Different classes still get different HP: why?

[Ridley's Cohort]

Range matters, obviously.

The underlying assumption is that the Fighter must pay the price of getting hit in order to be effective at all.

The Wizard lives under no such restriction.

The Strikers and Leaders may prefer to stay out of melee (or perhaps not), but they generally do not have the luxury of choosing to always avoid melee altogether while still being effective.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Depends how the damage scales, GSHamster.

What you describe is a direct consequence of not carefully controlling how damage scales.

3e does so by somewhat indirect means, and is somewhat liberal in allowing bonuses to accrue.

4e (allegedly) is more direct in its approach.

 

[small pumpkin man]

There's a flaw in your logic. Why did having ratios of BAB fail for different classes (+1/level, +1/2 levels) in the previous edition?

Because the total bonuses diverge rapidly, and you get into a situation where where one character cannot hit and one character cannot miss.

Similarly, with hitpoints, if they are ratio-based, you will eventually get a situation where an attack will one-shot the wizard, but the fighter will ignore it. So the monsters will have to do insane damage to even threaten the fighters, but that would be overly lethal to the wizards.

If you play WoW, something similar is happening at the high end. In the expansion they changed the ratio at which health is given out, and now tanks are sporting 20K health, while regular classes are around 9K. So the monsters are doing something like 8K per hit, which is absolutely lethal to non-tanks.

No, that's what happens when the Ratios don't scale properly, and when healing gets so powerful you require it to get through most fights. If a first level Wizard has 20 hp, and a first level Fighter has 30 hp, for the game to play in a similar way at high levels, at a certain point (for example, say, level 21), the Wizard should have around 100 and the Fighter around 150, thus requiring similar amounts of monster "hits" or at least rounds of attack to die, this requires them to get different amounts of hp at each level.

However while AC should be disparate by a similar amount from first to 30th level, this means both classes should get similar AC bonuses per level. (although since people can specialise, and usually the Fighter will specialise on defense abilities and the Wizard won't, so the difference will usualy, but not always escalate, ut this is the same as with hp).

The reason WoW (and most computer games) don't follow this is because damage, healing & damage reduction (armour in WoW) all scale faster than hp, meaning the late game plays completely different to early game, something 4e is (apparently) trying to move away from.

How much they've succeeded , well, we'll see.

 

[Cadfan]

There's a flaw in your logic. Why did having ratios of BAB fail for different classes (+1/level, +1/2 levels) in the previous edition?

Because the total bonuses diverge rapidly, and you get into a situation where where one character cannot hit and one character cannot miss.

Similarly, with hitpoints, if they are ratio-based, you will eventually get a situation where an attack will one-shot the wizard, but the fighter will ignore it. So the monsters will have to do insane damage to even threaten the fighters, but that would be overly lethal to the wizards.

If you play WoW, something similar is happening at the high end. In the expansion they changed the ratio at which health is given out, and now tanks are sporting 20K health, while regular classes are around 9K. So the monsters are doing something like 8K per hit, which is absolutely lethal to non-tanks.

My logic isn't flawed. BAB scaling differently has a different result than HP scaling differently because the math behind attacking (d20 + mod versus target number) is very different from the math behind survivability (hit points / expected damage per round).

What matters is this- suppose at level 1, a fighter can withstand 10 rounds of combat before going down, and a wizard can withstand 6. As you go up in level, enemy attacks do more damage. This means that the fighter and wizard will need more hit points to withstand the same number of combat rounds. Suppose by level X, a wizard's hit points have to double in order to make him continue to survive for 6 rounds of combat. The fighter's hit points therefore have to double as well. If the fighter only gets the same bonus the wizard gets, he will fall behind the 10 round mark.

In this case, it is the ratio that matters. In attack bonus, its not.