Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Crimson Hellkite 09-26-04, 06:18 PM	Right now, your AC would look like this: Armor Class: 16 (+3 Dex, +2 armor), touch 13, flat-footed 12. Do you find it odd that both your dodge and armor determines if you're hit or not? So, I propose a variant. Defense Rating: Evasion 35/100 (+15 Dex), Armor 12 (+2 studded leather) When you attack someone, you roll a d% and a d20. To hit them, you need to roll 35 on the d% and a 12 on the d20. Now, say you have an attack bonus of +2. Now, to hit them, you need to roll a 25 on the d% and a 10 on the d20. See, for armor, it translates the same, but there's no dexterity or dodge bonuses. Then for the evasion, it's 10 + (5 * dodge mod) + (5 * Dex mod). To get passed the evasion, you roll a d% + (5 * your to hit bonus). Now, I'm not sure how well this works in-game, because I haven't tested it yet, and I haven't thought about any problems since it came to me just a few minutes ago, but I could use some comments.
UltimateGnome 09-26-04, 07:18 PM	It seems a good idea, but you just make it easier to hit things. Say we have two fighters Bob and Steve level 10 fighters. Steve attacks Bob. Both are wearing the same stuff. Fullplate with only 13 dexterity and both have dodge. Both have 16 strength. assume no magical stuff, won't make any difference. Steve has +13 to hit. Thats d% + 65 Evasion is only 20, so automatic hit there. AC is 18, so Steve only needs 5 to hit. of course normally steve would only need 7 to hit, netting 10% increased chance of hitting.
DrakaraGM 09-26-04, 07:24 PM	I know where you are trying to go -- you want a "miss chance" to be incorporated into every attack, along with a "get through physical protections" chance, where your "to hit" roll on two separate dice helps you get past both avoidance and physical defenses... There are a variety of systems that do just that sort of thing, dating from way back to the original Runequest(tm) game. In almost all cases, it makes combat take longer than D&D combat -- and 3.0/3.5 d20 combat already has a lot of tactical choices and a fair amount of die rolling going on. So I think that although the flavor might be nice, the complication of mechanics and extra time taken are not worth the gain, if any. You also have to go through all bonuses to AC and decide if they add to physical defense or to evasion defense. You have to look at things that give a miss chance and decide how they interact with evasion chance -- additive, multiple rolls, or whatever (concealment, entropic shield, blur and displacement, etc.). Presumably you don't mind that the enhancement bonus of a weapon is gonna count for both ease of wielding the weapon (to get past avoidance) and ability to punch through armor. Does a "Defending" weapon add to avoidance or to physical defense? (Probably the latter, physically parrying the attack.) And so on. In addition, you actually are making some monsters -- those of large size and low DEX -- HARDER to hit. Check it out -- an ogre with DEX 8, wearing hide armor: AC = 16 (-1 size, -1 DEX, +5 natural, +3 hide armor) Under your system: Avoidance = ?, Physical AC = 18. Assume that the -2 for size and DEX combined mean that you don't miss the ogre with the %-ile roll -- though if he has any actual avoidance you might. You still need an 18 to hit the ogre physically, whereas before you only needed a 16. Against other characters, you might be making them harder to hit as well. When you get two rolls, and if either of them misses, you miss, that means that your actual chance to hit is the chance to hit each way, multiplied by each other. You would have to work up some real examples to get an idea of just how much or how little the impact was, but I think you might be surprised... D&D AC is a simplification -- a summation of all the things that might help you not be hit. From a mechanics viewpoint, breaking down AC into two separate rolls is probably a bad idea in more ways that one, unless you are willing to come up with a whole new system and playtest it extensively...