Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Saeviomagy" data-source="post: 4771793" data-attributes="member: 5890">Since the end of the adventuring day and the point at which any party member reaches zero surges are so closely correlated, any party is best served by attempting to spread damage around in proportion to each character's effective hit points per day.If the fighter is significantly more well-defended than the rest of the party, then any foe who isn't tactically deficient will simply ignore him. Additionally - if you're making your fighter a powerhouse of defense, then he's likely to be offensively weak compared with other party members, meaning that his combat challenge counts for little.Apart from that: the fighter simply cannot pin down every threat in a fight.All that adds up to make always pumping your fighter's defenses suboptimal. Heuristically you want to pump the defenses of whoever runs out of surges first each day.Real numbers: Your fighter and wizard are facing a ranged foe. The fighter cannot close with the ranged for for some reason (terrain, distance, other combatants, whatever - it's pretty common). The fighter throws a javelin and marks the foe.If the fighter's defense against the foe is more than two points better than that of the wizard, a foe with any tactical sense will never target the fighter. At that point, the ability of the fighter to spread damage around has been nullified, and the adventuring day will end that much sooner because of the wizard running out of effective hitpoints first. No matter how much better the fighter's defenses get, he will not change that point.If, on the other hand, the fighter's defense is one point better than that of the wizard, he can switch in and out of marking the foe in order to split damage, muddying the tactical waters. There will be a sweet spot for ideal damage splitting versus mitigated damage, and it's very hard to work out where it falls as it varies with monster, wizard and fighter stats.If the characters were all in melee, the same factors matter, but the entire equation is changed by the damage the fighter causes via his combat challenge. On the first such scenario each round, the monster must take the fighter's potential attack into account, meaning that the defenses can have more disparity before the same point is reached where attacking the wizard becomes the only tactically sound choice.</blockquote>

Verification