Upper_Krust said:
Hope you had a great time!
It was good; less than I expected but still fun.
I honestly don't think its as simple as Attack balancing Armor Class.
First and foremost because the relationship between Attack and AC changes as you advance.
Hitting becomes more and more easier while damage becomes less and less pertinent.
Especially when you give out abilities that boost attacks more than they boost AC.
Well again I am referring to a combat situation, not one where some sort of 'trick' has gained one side the upper hand.
Being a PC in a party isn't a 'trick', UK. It's a fact of the matter, a reality in the game. Having cohorts isn't a trick, either. Saying that damage is proportionally lowered as levels rise isn't a perfect truth; it's subject to the creature's HP and AC and the attackers BAB and feat selection (especially if the attacker has UPA).
Counterbalance can work in many wasy though. I have already explained the Attack vs. AC is counter-balanced by Damage vs. HP.
Well, as I've said before, giving attackers a
greater advantage than they already have over target ACs exacerbates this relationship; it also supports your argument by inflating the symptoms of the imbalance.
Its only a dissonance if you assume hitting 95% of the opponents on a '2'+ for your best fighter type is a flaw, rather than a feature of epic play.
Which I do. If the fighter always hits past a certain level, then the game runs aground. If that's your idea of what epic combat is like... well... I'll abstain from commenting.
You simply cannot keep everything within the perfunctory 20 point margin of the d20 range.
Certainly not by abandoning the idea of doing so and resigning ourselves to such (dare I say) mundaneness as 95% one way or the other.
I'm not trying to be offensive, you know? I just think you're digging a hole by pushing attacks higher and higher above ACs and the same for the Save/DC relationship.
It adds your intelligence up to the power of your divine rank. Remember your divinity is technically allowing you to bend the rules in such cases.
That's not what my copy says. Is this a 2.7 thing? If it is, I'd like to not be called to task on comparisons that I don't have.
Can you give me an example?
Any situation where it's more than one-on-one and where the BBEG isn't optimized for high AC or HP. Like an undead, for instance, against a strong party. That fight won't take more than... 4-8 rounds, no matter how much you reconcile attacks and AC. In a one-on-one, yeah: the damage needs to be high (ala UPA, usually) and the attacks need to land more often to keep the fights quick... but that's a situation that shouldn't happen often. Again... it's like your idea of what epic fights are differs from mine, and from what is statistically more average, IMXP. While it might be cinematic, it's not realistic and shouldn't be defaulted as the 'norm'. At lest that what it seems like you're doing, to me, because a full compliment PC party doesn't need to hit 95% of the time to keep the fights even, and they certainly don't need to be molly-coddled by duct-taped mechanics to keep their fight times down. A strong party with good tactics can do that all on their own, with a 95%, 75%, or even 50% hit ratio.
That's cool; while it might irk my PCs, it might be equally better for balance.
But they still need to be value for money.
There's nothing wrong with keeping the abilities balanced. Like I said, even if the abilities are balanced doesn't mean the attack-bonus power is weak; it's only "weak" or "nullified" if the enemy also takes the AC-bonus power... which is a good setup, since one should cancel the other.
Yes, but getting to an ability score of 50+ takes abilities in itself.
Or hit dice, or templates.
Good good; take care.
