AC per level
- Thread starter Datt
- Start date
There are many ways to physically harm a PC that don't involve HP loss. There's ability damage and level damage too, not to mention "save or die" (or blindness, deafness, madness, amputation, etc.).
So, really, it's "HP measures nothing more than a character's ability to take HP damage and remain functional." Sounds a bit circular, doesn't it?
But it's not as circular as it sounds. Certain categories of attacks cause damage to your HP. IMO, it would be great to define HP (or "damage") with that in mind. For example, "Hit points measure your ability to survive melee attacks, ranged attacks, and magical energy attacks." It doesn't measure your ability to survive drowning, poison, psionic attacks, or disease, for example. For some reason, it still measures your ability to survive falling damage (I call it the wuxia effect
).Is there a concrete list of attacks reduce HP, and attacks that don't? I think that would be a great starting place to resolve this otherwise endless debate of what HPs are.
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RangerWickett
Legend
From a design standpoint, I don't really see a need for both AC and hit points. Let's examine two possible systems, and compare how they work. Bear in mind that both of these systems are drastically different from core D&D, and if we actually used them, many standards of the game would have to be changed.
System One - Defense Only: In this system, your character gets Wound Points (WP) equal to his Constitution (or 1/2 Con for Small characters). You never get hit points, and WP heal at a rate of 1 per day of rest. When you reach 0 WP, you are disabled, and must make a Fortitude save (DC 10) every minute to keep from taking another point of damage. If you roll well enough, you can stabilize, but if you fail your Fortitude save, you'll slowly keep taking damage. At -10 WP, you die. While at negative hit points, you'll usually still be conscious and can take a partial action each round, which allows for dying speeches or daring last stands.
Your base AC is equal to 10 + Dex + Base Attack Bonus + Armor and Shield + various miscellaneous enhancements. AC represents how hard it is to get a blow through that strikes with any significant force. Beating AC might represent slipping a dagger through armor, or slamming a mace hard enough to crack bone even through plates of defense.
This system attempts to model reality. As you get more experienced, you get better at dodging blows, and you can use armor to protect yourself, but if you're hit, you go down very quickly. Spell damage would have to be drastically reduced, so a fireball might just deal 1d6 points of fire damage to everyone in the area. Similarly, things like Sneak Attack and Power Attack would have to be scaled way down.
The drawback of this system is that you don't get to roll as many dice, and everyone's going to want AC-boosting and damage reduction magic items above pretty much anything else.
System Two - Diverse: In this system, we divide up different types of defense into different systems.
Dexterity no longer modifies your defenses (it still helps with Initiative, Reflex saves, and Tumble checks to avoid Attacks of Opportunity, so it's not useless). No longer will 'nimble rogues' be the masters of surviving combat. Fighters are supposed to be the ones who survive combat, so high hit points can represent a nimble fighting style for a fencer, or a very tough body for a tank. You can still have nimble rogues, good at dodging spells and traps, but an equal-level fighter will take them to pieces in close combat.
You heal at a rate of 1 HP per level per hour. WP work like detailed above.
My Personal House Rules: I don't like giving out magic armor. I mean, do all high-level bad guys have magic armor? If so, then after a few fights, the PCs would have dozens of suits of magical armor, and I don't like people having throwaway magic.
Thus, I get rid of the assumption that everyone has magic at high levels. Potions and scrolls and other limited-use things I'm fine with, but magic weapons are rare and unique, and magic armor and other defenses are practically non-existent. To keep PCs and NPCs fairly balanced, though, everyone gets a Defense bonus to AC equal to half their character level. Simple.
System One - Defense Only: In this system, your character gets Wound Points (WP) equal to his Constitution (or 1/2 Con for Small characters). You never get hit points, and WP heal at a rate of 1 per day of rest. When you reach 0 WP, you are disabled, and must make a Fortitude save (DC 10) every minute to keep from taking another point of damage. If you roll well enough, you can stabilize, but if you fail your Fortitude save, you'll slowly keep taking damage. At -10 WP, you die. While at negative hit points, you'll usually still be conscious and can take a partial action each round, which allows for dying speeches or daring last stands.
Your base AC is equal to 10 + Dex + Base Attack Bonus + Armor and Shield + various miscellaneous enhancements. AC represents how hard it is to get a blow through that strikes with any significant force. Beating AC might represent slipping a dagger through armor, or slamming a mace hard enough to crack bone even through plates of defense.
This system attempts to model reality. As you get more experienced, you get better at dodging blows, and you can use armor to protect yourself, but if you're hit, you go down very quickly. Spell damage would have to be drastically reduced, so a fireball might just deal 1d6 points of fire damage to everyone in the area. Similarly, things like Sneak Attack and Power Attack would have to be scaled way down.
The drawback of this system is that you don't get to roll as many dice, and everyone's going to want AC-boosting and damage reduction magic items above pretty much anything else.
System Two - Diverse: In this system, we divide up different types of defense into different systems.
- Dodging attacks: Hit Points.
- Surviving injury: Wound Points.
- Parrying incoming attacks (Combat Expertise, Shields): Armor Class.
- Passive Defenses (Armor, Cover): Armor Class.
Dexterity no longer modifies your defenses (it still helps with Initiative, Reflex saves, and Tumble checks to avoid Attacks of Opportunity, so it's not useless). No longer will 'nimble rogues' be the masters of surviving combat. Fighters are supposed to be the ones who survive combat, so high hit points can represent a nimble fighting style for a fencer, or a very tough body for a tank. You can still have nimble rogues, good at dodging spells and traps, but an equal-level fighter will take them to pieces in close combat.
You heal at a rate of 1 HP per level per hour. WP work like detailed above.
My Personal House Rules: I don't like giving out magic armor. I mean, do all high-level bad guys have magic armor? If so, then after a few fights, the PCs would have dozens of suits of magical armor, and I don't like people having throwaway magic.
Thus, I get rid of the assumption that everyone has magic at high levels. Potions and scrolls and other limited-use things I'm fine with, but magic weapons are rare and unique, and magic armor and other defenses are practically non-existent. To keep PCs and NPCs fairly balanced, though, everyone gets a Defense bonus to AC equal to half their character level. Simple.
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G'day
I, too, would like to see a defense bonus that depends on level and class like BAB, rather than depending solely on DEX as at present. If for no other reason than that it would sort out what seems to be to be a problem with touch attacks and rays.
But if you were to introduce such a bonus, you would have to adjust a few other things. For a start, hit points increases with level at present partially represent an ability to avoid wearing solid hits (and one of the problems is that this ability ought to be more useful against touch attacks). With this ability represented explicitly in a defence bonus, you would have to scale back the progress of hit points with level a bit. You would also have to adjust the hit points of monsters. With hit points thus re-scaled, you would have to adjust the damage done by damaging spells and the hit points healed by healing spells. Since the main reason not to make armour provide damage resistance instead of acting the way it does is that it would be too much work to adjust everything as discussed, this re-write you are contemplating might be the opportunity to do that as well.
So this will take a bit more work than most house-rulers are happy to handle, especially in the way of play-testing. But after seeing that WotC did things this way in their d20 Star Wars game I live in hope that boffins in the back rooms are working on exactly these changes for D&D 4.0.
I also live in the hope that someone will re-publish the SPI game DragonQuest, second edition.
Regards,
Agback
I, too, would like to see a defense bonus that depends on level and class like BAB, rather than depending solely on DEX as at present. If for no other reason than that it would sort out what seems to be to be a problem with touch attacks and rays.
But if you were to introduce such a bonus, you would have to adjust a few other things. For a start, hit points increases with level at present partially represent an ability to avoid wearing solid hits (and one of the problems is that this ability ought to be more useful against touch attacks). With this ability represented explicitly in a defence bonus, you would have to scale back the progress of hit points with level a bit. You would also have to adjust the hit points of monsters. With hit points thus re-scaled, you would have to adjust the damage done by damaging spells and the hit points healed by healing spells. Since the main reason not to make armour provide damage resistance instead of acting the way it does is that it would be too much work to adjust everything as discussed, this re-write you are contemplating might be the opportunity to do that as well.
So this will take a bit more work than most house-rulers are happy to handle, especially in the way of play-testing. But after seeing that WotC did things this way in their d20 Star Wars game I live in hope that boffins in the back rooms are working on exactly these changes for D&D 4.0.
I also live in the hope that someone will re-publish the SPI game DragonQuest, second edition.
Regards,
Agback
Negative Zero said:
actually, that sounds pretty cinematic to me
~NegZ
You obviously watch different movies from the ones I watch. I liked Casablanca, Once Were Warriors, The Sixth Sense.... Films in which characters fold up and die just about as easily as real people.
I wonder when 'cinematic' came to mean 'absurd'.
Regards,
Agback
Geron Raveneye
Explorer
Agback said:
From it's conception, since "cinematic" is used for "effects, events, emotions etc. you can witness in a movie", which includes as absurd effects as people flying without the aid of any kind of support whatsoever or disregarding the laws of nature as we know them in any other way.
What you're aiming for is "realistic", which of course happens in the movies, too
I wanted a Defense Bonus ala Star Wars version...
So I made my own using the SW ones as a base.
From both extremes, from memory:
Fighters got a max 13 DB about 18th-20th lvl.
Wizards received about a max 6 between 18th-20th lvl.
The 'base 10' to AC was going to be removed, except for monsters. This was to represent their natural 'instinct'. So no DB unless a character class is picked up by the creature.
I also was going to have various AC bonus' reduce HP damage to subdual damage and more AC bonus' were going to stack as well (my own version of Vitality/Wounds is used on top of everything else).
The short of it: You use a Defense Bonus take out something else. I found the 'base ten' to AC was the easiest.
RCH
So I made my own using the SW ones as a base.
From both extremes, from memory:
Fighters got a max 13 DB about 18th-20th lvl.
Wizards received about a max 6 between 18th-20th lvl.
The 'base 10' to AC was going to be removed, except for monsters. This was to represent their natural 'instinct'. So no DB unless a character class is picked up by the creature.
I also was going to have various AC bonus' reduce HP damage to subdual damage and more AC bonus' were going to stack as well (my own version of Vitality/Wounds is used on top of everything else).
The short of it: You use a Defense Bonus take out something else. I found the 'base ten' to AC was the easiest.
RCH
Aitch Eye
First Post
Corinth said:
That may be what they say now, but they got the concept of hit points from earlier editions, where it was quite explicit that they didn't all represent physical damage. If the arguments people are making here that are bunk, then so are hit points, since those arguments are paraphrases of the earlier justification for them.
From the 1e DMG (p. 82):
"It is quite unreasonable to assume that as a character gains levels of ability in his or her class that a corresponding gain in actual ability to sustain physical damage takes place. It is preposterous to state such an assumption, for if we are to assume that a man is killed by a sword thrust that does 4 points of damage, we must similarly assume that a hero could, on the average, withstand five such thrusts before being slain! Why then the increase in hit points? Because these reflect both the actual physical ability of the character to withstand damage -- as indicated by constitution bonuses -- and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations, the "sixth sense" which warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection. Therefore, constitution affects both actual ability to withstand physical punishment hit points (physique) and the immeasurable areas which involve the sixth sense and luck (fitness)."
nharwell said:
From the 1e DMG again:
"Each hit scored upon the character does only a small amount of actual physical harm -- the sword thrust that would have run a 1st level fighter through the heart merely grazes the character due to the fighters exceptional skill, luck, and sixth sense ability which caused movement to avoid the attach at just the right moment. However, having sustained 40 or 50 points of damage, our lordly fighter will be covered with a number of nicks, scratches, cuts and bruises. It will require a long period of rest and recuperation to regain the physical and metaphysical peak of 95 hit points."
If the way monsters are assigned hit points is inconsistent with that, it's a problem with the way monsters are assigned hit points. But hit points themselves only make in-game sense -- however much or little it may be -- when they don't just represent physical damage.
Unless of course there's some explicitely stated "vital energy" or something that infuses the characters and lets them take multiples of the damage that a human (or horse) body alone can take (which could explain what happens with monster classes in Savage Species as well). Have I missed something like this anywhere in the books?
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