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

[billd91]

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.

Guys, this just a matter of perspective. They're not really dependent in the sense that one affects the other - they just affect how you're describing the difference in ACs. One point of view is not better than the other. The difference is whether or not you're just looking at hits compared to the other case vs looking at the whole list of outcomes (misses and hits together). Which one is the better perspective to pick usually depends on the argument you're making and the impression you're trying to give. A +1 to hit makes for a 100% increase in productivity if you would have only hit on a 20 but only affects 5% of the rolls. Which impression are you trying to give - that it's a whopping increase (100% YAY!) or an infrequent case (5% of trials, Boo!)?

 

[DND_Reborn]

Guys, this just a matter of perspective. They're not really dependent in the sense that one affects the other - they just affect how you're describing the difference in ACs. One point of view is not better than the other. The difference is whether or not you're just looking at hits compared to the other case vs looking at the whole list of outcomes (misses and hits together). Which one is the better perspective to pick usually depends on the argument you're making and the impression you're trying to give. A +1 to hit makes for a 100% increase in productivity if you would have only hit on a 20 but only affects 5% of the rolls. Which impression are you trying to give - that it's a whopping increase (100% YAY!) or an infrequent case (5% of trials, Boo!)?

This is why we statisticians know never to trust statistics.

Which is why I know I am right, but so are they, because it is just a matter of what you are looking at. As you say, perspective.

 

[Oofta]

There are lies, darn lies and statistics.

 

[FrogReaver]

IMO

Going from being hit on a 19-20 to being hit on a 20 is nearly meaningless. Yea, you are a lot tougher but when your not going to die from attacks in either case it doesn’t really matter.

it’s much more important to go from being hit on 2-20 to being hit on 3-20. Why? Because It’s actually can extend your in combat life in real terms. The high Ac guy in either case doesn’t have to worry.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Guys, this just a matter of perspective. They're not really dependent in the sense that one affects the other - they just affect how you're describing the difference in ACs. One point of view is not better than the other. The difference is whether or not you're just looking at hits compared to the other case vs looking at the whole list of outcomes (misses and hits together). Which one is the better perspective to pick usually depends on the argument you're making and the impression you're trying to give. A +1 to hit makes for a 100% increase in productivity if you would have only hit on a 20 but only affects 5% of the rolls. Which impression are you trying to give - that it's a whopping increase (100% YAY!) or an infrequent case (5% of trials, Boo!)?

It's not just perspective, though, or "what you're trying to argue", that's a bass-ackwards way of looking at it. It's about trying to derive useful information from it. And knowing that it really does result in a more significant in the number of hits, over time, than it might appear from the straight-die-mod percentage alone is more useful than just knowing the straight-die-mod percentage.

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.

I don't think it goes quite that far, but yes, 5E is a system where monsters (and to a lesser extent, PCs), have a lot of HP, and it's hard to bring it down. In 4E they had even more, but you could do a lot more damage a lot faster, in general, and you minions to break things up.

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

I mean, that's not true. You've been on this messageboard a long time, and loads of people have praised 5E's combat. Indeed, people praised it a huge, ridiculous amount when 5E came out, so if you were around then, and you're saying that, well, buddy, that's some real memory bias in action. People still regularly say stuff like "5E has good combat" or "my group likes 5E's combat" or the like. So that's a weird claim.

If you said "I see far, far less praise for 5E's combat than 4E's", I'd have to agree. Even now, people outright praise 4E's combat more 5E. Equally, if you said "people have an awful lot of criticisms of 5E's combat", that's very true - more than for a number of modern TT RPGs. But no-one praises it? Man what.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

Can't help you there...I'm Pompey all the way!

My experience is that fans of the winning defensive team love it, and fans of the losing team loathe it.

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.

This one's completely dependent on situation and circumstance.

But for a D&D-style one-on-one fight, I've seen Fighter-types go - as a long-term thing - all-in on offense and I've seen others go all-in on defense. Guess which ones consistently lived longer - which is a very important consideration when the game really is out to kill you.

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.

I agree that long-term endurance is worth a long hard look sometime with an eye to implementing some sort of rules around it.

But as most combats IME don't go much longer than 5 rounds - which in 5e is less than a minute and in my games is 2.5 minutes - long-term endurance isn't really a big issue. For me the endurance piece comes in more during things like cross-country travel on foot.

 

[Lanefan]

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

Agreed; but as that's mostly a DM-only headache I'll gladly live with it, if the alternative is having some PCs be untouchable while others are nearly defenseless.

 

[Lanefan]

If you said "I see far, far less praise for 5E's combat than 4E's", I'd have to agree. Even now, people outright praise 4E's combat more 5E.

The one common denominator I've consistently heard about both, having never played either, is that they tend to become rather predictable; after the first few rounds the PCs know they're going to win and it's just a matter of carving through all those hit points.

Maybe that's why I prefer fewer h.p. overall and a greater need for defense - it makes the whole thing a bit more swingy and less predictable.

 

[Oofta]

I think 4E's combat was more tactical, had more synergies and had more going on. Whether that made it better or not (especially considering the length of time higher level combats took) is a matter of opinion.

I wouldn't judge it based on random posts.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

My experience is that fans of the winning defensive team love it, and fans of the losing team loathe it.

Nah.

They don't. Not if that is how the team habitually operates. They're okay with it, because their tribal loyalties are sufficient, but you know perfectly well that they grumble about it, that they mutter about it, and that whenever a match doesn't work out that way, even if it's 3-2 or perhaps even 3-3 if it's not going to be a problem, they're way happier than 1-0. If they do it occasionally and tactically though, yeah, people are fine with it. Arsenal in the later 1990s and early-mid 2000s were doing it as a standard thing though.

I feel like if you know a lot of other fans of other teams you know this, but hey maybe not. Also holy naughty word the whole league setup has changed so much since I was a kid and (briefly) into football.

But for a D&D-style one-on-one fight, I've seen Fighter-types go - as a long-term thing - all-in on offense and I've seen others go all-in on defense. Guess which ones consistently lived longer - which is a very important consideration when the game really is out to kill you.

The one common denominator I've consistently heard about both, having never played either, is that they tend to become rather predictable; after the first few rounds the PCs know they're going to win and it's just a matter of carving through all those hit points.

Maybe that's why I prefer fewer h.p. overall and a greater need for defense - it makes the whole thing a bit more swingy and less predictable.

Wait, so you've only played the editions which are wackily unbalanced and allow insane levels of defense by stacking all sorts of crazy nonsense, for basically no cost, i.e. AD&D and 3E? AD&D also gave almost no real advantage to using a 2H over a shield, in terms of damage output. You can't even really "build defensively" in AD&D, you just wear as much armour and magic items as you possibly can to boost your AC and other defenses as high as possible. 3E is not entirely dissimilar.

So that explains a lot about your attitudes on this issue!

I disagree somewhat re: predictable. In 2E and 3E fights are often won in the surprise round or first round, and it's just clean-up after that. 4E and 5E are less predictable in that sense. 4E is easily the most tactical version of D&D and the one with the most different-but-valid approaches to combat. 5E has often had me saying "We're all gonna die!!!!" as a player, and particularly you tend to be able to see the end coming like a train bearing down on you. Whereas in 2E or 3E if you do die it's usually "Oh crud everyone failed their save".