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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8964747" data-attributes="member: 4937">As a guy who made them work, I know exactly how much work it takes to make the work.  First, for everything you have to divide AC into two things - Armor Class and Armor Bonus.  There are hints of this in the game's history where monsters are listed as having natural armor equivalent to some type of worn armor and other places.  The idea is to record what 3e ended up explicitly recording - what part of the AC is from things that make you defect blows and what part is from things that make blows miss.   You then have to every time you use a monster take the AC and convert into something like 10(+4) or 5(+2) or even 2(-2).   Incidentally, this gives you an approximate DEX for all monsters while you are at it, and the lack of DEX for monsters was something that had been bugging me for a while because I wanted monsters to also have reaction modifiers or missile weapon modifiers and the like and not just PC's.  So that actually helped the game out in ways that were initially not intended. But then there is the problem that if you have to look up these values during play that it slows down combat too much.  So what I did was precompute them.  Each character for each weapon got its own to hit AC X table precomputed with all the appropriate modifiers.  That meant players didn't normally have to do math.  They could just report their rolled result to me and I had do to only minimal math to compute the target number.  The result was that combat actually sped up at my table.  Gone were the days of the player going, "Ok, 17, plus my strength bonus, plus my specialization bonus, plus the bonus from my magic sword... that's a 23." every single die roll.</blockquote>

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