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Mystic Theurge 03-22-07, 07:52 PM

Armor as damage reduction and class defense: characters and NPCs with any non NPC class get a class defense bonus equal to half their base attack bonus rounded up. This bonus stacks with the AC bonus granted by armor and is considered a dodge type of bonus (stacks with any other dodge bonus and applies to touch AC, not FF). Armor grants half its bonus rounded down as damage reduction and the other half as an armor bonus to AC. Damage reduction offered by other armor qualities, such as adamantine, stacks with DR granted by armor. Example: Studded leather armor grants +2 AC bonus with a DR of 1/-; Warforged with Adamantine Body receive +4 to AC and have DR 6/- (2 points of this DR can be bypassed with adamantine weapons and this is an exception to the rule that different types of DR do not stack.) Clarifications: NPC classes do not get a class defense bonus (CDB), but if a character multiclasses into a PC class, they get the specialized training to help with defense and so they get CDB Adamantine Body: This feat gives a warforged character a DR of 2/adamantine. With armor as DR, since it gives an AC bonus of +4 and a DR of 4/-, the adamantine body would not give any other benefit. A DM could opt to treat the DR from adamantine body as you would regular adamantine body, or elect to have the DR from the feat to stack with DR from armor but have a portion still be bypassed by adamantine weapons. The second choice is the one I opted for as it keeps a bit of the limitation of the feat. Why I don't like the rules in the UA: I had been thinking a long time about what the problems were with the armor as DR and class defense varients and our group had been toying with using both for some time. Several problems came up (and ARE addressed in the UA) that I didn't care for. Class defense makes touch attacks very difficult. This has a tendency to neuter spells casters who use touch attacks alot, especially warlocks. Many battles took needless time because spellcasters simply couldn't hit the broadside of a barn. That caused spellcasters to lean away from useful touch attack spells (and the like) and go for area spells or other types of spells that allowed saves, which introduced a whole new dynamic. Imagine fighting a character that has a high class defense and SR. Spellscasters in the group would then be pretty much useless. Class defense overlaps the bonus granted by armor and the CDB is fairly high, even for those who don't normally wear armor, but perhaps use spells. This made magical armor practicly useless. The only reason for making magical armor is for special properties of the magic items. For low levels, this makes armor purchases limited to the mundane as purchasing a +1 breastplate for a fighter would be pointless. The magical bonus does not add to the DR of the armor, and since the class defense overlaps it, the bonus doesn't add to the AC bonus. Therefore, a character would be wise to simply opt for other magical items. Perhaps that's ok in your mind, but it didn't sit well for me. Having class defense based on what kind of armor you can wear made less sense to me then having it based on how well trained a character can fight. If one is trained to hit well, it makes sense to me that a character should then be trained to be able to defend well. CDB in the UA is astronomical. A 1st level fighter wearing nothing is still very hard to hit. Again, this makes an armor purchase less and less valuable. Since such characters can't afford the more dense armors, or the armors they can afford carry with them serious hinderences, many characters simply opt to go with no armor in lieu of haveing a DR of 1 or 2/-. This has caused some frustration by DMs in that they have had trouble with people not getting hit. Battles could last for hours instead of minutes. The fix: it took some time for me to find an adequate fix for the above problems. I would bounce ideas off of fellow players and they would punch holes in them. Since as a group we had decided to play with these rules, and since the problems would occasionally seem glaring, some of the DMs in the group were pondering dropping it altogether, while some agreed that there were problems, they kept the system anyway. Eventually, we all decided to give the new system a try and found out several things. CDB is no longer astronomical. It helps, but it still behooves a character to find another type of defense. This helps eliminate the problem with spellcasters, but not entirely. Warriors in battle are no longer helpless against the touch attacks by spellcasters, while spellcasters are no longer neutered. There seems to be a happy medium. Because the armor bonus now stacks with CDB, armor has become a valid and valuable choice for characters. For relatively low level characters, buying that +1 breastplate boosts AC, but agian, it's no longer astronomical. Because CDB is now based on BAB rather than what armor a character could potentially wear, there is no longer the situation where players dip into a class that has heavy armor proficiency in order to get a huge AC. In fact, if the characters do dip into another class for the benefit of AC, the benefit is minimal. Finally, since the CDB is no longer so high, battles aren't as tedious and frustrating as before. Instead of going round by round of "I miss again" ad nauseum, battles become more fun and players are once again concerned about the survivability of their characters as opposed to being sure of it.