Defenses and To Hits for Your Party ~ Averages

[Destil]

I honestly don't know what this character was like at 1st level. I am taking over the DM reins at level 13 and I only joined when they were just moving up to level 8.

It is entirely possible that the original DM made them use an 18 point buy--he is notoriously stingy.

I'd suggest letting all the PCs do some reworking. The other option not mentioned is to change him from a fighter to a battlemind if Con is really his thing. Then his powers would use Con instead of Str and his attack bonus would be around what it should be.

Do the feats "Weapon Expertise" and "Versatile Expertise" stack? Why is my offline Character Builder not stacking them?

No, they both provide Feat bonuses (as does every variant of those feats).

 

[TarionzCousin]

The Dwarven Fighter is actually not the worst build in the bunch. He's happy with what he's got, and we already have a Battlemind.

I'm not even going to mention the Eladrin Wizard that uses a spear as his implement and wears Hide armor.

It's a flavorful group--not designed for optimization. But we're having fun!

 

[Obryn]

The Dwarven Fighter is actually not the worst build in the bunch. He's happy with what he's got, and we already have a Battlemind.

I'm not even going to mention the Eladrin Wizard that uses a spear as his implement and wears Hide armor.

It's a flavorful group--not designed for optimization. But we're having fun!

It can still work, as long as it's not a mix of non-optimized and optimized characters, but it'll take some careful management. You will need to pull punches.

-O

 

[hayek]

It can still work, as long as it's not a mix of non-optimized and optimized characters, but it'll take some careful management. You will need to pull punches.

-O

Yeah, if everyone is all on the same power level, that's all that counts. I wouldn't sweat comparing the math of 'standard charactes' to your party. There's always gonna be differences between your party's performance in battle and the 'expected' performance, and you'll just have to get a feel for what level encounters provide a difficult, but beatable challenge.

 

[monboesen]

The Dwarven Fighter is actually not the worst build in the bunch. He's happy with what he's got, and we already have a Battlemind.

I'm not even going to mention the Eladrin Wizard that uses a spear as his implement and wears Hide armor.

It's a flavorful group--not designed for optimization. But we're having fun!

If I were the DM for this group I would find the average numbers for AC, Defenses, and Attacks and simply treat the group as being of the level that those numbers show.

So if I found that the characters on average were at -3 compared to the expected numbers for their level. I would design challenges for 10-11 level characters rather than 13 level ones.

I would give greatest weight to the Attack bonuses. The game quickly bogs down if players keeps missing with attacks.


But like other posters I would recommend a rebuild of the characters. As demonstrated it will be easy to keep the flavor while actually making the characters come very close to the expected values. That will make your DM'ing easier and simpler.

If you want to keep the flavor of scarce magic you can use the Inherent Bonus option. Thats what we do and it works out fine.

 

[Shin Okada]

I wouldn't sweat comparing the math of 'standard charactes' to your party. There's always gonna be differences between your party's performance in battle and the 'expected' performance, and you'll just have to get a feel for what level encounters provide a difficult, but beatable challenge.

This!

Simple numbers only don't define each party's performance. Player skills do affect much. And so as affinities of PC builds.

For example, attackers having low attack bonus may not be troublesome much when the party leader is constantly providing attack bonus. On the other hand, having a leader who grants a lot of melee basic attack does not work well when the party has not PCs with efficient MBA. A rogue may have trouble if he has only few comrades who are willing to go adjacent to enemies, because it will become hard to flank. Etc., etc.

It is hard to estimate the party's performance just by reading each PCs' character sheets. Start to worry when the party is actually having hard time (or easy time) challenging encounters of appropriate level.

By the way, onto the original question. Yeah, I too think that guideline is about right.

Depend on each players' taste, NADs tend to become slightly lower than that guideline IME (people around me tend to take offensive of flashy feats than to take +X to defense feats).

 

[TarionzCousin]

There are 7 players in the group, so that helps mitigate combat somewhat as well.

"The Grand Rebuild" isn't going to happen with this group. Only two of us have Character Builder and all of the players are very happy with their non-optimized feat selections.

I emailed all of them a couple days ago and said "Your characters are all below average." Collective response "So what?"

But I'm aware of it. Seeing as how I'm using modified/created monsters of my own, I don't anticipate it being too much of a problem.

Thanks for the feedback.

 

[monboesen]

and all of the players are very happy with their non-optimized feat selections.

Just to be clear. Feat selection is what makes the difference between a standard and an optimized character. But not a weak character and an optimized character.

Any character who starts with an 16-18 in his prime stat and increases it at every possible opportunity will be OK no matter what feats they choose.

But starting with a 13 in a prime stat and not increasing it will result in a weak character that will get increasingly weaker as levels go by.

The dwarf fighter will start at -3 to hit compared to a standard fighter. But at level 10 he will be at -4, level 20 at -5 and at level 30 at -7.

In short he will end up with missing a lot of attacks. Like 70% of them.

So it will take an increasingly larger effort on your part to tailor make mosnters and encounters to the group. If you enjoy that and are good at it, no sweat. But you will still have to spend time fiddling with numbers that could have been spend on plot, maps, story and so on.

Good luck.

 

[GreyLord]

On the question from the first post, I had to stop, think, and go back and look at my different characters and see what records I had of them (I sometimes have different sheets for them at different levels) and actually, they seem to fall in those averages within +/- 1 or 2 overall. Pretty wild looking at that.

 

[Prestidigitalis]

Feat selection is what makes the difference between a standard and an optimized character.

Or a weak character and a standard character.

But not a weak character and an optimized character.

True, to the extent that feats are only one factor in a list that includes ability scores, skills, powers, items and the synergy between them.

Any character who starts with an 16-18 in his prime stat and increases it at every possible opportunity will be OK no matter what feats they choose.

I've seen several weak characters who were handicapped primarily by their feat selection. Many feats are just plain inferior, typically because they grant highly conditional benefits that are too small to justify their occasional use. A player who picks them for flavor will actually end up with a vanilla character who seldom makes an impact because the things that make them unique rarely come into play.

And if you are the sort of player to take Linguist multiple times, along with feats that give bonuses to skills used for foraging or tracking or curing diseases and the like, your character may be weak even with a pre-racial 18. Fun, interesting, and incredibly useful to the party, if done correctly, but weak.