Hello people, I have an unusual request.
I've been running a somewhat heavily houseruled game for the past eleven months - I began the game by explicitly allowing all 3e/3.5 books, third party material, optional rules subsystems, and homebrew for the players to use. And it's been a load of fun, if somewhat more complicated to run.
As we went along, we modified rules to better suit our game, including overhauling Armor as DR somewhat drastically. The way we're currently running it, the maximum amount of damage that can be soaked by the DR is the amount of DR times two. (So, if wearing full plate for 9 DR, it can only block up to 18 damage in a round.) This was proposed by one of the players to make Armor as DR less overwhelming against hordes of enemies. Whenever a PC using Armor as DR gains another iterative attack, their DR's cap will increase, too.
So, preamble behind us, we've been doing this for about ten months and it's worked great. But, I'd like to know how exactly the system stacks up against regular AC in a variety of different scenarios, a variety of opponents, so I can know exactly how balanced or unbalanced it is. I'd also like to be able to better predict how dangerous enemies are in advance of their meeting the PCs; I have an easy time intuiting the AC/to hit system, but a much harder time intuiting the system we're using. On several occasions fights have turned out to be either far tougher or far easier than I anticipated - I like tailoring difficulty to the strength of the party, but it's been hard this campaign.
Does anyone use or know of a DPR calculator robust enough for me to enter different values for DR that only applies up to a cap?
Many thanks in advance!
I don't have any spreadsheets to help you in your task, but I can tell you that at low levels armor as DR can be overwhelmingly good. But, at higher levels when attacks are basically guaranteed to succeed (especially because you've removed a major component of normal AC values, armor) the DR value lags behind such that martial combatants are going to take a lot more damage than they do in a normal game.
My personal opinion has always been that the armor as DR rules as presented for Pathfidner have always been poor and do not work. And your additional rule about only blocking so much damage per round will only make the issue worse.
Also keep in mind, that while your trying to balance this against a "horde of weak enemies" in the base game your high AC would keep the horde of weak enemies from hitting you at all except on a nat 20. So the game assume weak enemies can't hurt you, it's just part of the expectation.
I expect that the rules as you've implemented them will only make the game more and more dangerous for PCs as they grow to higher and higher levels.
Thanks for the reply! I agree with you on all counts.
I didn't want to clutter the OP by going into too much detail about the changes we've made to the armor as DR rules - but the players who're using the Armor as DR variant thing are also adding their BAB to their AC. That should make being hit a little less of a sure thing at the higher levels.
Only two of the players are using the Armor as DR rules - one of them is a barbarian with an archetype that traded away the ability to wear metal armor; he figured that his AC was so low due to a subpar DEX, subpar armor, and rage penalties, that he might as well get a little DR instead. The subsystem's a straight buff to him. The other one wants to use Armor as DR purely for fluff reasons - they're a dragon and they want to have DR. They're the one who's been putting in all the work tinkering with the subsystem, and I don't want to invalidate their work by saying they can't use it, simply because it confuses me at times.
Also keep in mind, that while your trying to balance this against a "horde of weak enemies" in the base game your high AC would keep the horde of weak enemies from hitting you at all except on a nat 20. So the game assume weak enemies can't hurt you, it's just part of the expectation.
By a horde of weak enemies, I mean fighting goblins at level one or quasits at level two - PCs aren't typically invulnerable to the attacks of enemies of their CR.
Honestly, though, I'm inclined to agree with you; the armor as DR rules as presented for Pathfidner have always been poor and do not work, and while our home fixes might serve to fix that (in our specific circumstances, but we don't need to balance the system for anyone but the two PCs using it) it leaves us with a convoluted and unintuitive mess.
But the PCs want to use it, and so it'd make my life easier if I could find a DPR calculator that'd work with the subsystem.
Start with a DPR calculator. Determine the damage by attack by decomposing the DPR value to its components. Sort from high to low. Sum each value as follows: while the value being looked at is at least the DR value, and the DR cap is not met, subtract the DR from it. Once the value is not as much as the DR, sum the rest of the numbers and subtract any remaining cap.
/cevah