stupid. We're talking about someone who doesn't reason as well as the average goblin. If your campaign world has a youtube equivalent, searching for that character's name probably brings up a few hilariously painful videos.

If the character has a high Wis, they learn from experience but would be difficult to talk out of bad ideas. Add in a low charisma and you have someone who is annoying, stupid, and impossibly hard-headed. Mr 7/18/7 I'm thinking of you.

These are simply my opinions so feel free to ignore them.

Edit: removed a comma