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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Reaper Steve" data-source="post: 3901203" data-attributes="member: 51528">I understand Mearl's point. I have a love-hate relationship with D&D armor class and hit points, but in light of recent d20 design advances (esp SWSE) I do think that a better way of handling combat has yet to be devised. (Coming from the fun > simulation camp.)AC and HP make it easy to calculate avg hit % and average damage output.  Armor as DR messes this up. It's like free hit points, but you don't know exactly how many. The softer someone hits, the more free hit points you have. (If you have DR 3 and are hit 10 times for 5 each, you only take 20 HP...and had 30 free ones. But 5 hits for 10 HP would cause a total of 35 HP, with you only gaining 15 free ones. )It's worse than my example makes it seem... armor DR would make it impossible to calculate average damage since there would no longer by any constant in the equation. It makes weaker hits much weaker while having less effect as damage output increases. Some may argue 'exactly as it should!' but they need to realize how this totally skews the game's power curve. And again, it is a game, not a simulation.D&D combat is actually resolved backwards. The attack roll doesn't  determine the degree of success...the damage roll does. And with very little exception, the two are calculated independently. It doesn't matter if the attack roll succeeds by 1 or by 21. The attack roll purely determines if the attacker can hit the defender if the defender doesn't go out of his way to protect himself. If the attack roll is successful, the damage roll actually determines how much effort is required on the defender's part to prevent the hit from causing him harm. That's what HP loss represents...until the hit that takes him to 0 or less...that hit drops him.When understood this way, one can see how armor actually does prevent one from being hurt (what the DR crowd wants.) When an attack roll against a high AC guy misses, it can mean that the target was hit, but the blow was absorbed by the armor and caused no serious harm. Since the defender was wearing armor, he did not have to go to extreme measures (read: use HPs) to defend himself from this attack. I know, people have been saying 'the attack glanced off your armor' for years... what I think many people miss is that this statement means armor is functioning as DR. Fact: a higher AC reduces damage received.The worst part about AC and HP is that their names reinforce the misconceptions that 1) an attack roll 'hits' (more accurately: a failed attack roll is characterized as a 'miss' when it is better described as an attack that was easily defended against) and 2) that hit points are 'physical damage.'If armor was DR (and did not reduce your chance to be hit)  it would completely disrupt the game's scaling. I'd love to go into it, but my wife's waiting for the computer. For now, suffice to say that if armor provided DR, the game would quickly get to a point where it NO LONGER made sense to wear armor.</blockquote>

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