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So I have a bit of a reputation within my gaming group of building relatively unhittable characters, mostly in the form fighters, Monks, and most recently a Dervish Dancer bard. The thing I've noticed with all on my characters is this: it is actually pretty difficult and requires a lot of planning to build a good AC monkey, whereas building someone who dishes out a crap ton of damage it relatively easy.
I'll clarify. It seems like most class features and feats are geared toward doing more damage, or making it easier for you to do more damage. Power Attack, Deadly Aim, Weapon Focus and Specialization are a few examples. And most classes apply bonuses to you ability to attack, such as a Fighter's weapon Training, a Ranger's Favored Enemy and Combat Style feats, and a Barbarian's Rage. Now, there are a few classes that give you bonuses to AC ( Monk, a couple fighter Archetypes, the Stalwart Defender, and Duelist come to mind), but it seems that Damage is the name of the game.
I'm not hating on the system, by any means. I love Pathfinder, and it is quite gratifying to hit evil monsters really hard. I guess my point is this: As an active member of the SCA, I'm accustom to strapping on medieval armor with my fiends and whaling on each other, and my experience has taught me that is is always easier too defend than it is to attack. And I guess I don't see that in Pathfinder.
I understand why, I guess. No one has fun sitting around a table, rolling a few dice and saying "Yup, I missed. Again," all session. So I guess I've answered my own question, and now I'm just curious to see what other people think.
Thoughts?
I understand why, I guess. No one has fun sitting around a table, rolling a few dice and saying "Yup, I missed. Again," all session. So I guess I've answered my own question, and now I'm just curious to see what other people think.Thoughts?
I was going to give you this answer, but since you did so yourself, I'll settle for agreeing with you.
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I would say it is because you are supposed to get hit. It your HP stayed the same all game, than your defense should rise equal to the hit chance. In pathfinder (and d20) however you get the ability to take more damage. Imagine trying 20 times to hit someone, finally getting through, only to damage him a 10th of his life.
What Harald said. Also, from the DM side, I've noticed for some strange reason DMs don't mind stupidly high offense PCs ("I can just throw more monsters at them" mindset, I guess?) but they absolutely cannot stand a PC they can't hurt*. I have almost never had a DM complain about my damage output, but very many times they've gotten really upset about my character's defenses being "too high." Even though in general, I'd say I make "offense-focused" characters at least twice as often as I do "AC whores," partly because as the OP noted, it's just so much easier.
*I could make a comment on how this might relate to a lot of DMs being on power trips to make up for feeling powerless in real life and reacting poorly to not feeling omnipotent over their player's characters, but...yeah, I'll stop there.
The system is not really built around defense. One of the common problems people find with high defense builds is that everyone suggests that the GM would and should just ignore the character to attack the squishies.
While this is a valid tactical decision, the problem comes up-why have defense then? The usual reason to have defense in other games is to present a physical wall to attackers. But in this game, all battles either take place in blank open fields or tight corridors.
If there was a decently presented battlefield that allowed defensible positions-it would be because the GM put it there. But as StreamofTheSky stated-to provide a distinct set of tactical options would require a maturity that many GM's seem to lack. Many players do too, but that is a different issue.
The other reason is that there is little reason to play defense anyway since characters are masses of hit points rather than the vulnerable meatbags we see in real life. Few games really give you the impression of danger (which is why I love Dark Souls and Demon Souls, since they show players without shields off as either noobs or hyperskilled murdertornadoes to run away from...which you can't)
Of course, there are some defensive styles that also present decent offense. Reach weapon present an excellent example of this, since they can be used to attack, and they also shape the battlefield based upon you turning yourself into a 25' wide circle of pain and/or combat maneuvers.
Because if it were easy for PCs to become unhittable, it would be equally easy to make NPCs that were unhittable. And when players can't hit their enemies, it stops being fun.
If I had any complaint about the way AC works, though, it would be that shields are VERY underpowered in terms of AC. A lousy +2 for a large shield that you can basically hide the majority of your body behind?
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Because if it were easy for PCs to become unhittable, it would be equally easy to make NPCs that were unhittable. And when players can't hit their enemies, it stops being fun.
But it would make combat more... Epic isn't the right word, so I'll go with challenging. If you stop being able to just walk up to an enemy and whale on them with reasonable assurance that you'll hit, it changes up to combat tactics of parties and GM's alike. Instead of the Fighter of the group rushing in and power attacking his bum off, he might delay his action till he can flank with a friend, or attempt to attack from higher ground. If enemies aren't piss-easy to hit, it forces parties to actually work for their wins; which I view as a 100% positive result. From a player standpoint, fights become more involving and interesting if you are challenged by them, and as a GM it's fun to have fights that last longer than 18 seconds in game-time.
Alright, you face the final boss! It's over in 6 rounds of combat, meaning the actual fight took... 36 seconds. Wow. Talk about a thrilling climax, lol.
One consequence of high AC being easier to obtain in Pathfinder is that it would give casters yet another relative boost over martials. High AC makes it harder for martials to land blows while casters are mostly unaffected.
Yeah, that is also a problem. If you have very high defense but low offense, enemies can and will just start ignoring you.
Ultimately, a tank needs both area control ("lockdown") to force enemies to actually attack him instead of allies -- very strong tripping, ability to halt foes' movement, long reach, etc... -- *and* he needs to actually be able to survive the focus fire.
Because that's the other thing. The game already rewards focus firing on one guy till he's dead. And the difference in a d10 and d6 HD really isn't that great... The ideal tanking set up would be one where the party can evenly spread damage out among everyone, not one where a slightly tougher guy takes all the beatings instead of the slightly more fragile guy.
The fact that PF nerfed the hell out of lockdown abilities and is deathly allergic to agro mechanics just compounds the issue.
And the claim that, "if a guy can stand toe to toe with all the enemies for several rounds and expect to be just fine, then the enemies aren't really a challenge to him, even if he needs other people to actually kill them off quickly" isn't entirely invalid, either...
Alright, you face the final boss! It's over in 6 rounds of combat, meaning the actual fight took... 36 seconds. Wow. Talk about a thrilling climax, lol.
If those 36 seconds of in-game time has taken an hour or two in the real world, I wouldn't really be interested in a combat taking 50 turns...
One consequence of high AC being easier to obtain in Pathfinder is that it would give casters yet another relative boost over martials. High AC makes it harder for martials to land blows while casters are mostly unaffected.
It's funny you should mention AC and casters vs. martials.
In 3E, 2H fighting was the ideal style (distantly followed by TWF, for which this also applies) and at higher levels the martials could just pick up an animated heavy shield for +3 to +7 AC boost (+1 heavy shield - +5 heavy shield AC values) fairly cheap.
In 3E, casters didn't care about animated because they just needed one hand to cast anyway, so they often went with the (mithral) buckler for +1 to +6 AC (unenhanced through +5).
In Pathfinder... the caster option works just as well as in 3E. But for martials, animated is now only a few rounds per activation (and actions in combat are costly), so it's largely not used. This means that in PF, caster AC remained the same but martial AC took a steep drop.
I'm shocked so few have noticed or commented on this...
It's not that complicated to make a character who is virtually impervious to physical attacks. You mostly just need to spend a lot of money on it and buy those silly items like Jingasa of the Fortunate Soldier, maybe a bit of Fighting Defensively too.
And from the GM point of view, let's say you're attacking a bandit fortress. Within a couple of rounds they ought to notice they're fighting an enemy who can kill them, but who they have no chance of harming. Now what? Do they all flee at once? Go around the character and try to attack his allies, ignoring the fact that they're basically doomed?
It's pretty frustrating trying to make an encounter like that exciting and heroic for the players while still making the enemies behave like real people.
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In Pathfinder... the caster option works just as well as in 3E. But for martials, animated is now only a few rounds per activation (and actions in combat are costly), so it's largely not used. This means that in PF, caster AC remained the same but martial AC took a steep drop.
I'm shocked so few have noticed or commented on this...
Probably because martial classes are still much better at AC than casters are.
Yeah, that is also a problem. If you have very high defense but low offense, enemies can and will just start ignoring you.
What do they do when it is the Oracle of Life that is unhittable?
Because if it were easy for PCs to become unhittable, it would be equally easy to make NPCs that were unhittable. And when players can't hit their enemies, it stops being fun.But it would make combat more... Epic isn't the right word, so I'll go with challenging.
Well, that sounds good in theory, but to be honest I hate long combats. Its especially frustrating when you try again and again and your just not doing anything. Your not even scratching him. Some games move towards bulking up HPs and raising attack so that you always feel like you did something at least. It also becomes a long game if you take forever with your choices. The other day my character was fighting a single character with higher AC, fast healing, and regen. Took 2 hours, and our turns weren't short, it just takes a while to get around the table and the guy sucked at dying. I'm never fond of those long strung out duels. If he had time to set up a less than amazing tactic like flanking it wouldn't make it any more exciting, he's just get a small bonus. That's actually pretty boring and not worth an extra 3 turns of fighting for.
Anyways, I blame the easy scaling of offence on the fact it actually scales with your character as part of your class and AC scales with your magic item treadmill and some of the ways to get a better defense are a little specific(Dervish dance, Crane style). Its not the worst thing in the world though.
I don't know about you, but I always thought a magical floating shield looked ridiculous, and I still do.
So, any changes to that item make no difference to my game, because I don't use it.
(Sure, sure, your arithmetic is sound. But I'm not playing this game solely to have higher numbers)
As for the OP, consider a game where defending is easy and attacking is hard.
I attack <blocked>
I attack <dodged>
I attack <miss>
It's less fun than the alternative.
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It's not that complicated to make a character who is virtually impervious to physical attacks. You mostly just need to spend a lot of money on it and buy those silly items like Jingasa of the Fortunate Soldier, maybe a bit of Fighting Defensively too.
That's another problem I have with Pathfinder, but my dis-like for reliance on magical items is a subject for a different post.
Probably because martial classes are still much better at AC than casters are.
Sort of. The only thing martials actually have on arcane casters is armor itself and possibly some specific more specific builds(dex based dervish dancer for higher dex, crane style which is specific to certain builds). Arcane caster's on the other hand have a mithral bucklers, mirror images, blur, summoned creatures, invisibility, flight, resistance to x, protection from x, mind blank, etc... Many of which are things martials can only hope to emulate with features outside of their class. (most of those things aren't AC though!)
I don't know about you, but I always thought a magical floating shield looked ridiculous, and I still do.
So, any changes to that item make no difference to my game, because I don't use it.
(Sure, sure, your arithmetic is sound. But I'm not playing this game solely to have higher numbers)
I would also agree with that. It is ridiculous. I also hate iuon stones and wish you could just pay for the already-baked-into-the-price-tag 2x cost for not being a body slot and keep them in your freaking pocket (without having to shell out still more money on "wayfinders" or whatever).
But the fact is, in 3E mid/high-level martials got a sharp AC boost and in PF they've lost that.
PF could've done something to make up for the change (like add half BAB to AC, or even more directly, just give all the non-caster classes AC boosts as class features). But, just like rogue suddenly not getting much of an edge for having "class skills" -- they did not do anything to address the change in balance.
I have noticed this as well, though against certain enemies anyways a flowing whatever monk someone built could make things frustrating. It was a cohort gained with leadership and custom made by the PC (yeah, I know it's a bad idea now, live and learn) who was basically built from the ground up to be nothing more than a living shield for the PC wizard. It wasn't a super optimized character or anything as it sacrificed everything for defense. Didn't do a thing damage-wise, especially when they started running into things with DR, so it was frustrating for monsters when they attacked it and frustrating for the cohort when he attacked monsters.
The party occasionally fought similarly styled enemies (really hard to hit with good defenses but diddly for offense, can't for the life of me remember what though) and after a little while I realized that the main reason the high defense no offense approach was frustrating was that it lengthened the encounters without affecting their outcome. If there was one high defense enemy mixed with a more dangerous foe (magic user, high offense) the party would mostly focus on taking out the threat. The high defense foes were missed or absorbed blows, but did very little in return, so anything with a high defense would be whittled away at for sometimes a half-dozen rounds once the real threat of the encounter was ended. Which means another long stretch of time where we are basically wasting time since we know exactly what will happen (indeed on some encounters I just fast-forwarded to 'and they are all dead' to save 30 minutes or more of precious game time). It didn't add to the fun of encounters unless the high defense foe could offer a threat to the party. That could be fun, if used sparingly, a foe that was a monster threat on offense and heavy on defense too. It's just hard to do, much easier to make an offensive threat who can't stand up defensively... and now I'm going in circles back to the topic of this thread.
I do find it very fun to read differing opinions from posters on a topic. After reading a thread where basically everyone was calling the OP a terrible DM for making really hard to hit goblin enemies it's fun to see people saying how a fight where a PC is having a very hard time hitting would be fun and tactical. We really all do play very different games with very different expectations, and what's fun for some is awful for others.
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Because the game is designed to be offense dominant because offense dominance induces the behavior the game necessarily wants you to engage in.
Defense dominance tends to encourage slow slogging combat or,and this is worse for the game, no combat.
Deterrence dominance similarly incentivizes doing nothing.
See, e.g. http://isanet.ccit.arizona.edu/noarchive/adams.html
There are other tricks to increase AC than have been stated:
Two-Weapon Fighting is perfectly viable (in fact, a bit more cost effective on a WBL basis with Shield Master) using weapon/shield bash, instead of paired/double weapons. Bashing Finish with a high-crit range weapon can even give fairly consistent extra attacks and Shield Slam helps in the battlefield control aspect. A quickdraw light shield (with the Quick Draw feat) makes it a free action to ready or stow the shield, too.
For those melee characters not going the weapon/shield bash route, a one-level dip into cleric for the Defense sub-domain (Abadar, Nethys, Shelyn, or Torag out of the core deities) grants shield as a 1st-level domain spell (+4 shield bonus and blocks magic missiles). Pearls of power (1st) are pretty inexpensive at 1,000 gp each, too. It's not the +7 from the 3.x +5 animated heavy shield, but it can be used a lot earlier in the character's career and takes up much less of the WBL. Plus, you can activate all those healing wands without Use Magic Device.
Basically, there are still ways to have both high AC and high DPR.
Another thing to bear in mind is how the abstract "hit points" system works. At the later levels you have characters with insane numbers compared to the damage a commoner can take, because of the inclusion of their ability to avoid damage. A lot of those attacks aren't necessarily causing damage, instead just wearing down the defender's ability to defend by subtracting those abstract HPs as their endurance and luck get chipped away at.
Alright, you face the final boss! It's over in 6 rounds of combat, meaning the actual fight took... 36 seconds. Wow. Talk about a thrilling climax, lol.If those 36 seconds of in-game time has taken an hour or two in the real world, I wouldn't really be interested in a combat taking 50 turns...
This. How much real-world time a combat takes is far more relevant to me than how much time it takes in-universe. For a typical four to six hour session, you really can't afford to spend too much time on a single battle.
Also, players like to feel like their game turns accomplish something. Spending ten minutes waiting for your next turn, just for it to be another missed attack ends up not being much fun.
To answer the op:
You have a boost to attack rolls that increases with levels, but ac doesn't increase unless you invest in it. Until that changes, ac is going to be harder to get than to-hit.
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Alright, you face the final boss! It's over in 6 rounds of combat, meaning the actual fight took... 36 seconds. Wow. Talk about a thrilling climax, lol.If those 36 seconds of in-game time has taken an hour or two in the real world, I wouldn't really be interested in a combat taking 50 turns...
Just be glad you're not playing Car Wars then. 5 hours = 18 turns = 18 seconds. :)
Yeah, that is also a problem. If you have very high defense but low offense, enemies can and will just start ignoring you.
Let's remain honest here: This is not the 'enemy' making decisions, it is the 'GM' or 'Player' depending on the situation. People, with an outside perspective, able to do mental math of how easy it would be to hit. Many of the actual 'enemies' are unintelligent beasts with low to no INT score, yet they somehow end up making sound tactical decisions. They even avoid high defense characters even if it isn't based upon obvious tells like armor (such as crane style, fighting defensively, and combat expertise)
If there is a problem with the ability of a defensive character to play, it is between people. Remember that and discuss with them.
At the same time though, there is a relative lack of options for drawing aggro. I am sure there are some, but I never see any builds that has them as important.
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Another thing to bear in mind is how the abstract "hit points" system works. At the later levels you have characters with insane numbers compared to the damage a commoner can take, because of the inclusion of their ability to avoid damage. A lot of those attacks aren't necessarily causing damage, instead just wearing down the defender's ability to defend by subtracting those abstract HPs as their endurance and luck get chipped away at.
That's true. That can represent, say, you holding up your weapon to parry but getting it slammed against your chest by the force of the blow. Or, at higher levels, that you remembered to tuck-and-roll to survive a fall from terminal velocity. Though even when the enemy misses, it could also be because of your armour or shield, and not just clumsiness on the attacker's part.
Though I admit it would be fun to have a defence-based monk who would go Crane Style or just stay in Total Defense, not wanting to cause undue harm; though it wouldn't work for long periods against undeads and constructs that can keep attacking endlessly.
Since Pathfinder is a fantasy game, and the staples of the fantasy genre include exploring uncharted places and beating the stuffing out of people who want to conquer or ruin the known world/universe/and beyond, its mechanics emphasize action over passivity. There's more searching than waiting, dungeon-crawling over getting your foes to come to you. Decisive victory is encouraged more than long, drawn-out sieges or political deliberations. It's probably something that goes back to the basic Hero's Journey, explaining why heroes are more often depicted raising swords than shields.
...Though now this thread makes me want to make up a homebrew adventure aboud defending a fortified frontier trading post, whose main deity's favoured weapon is the spiked shield.