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<blockquote data-quote="Logan_Bonner" data-source="post: 4092355" data-attributes="member: 54782">Another way to look at it is: That's double jeopardy. It's making two ways in which a wizard is worse at resisting effects instead of one, and that makes him FAR worse at defending against those effects instead of somewhat worse. It's sort of like giving small creatures a Strength penalty and making them use weapons that deal less damage. Doing one of these gets the desired result: Small creatures deal less damage with weapons. Doing both means small creatures do insignificant damage with weapons and are dumb to use them. Instead of a nudge away from something, we've given a shove. That's not what we want.Let's say fighter, ranger, and wizard all get attacked with an attack against Fortitude. Their Fort defenses are: fighter 18 (40% chance of being hit), ranger 16 (50%), and wizard 14 (60%). Now pretend we had Fort, Ref, and Will saves. The fighter gets +2 to Fort, ranger gets +0, and wizard gets –2. Now, each round the fighter has a 65% chance to drop the effect, the ranger has a 55% chance, and the wizard has a 45% chance.At that point, the progression is far worse for the wizard than is sensible. We don't want the enemies to always attack the wizard's Fort or the fighter's Will. We use only one measure—a defense—to differentiate the characters' resistances to these effects for a reason: We only need one of them to achieve the desired result. The idea that the fighter has a better defense against some types of attacks is carried in his Fortitude defense.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Logan_Bonner, post: 4092355, member: 54782"] Another way to look at it is: That's double jeopardy. It's making two ways in which a wizard is worse at resisting effects instead of one, and that makes him FAR worse at defending against those effects instead of somewhat worse. It's sort of like giving small creatures a Strength penalty [I]and[/I] making them use weapons that deal less damage. Doing one of these gets the desired result: Small creatures deal less damage with weapons. Doing both means small creatures do insignificant damage with weapons and are dumb to use them. Instead of a nudge away from something, we've given a shove. That's not what we want. Let's say fighter, ranger, and wizard all get attacked with an attack against Fortitude. Their Fort defenses are: fighter 18 (40% chance of being hit), ranger 16 (50%), and wizard 14 (60%). Now pretend we had Fort, Ref, and Will saves. The fighter gets +2 to Fort, ranger gets +0, and wizard gets –2. Now, each round the fighter has a 65% chance to drop the effect, the ranger has a 55% chance, and the wizard has a 45% chance. At that point, the progression is far worse for the wizard than is sensible. We don't want the enemies to [I]always[/I] attack the wizard's Fort or the fighter's Will. We use only one measure—a defense—to differentiate the characters' resistances to these effects for a reason: We only need one of them to achieve the desired result. The idea that the fighter has a better defense against some types of attacks is carried in his Fortitude defense. [/QUOTE]

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