Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alaxk Knight of Galt" data-source="post: 3936843" data-attributes="member: 4129">Quick point on this postActive Defense = An action taken (most likely the character's Immediate Action) in an attempt to avoid a successful attack, for example: rolling a shield parry against a successful attack (if such a thing existed in 3.5).Passive Defense = A target number to determine the success/failure of an action, for example:  3.5 AC values.Active Defense in 4E would be a new spin for the base DnD game.  Bot9S had several active defenses; the one that comes to mind is a maneuver that allows you a roll to beat the attack that struck you.Oddly enough, the best example of Active Defense is with saving throws.  Fireball coming, make a saving throw to dodge some of its effect.  Drink that lovely poison, better make a good fortitude save.  Combat (at least for martial types) is almost completely devoid of Active Defenses.  AC and DR provide hard and fast passive defenses.  A player can do several things to adjust his passive defense (combat expertise, armor and shields, finding cover) but aside from Bot9S has no way to do defend against that successful attack.With 4E, saving throws are going from active to passive.  The reason:  to streamline combat and make it more fun (side note:  fun is the reason for all changes in 4e  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" />  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /> ).  Because of the change to saving throws, I strongly doubt we will see shields always providing an active defense.  I do think that the designers might develop shield talents/feats that allow such an active defense for those highly specialized in shield use.Edit:  Cleared up my definition of Active/Passive defenses</blockquote>

Verification