damage reduction, useful?

[Bad Paper]

I asked this question a few months ago, for my cleric who was torn between going for an adamantine chain shirt or mithral breastplate. I went for the mithral breastplate. One point of AC is better for a non-frontline person who doesn't count on getting hit a lot.

However, if you count on getting hit a lot, then yeah, DR is wonderful. My barbarian (different campaign) loves his piddly DR 1/-. Get hit five times in a round? Keep five hit points. woohoo!

 

[Infiniti2000]

DR is also great against those secondary effects. Bad Paper's barbarian could let a small viper gnaw on his arm and not only NOT feel any pain, but not get poisoned.

 

[Stalker0]

One huge error I feel that would have made DR I whole lot better was the effect if should have on swarms.

Swarms do piddly damage, but its compounded by thousands of bites. Barbs with DR should be immune to them in my opinion.

 

[Question]

Its not powerful at all, its something minor. Its useful, yes, but it doesnt stop spells at all, nor does it even faze a lot of monsters which can do dozens of damage per hit and power attack to boot. It seems like it only really affects 2WF(since each hit's damage is low) and arrows.

 

[Victim]

Even at high levels, a couple points of DR comes in handy. It's really more like bonus HP than AC when damage is nasty. While DR 3/- isn't going to shave off a significant portion of most attacks, getting hit with 5 attacks effectively nets the character 15 HP. It's not really worth getting excited about, but still potentially life saving.

DR is also more valuable when the enemies are weak, or use unusual attack patterns. Against a master thrower with ~22 attacks, that DR will be of much more use than against a greatsword guy.

Getting DR early is a big benefit. DR 2 at 12th level is okay, but DR 2 at first level is awesome. Warforged with Adamantine Body or characters with enough Craft to make their own Adamantine armor at 1/3rd price can get DR early enough to make the most of its protective qualities.

 

[KarinsDad]

Mathematically, I believe 1 point of AC is more valuable than 1 point of DR in most cases. When only a low roll is needed to hit, 1 point of AC is more valuable than DR (especially when Power Attack is taken into account), but DR starts to become more valuable as a higher roll is needed (and is statistically better once the AC is so high that an attack only hits on a 20).

DR vs. AC has a situation which the mathematical discussion tends to ignore.

The mathematical discussion is concerned with average damage and over the long haul, is perfectly valid.


However, it is a lot easier to get hit a lot of times in a single combat where an extra +1 AC never made a difference in the entire combat than it is when the extra +1 AC made a difference one or more times in the combat.


So, let's take DR 1 versus +1 AC. Regardless of what the "to hits" are and the "AC" is (except the cases of 95% chance to hit or 5% chance to hit), say a given opponent hits you 6 times in 10 swings (or even 6 times in 50 swings).

The DR saved you 6 hit points.

73.5% of the time, +1 AC does nothing. 26.5% of the time, it prevents you from getting hit one or more times where you would have gotten hit without it.


So although the PC takes less damage on average with the +1 AC, there are a majority of combats where the DR helps out and the AC does not.

This also means that on a majority of rounds, the DR helps out and the AC does not.

In other words, the Hare wins the race by a lot when he wins (i.e. +1 AC averages less damage over many combats), but it is the Tortoise that wins the race more often (i.e. the majority of combats, the PC with DR has more hit points left over at the end of combat). Depending on how many hit points a given PC has, the +1 DR does actually help out more most adventuring days (i.e. the PCs decide to stop adventuring for the day more often if the PC has DR, but this is typically a choice that does not matter in the long run). This is also why DR is better for high hit point PCs like Barbarians and would hardly help out a Wizard at all (unless the Wizard had an extremely high CON).

As an example, say your opponent averages 17 points of damage if he hits and you have 50 hit points. If he hits you 3 times, you will still be conscious at 2 hit points if you have +1 DR (assuming average damage). You will be unconsicous if you have +1 AC (except for those uncommon cases where he hit you less than 3 times which is 14% of the time). So, it is better to be conscious and able to do something than unconscious and dying. Granted, it is better to have been hit 2 or fewer times than 3 times, but most of the time in this situation (86%), that is not the case.


So, it is not quite as cut and dry as "average damage" leads one to believe.

 

[The Levitator]

I'm very interested in this discussion as we just implemented the Armor as DR variant from Unearthed Acrana. In this variant, it just splits the AC bonus in half an puts the other half into DR. So Full plate is +4 AC and 4 DR.

I have a question for any of the expert number crunchers out there. How badly would it throw the game out of balance to go full DR on both armor and Natural armor conversion. With this system, full plate would add nothing to your AC bonus, but would give you DR8. You would just transfer the entire normal AC bonus to DR. My players are interested in this as they feel that armor should absorb damage and we run a low magic campaign. Would something like this work for us, or would it completely unbalance the game?

 

[kigmatzomat]

Not a great idea. Full plate (DR8) becomes invulnerable to many weapons at low levels (e.g peasants with clubs) and will convince everyone to become a 2-handed greataxe weilder so they get the 1.5x Str to punch through your DR8/AC12 self. The typical barbarian will surrender all his strength damage in return for hitting you pretty much every time. And the crits will hurrrrrt.

 

[The Levitator]

See, that's exactly what I was thinking. I have a member in my group though that argues that a peasant with a club probably wouldn't be able to do much damage to a knight in full plate armor anyways. Would a slightly different ratio other than 50/50 work? I guess another option would be to put further mobility penalties on heavy armor. The guy in full plate would be almost impervious to damage from daggers and clubs (except crits) but would be easy to "defeat" because of their limited mobility. Things like shield bash, overrun, trip and others would be more valuable against a foe that once prone could be stuck there for a long time. A club might not do much damage to a guy in full plate, but a couple pints of oil and a torch could be pretty fatal to a prone fighter who can't get up on his own.

I'm just curious if there were a way to balance high DR with limiting mobility and encouraging tactics. It might be too extreme to to go 0/100, but 50/50 doesn't seem to make much of a difference at higher levels. Any ideas, or is the Unearthed Arcana solution the best overall solution?

 

[moritheil]

The main point of DR is to ignore injury poison-tipped darts. At other times, it's nice, but generally not too powerful.