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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 3552311" data-attributes="member: 8158">By your "using miniatures" comment, I can only guess that you consider AoO's to be all about moving your character around grids. Since AoO's are not necessarily about movement, I think you're underming your own case. You basically memorize the list of things that do and don't provoke them, and they're kind of arbitrary. It's kind of a silly arguement, but I'll contribute anyway by positing Darth could make the 25 DC pretty effortlessly. AoO's are nice in concept, but annoying in execution. The things they were meant to curtail they don't actually do a good job of curtailing. For instance, instead of inhibiting wizards from casting in meleee, for instance, the wizard just casts defensively and maxes out Concentration and (if played from 1st-level) probably takes Combat Casting as his first feat. Even if the wizard blow the roll, you won't get the AoO; defensive casting has made that a non-option. Bottom-line: AoO's boil down to another thing for players to optimize. If you plan on your character being good at something that can provoke an AoO, it's a no-brainer that you'll plan your way around AoO's by taking the right skills, feats, or whatever. What AoO's do wind up curtailing is improvisation. Tactics like tripping, bull rushing, disarming, sundering, and overrunning are already pretty marginalized simply by their all-or-nothing nature. If you don't speciifcally design your character to be optimized at any of those things, your chances at getting "all" isn't tremendously better than "nothing". Thus, they don't need to provoke AoO's to deter abuse. And to add insult to injury, in a lot of those cases it's pretty arbitrary to have an action provoke an AoO because what you're trying to do isn't really any more "provocative" than just making a plain ol' melee weapon attack. And, again, if you optimize your character to be good at something, then AoO's stop being a detterent. Once I've got the Improved Whatever feat, then I have edged my character closer to getting the "all" all the time while no longer suffering the deterrent of AoO's. So, the net result is that the Improved Trip guy trips, trips, trips, and trips some more. He lives to trip, and abuses it wth casual abandon. Meanwhile, the guy who doesn't have the feat never trips, because he considers tripping as nothing more than a way for him to throw away an attack on something iffy that will open him up to an AoO. In either case, the risk-to-reward ratio is out-of-whack.Nice idea, weak execution.</blockquote>

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