D&D General The diminishing effectiveness of armour across the editions

[Ruin Explorer]

AC 18 gets attacked by +4 foe, chance of getting hit is on 14 or higher, which is 35%.
AC 14 gets attacked by +4 foe, chance of getting hit is on 10 or higher, which is 55%.
That sure looks like a 20% difference to me...

If you are thinking more along the lines of 35/55 indicating the 18 AC guy is 36% (roughly) less likely to be hit, then you are looking at them as dependent, which they aren't since one has nothing to do with the other.

Uh-huh, but you're failing at basic logic here, because it doesn't matter if they're "dependent" or not, what matters is that the AC18 guy is, over the course of adventure or three, going to get hit a lot more than 20% less often, relative to the AC14 guy (or an alternate reality where he had AC14).

You've got into that math zone where you can't see how real games actually play, or how numbers matter over time. The goal of having a high AC is to stop yourself getting downed by damage which comes from attack rolls.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Whiff-fests are also the way to win.

It's an odd but very true parallel: in both D&D and most team sports the adage "defense wins championships" is bang-on right.

If you've got better defense (i.e. AC) than your opponent, chances are high you're going to win that battle.

Yes this is true, and fans absolutely loathe it, and casual viewers loathe it, and it's boring, and people loathe teams like that. I speak as family member of long-time Arsenal fans. The most famous Arsenal chant for a long time was "One nil to the Arsenal!", because Arsenal would manage to go 1 up, and then they'd just use their superior defense to hold the match to 1-0 victory for the next 70+ minutes or whatever. It was boring and was frustrating and fans mostly sung about because they knew how much it annoyed everyone, even them.

It's not that effective in military situations, where it's very hard to outdo offense with defense, and there's typically a way around defense.

The problem with this is that it over-blows the importance of having lots of hit points (a game conceit) at cost of undercutting the importance of having good defense (realistic).

This of course directly leads to players insisting on hit-point generation methods with lots of safety nets so as not to be left vulnerable by one or more bad rolls.

On a different note: there is in fact one way in which armour-based defense improved from 1e to 3e (RAW): in 1e a shield only improved AC by 1, in 3e (and forward) a shield adds 2 to AC.

It doesn't "over-blow" anything. It's a fundamentally different design, and the idea that having a good defense is "realistic" is hogswash. Nothing about these games is "realistic", not least the infinite endurance possessed by the people involved. In reality, defense is not that great, because you get tired real fast, and your ability to defend yourself weakens, and sudden, even though you're in heavy armour, all it takes is a fresh combatant to knock you to the ground and stab you in the armpit or throat or whatever, or just keep you from getting up, which is easy, because you're exhausted, on the ground and and under 70lbs of steel.

Appealing to realism here to claim one thing is better than another, when you're relying on massive unrealism, is just not a great plan.

 

[billd91]

That's a 3e thing; in 1e Rings of Protection didn't stack with magic armour, which solves a lot of those headaches in a hurry.

By adding the altogether different headache of keeping track of when rings/cloaks of protection’s bonuses applied and when they didn’t.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Uh-huh, but you're failing at basic logic here, because it doesn't matter if they're "dependent" or not, what matters is that the AC18 guy is, over the course of adventure or three, going to get hit a lot more than 20% less often, relative to the AC14 guy (or an alternate reality where he had AC14).

You've got into that math zone where you can't see how real games actually play, or how numbers matter over time. The goal of having a high AC is to stop yourself getting downed by damage which comes from attack rolls.

Keep telling yourself that.

"The goal of having a high AC is to stop yourself getting downed by damage which comes from attack rolls."

Brilliant insight here...

 

[Helldritch]

Me and my group of old timers are currently working on a house rule that might do the trick. Medium armor from chain shirt to breast removes 1 pt of damage and it can absorb such damage for 10 point for each AC point the armor gives over 12. Half plate and heavy armor up to chain mail absorb 2 points and anything above chain mail absorb 3 points. All cumulative with heavy armor master feat.. Once the hp pool of the armor is depleted, it loses 1pt of AC and needs repair. Heavy armor master feat still works even if the armor's hp are depleted.

So far, my players love it. It is fun and gives back some importance to armor. It is still in testing but so far the only complain is that the lowest medium armor are a bit low on hp. We might raise the hp by 10 and it could work. Again we are testing it.

As for plate IRL. A knight was litterally a tank. Yes there were fighting techniques to fight plate wearers (such as half swording) but the most common trope was to use polearms. You could go and see the analysis that Skalagrim makes of a knight fighting commoners in a short movie. It is really good and shoes how it probably would have worked out.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Yes this is true, and fans absolutely loathe it, and casual viewers loathe it, and it's boring, and people loathe teams like that. I speak as family member of long-time Arsenal fans. The most famous Arsenal chant for a long time was "One nil to the Arsenal!", because Arsenal would manage to go 1 up, and then they'd just use their superior defense to hold the match to 1-0 victory for the next 70+ minutes or whatever. It was boring and was frustrating and fans mostly sung about because they knew how much it annoyed everyone, even them.

A key problem is that the current model is a different form of boring. Right now we have "bullet sponge" enemies, so named after the FPS (and third person shooter) approach to difficulty where you need to empty an entire clip into the enemy to get them to drop. Technically it's harder to win than with less tough enemies, but it's just a different sort of defense. A different sort and an even more boring one because it's so predictable and so inevitable - it just takes time. Even if the DPR is the same rolling to hit, rolling to damage, and then taking the damage off the monster's current hp total physically takes longer than rolling to hit and missing. This means that if you hit three hits in four the physical process takes longer than if you hit only one hit in four but the monster has one third of the hp - and the total excitement difference is very slight. (Hypothetical example is very close to our AC5, 19 hp AD&D ogre vs a 2nd level party average THAC0 of 19 for the AD&D ogre and AC11, 59hp vs an average 2nd level party attack bonus of +5 (3 stat, 2 proficiency)).

This also combines badly with 5e managing to make tactical positioning almost irrelevant other than for focus fire due to monsters having the same attack rolls with melee and ranged combat (either they use finesse weapons and ranged weapons or thrown weapons and normal melee weapons), due to the lack of flanking, and due to there being no penalty for casting a spell in melee as long as it doesn't use attack rolls (and most use saving throws). Of course AD&D didn't have substantially different ranged and melee attacks but 3.X and 4e both did which offset slowing things down by providing engagement.

I've literally never heard anyone praise 5e's combat.

 

[Mirtek]

Hey, I have two groups, thank you very much.

The bigger issue is just what is enjoyable to the table. I'm very quick with the math, so I don't mind hitting more, etc. but most of the players in my group aren't. People are sitting around waiting for a guy to roll his SA or smite or Fireball damage. And smites are worse because the player can add the damage on both hits when he hits twice! I've actually given one player a calculator and just asked him to use it. He's a great guy and fun player, but man, math is not his strength!



No, 18 isn't hard to get, and for God's sake I have run SO MANY NUMBERS it is ridiculous! I have tried so many variants and ideas I can't even remember them all.

AC 18 gets attacked by +4 foe, chance of getting hit is on 14 or higher, which is 35%.
AC 14 gets attacked by +4 foe, chance of getting hit is on 10 or higher, which is 55%.
That sure looks like a 20% difference to me...

If you are thinking more along the lines of 35/55 indicating the 18 AC guy is 36% (roughly) less likely to be hit, then you are looking at them as dependent, which they aren't since one has nothing to do with the other.

If you are comparing them, they are dependent. If both are subjects to a 1,000 attacks, then one will suffer 550 hits and the other 350

Depending on whom you use as base that's 36-57% less hits over 1,000 attacks

Someone i can only hit on a 20 is twice as hard to hit as someone i can hit on 19-20.

 

[Oofta]

...
I've literally never heard anyone praise 5e's combat.

Okay. I like it. In fact I prefer it to the fiddly nature of previous editions. Any combat can be boring if you make it and reduce it to a dull rote rolling of dice and announcing number.

The groups I play with have a lot of fun. It's reasonably fast, especially compared to 4E, I don't have to have a spreadsheet to track bonuses that I needed in 3.x.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I like 5e combat. Compared to other editions it's fast, keeps the maths to a minimum, gives all the players something to do and avoids the time-wasting endless stream of misses.

 

[Dausuul]

AC 18 gets attacked by +4 foe, chance of getting hit is on 14 or higher, which is 35%.
AC 14 gets attacked by +4 foe, chance of getting hit is on 10 or higher, which is 55%.
That sure looks like a 20% difference to me...

No. That is 20 percentage points, not 20%.

If you are thinking more along the lines of 35/55 indicating the 18 AC guy is 36% (roughly) less likely to be hit, then you are looking at them as dependent...

What? No. This does not follow or make any sense.

If monsters have a 20% chance to hit Tanky McFighter and a 40% chance to hit Squishy McWizard, then Tanky McFighter is half as likely to be hit as Squishy McWizard. Another way to say this is that the chance to hit Tanky is 50% of the chance to hit Squishy.

If monsters have a 50% chance to hit Tanky McFighter and a 100% chance to hit Squishy McWizard, then the chance to hit Tanky is still 50% of the chance to hit Squishy. The number of percentage points has changed, but the ratio of the percentages--which is what matters when comparing the durability of the two PCs--has not.