Dex vs. Str and AC vs DR


Combat & Magic

Sovereign Court

I never liked the fact that your strength bonus is influencing your chance to hit an opponent. Although a high strength increases the probability to penetrate artifical and natural armor it won't give you I big advantage if you fight a quick and agile rogue. IMU strenght does not necessarily mean speed.
Now my suggestions:
I would like to see bonuses from artificial and natural armor as well as deflecton be converted to DR but the other bonuses kept as they are. Furthermore, your Dex not your Str bonus should be used to calculate your attack bonus, always and for any weapon. I know these changes would mess up the backward compatibility but IMO they are still worth consideration.

Silver Crusade

jolochl wrote:

I never liked the fact that your strength bonus is influencing your chance to hit an opponent. Although a high strength increases the probability to penetrate artifical and natural armor it won't give you I big advantage if you fight a quick and agile rogue. IMU strenght does not necessarily mean speed.

Now my suggestions:
I would like to see bonuses from artificial and natural armor as well as deflecton be converted to DR but the other bonuses kept as they are. Furthermore, your Dex not your Str bonus should be used to calculate your attack bonus, always and for any weapon. I know these changes would mess up the backward compatibility but IMO they are still worth consideration.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to your Dex argument, although higher Str helps the fighter accelerate a weapon more quickly in combat, which makes it harder for the agile rogue to avoid. However, I think that this change would make Dex even more multi-purpose than it is now. Dex already improves missile attacks, AC, and initiative: I'd be a bit worried about game balance.

I think that the DR change would favor heavy-hitting monsters over players in the long term. I'd much rather have a 5% lower chance of being hit/point of AC than a -1 on damage dealt/point of AC against any single attack that did more than 20 points of damage.

That said: Have you tried out the DR modification? How did it work in your game?

Dark Archive

Eric Zylstra wrote:

I think that the DR change would favor heavy-hitting monsters over players in the long term. I'd much rather have a 5% lower chance of being hit/point of AC than a -1 on damage dealt/point of AC against any single attack that did more than 20 points of damage.

That said: Have you tried out the DR modification? How did it work in your game?

I does wonders, unless your style of play is that of blasting through ranks of enemies, mowing down the high-caliber baddies like grass.

A 12° level party encounters a couple of hostile Fire Giants, using the standard AC rules: "Oh crap! It's a whole lot of HPs, it will take us at least 5 rounds of combat!"

A 12° level party encounters a couple of hostile Fire Giants, using the DR rules*: "Oh crap! It's a whole world of hurt packed in humanoid form! And there's two of them!"

* I use the DR rules from UA coupled with a reworked dodge/parry Base Defese Bonus pilfered from the Conan RPG, which slightly improves the non-DR AC value.


Strength does make sense, especially for heavy stuff. With a big heavy axe, your agility will help you not a bit if you can't lift the thing up in under 20 seconds and 3 tries.

One of my houserules was to make weapon finesse an option, not a feat. You always get to choose with light weapons (and those that are elegible for weapon finesse now).

Dark Archive

This isn't the first topic on the subject, so I'm going to copy an argument I made against DR here.

The problem with Armor as DR is balance as at low levels people wearing full plate trend to be near-invincible where at high levels most monsters and npc do so much damage that DR is pointless.

For example:

A low level if you go full armor bonus=DR, anyone wearing full plate can't take damage from anyone that can't deal more than 8 damage. Furthermore, at high levels the increase of in damage out strips DR. A level 20 fighter wearing +5 full plate, assuming that enchantment bonuses increase DR, has a DR of 13. A Very Old Red Dragon has a CR:21 which means it suitable challenge for a party of level 20 PCs(For ease I'm using the one found on MM page 77). Using full attack, the red has 6 attacks. 1 Bite at 4d6+13 damage (ave. 27 damage, Max 41, Min 17). 2 Claws at 2d8+6 per Claw (ave. 15, Max 24, min 8). 2 Wings at 2d6+6 per wing (ave. 13, max 18, min 8). And 1 tail slap at 2d8+18 (ave. 27, max 34, min 20). Assuming that all attacks hit the fighter and do average damage the fighter will take 32 points of damage(14+2+2+0+0+14).

Hm... I realized thats not that bad and truth be told works at the high level but not the low level..

But moving on, if you use the rule in UA then the above example the Dragon will deal 86.(23+11+11+9+9+23) It will always hit as your Armor bonus is 9(4+5) while your DR is 4. Adding the max dex for a PC in full plate gives you a whopping AC of 20 which is less than the Dragons BAB.

It works at low levels but breaks at the higher levels.

The only thought I have would be to switch the UA rule to have the enchantment bonus increase DR, but it doesn't change the fact that you're going to be hit every time.

As it stands right now, I think the Armor Bonus to AC works best.


jolochl wrote:

I never liked the fact that your strength bonus is influencing your chance to hit an opponent. Although a high strength increases the probability to penetrate artifical and natural armor it won't give you I big advantage if you fight a quick and agile rogue. IMU strenght does not necessarily mean speed.

Now my suggestions:
I would like to see bonuses from artificial and natural armor as well as deflecton be converted to DR but the other bonuses kept as they are. Furthermore, your Dex not your Str bonus should be used to calculate your attack bonus, always and for any weapon. I know these changes would mess up the backward compatibility but IMO they are still worth consideration.

I've sen the Dexterity vs. Strength argument a hundred times now.

And it all boils down to this:

Simplicity.

An argument could be made that Dexterity is the most important To Hit modifier (actually needing to hit the target), and an argument can be made that Strength is the most important (your aim doesn't matter, if you can pommel your way past your opponents defenses - and I am not talking Armor here). But since Strength adds to Damage, and not Dexterity (I am guessing we can all agree that this is not up for debate) Strength might as well be the stat to modify melee To Hit rolls.

On top of that, 3.0 introduced the wonderful Weapon Finesse feat, and 3.5 removed its one weapon only restriction.

Assuming Pathfinder RPG doesn't do away with that, we have the best of both worlds here already.


Disenchanter wrote:

On top of that, 3.0 introduced the wonderful Weapon Finesse feat, and 3.5 removed its one weapon only restriction.

Assuming Pathfinder RPG doesn't do away with that, we have the best of both worlds here already.

I would point out that this Feat doesn't apply to all weapons. However, I would also point out that I agree with Strength being the to-hit modifier for the majority of weapons.

For starters, the majority of people using weapons fight as if strength equals speed. It doesn't, but they don't realize that. (If you disagree, try watching boffer training sessions.) Thus, I would agree that it would require a Feat to use your Dexterity (since, in practice, it does).

I would also point out from my experiences at failing to become proficient in claymores, that for large weapons (especially such like the greatsword or the maul) the weapon is carrying you through the attack, not the other way around. You produce the impetus and inertia does the rest. The entire fighting style for most two-handed weapons involves bending rather than directly controlling weapon trajectories. A quick dude might be able to cut the air with a rapier, but the quick dude ain't going to have a lot of advantage with a two-handed waraxe.

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I think Strength as the determinant in to-hit rolls is useful mainly from a mechanics point of view. That way, the rogue isn't out-hitting the barbarian at low levels. I don't think there's enough logical evidence to change things that much...although it would be nice to cap things somewhere so ogres, giants, and other very high-strength creatures don't almost always hit with every swing.

I prefer Armor Class for ease of play. You roll, you hit, you roll for damage and subtract from the opponent's hit points. Armor as damage reduction adds another step to that, and in some cases means that certain PCs are going to be completely unable to hurt heavily armored foes. I can see the reasoning in providing it as an optional rule, but I think there's a very good reason why hit points and armor class have remained as they are despite thirty years of grumbling.

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