Target methods

[Dalamar]

Look at it this way: if it has a low touch-AC, it most likely can survive a round or two of anything a mage can dish at it, unless said mage is really dedicated and using touch range spells. The only ones who don't fit that definition are other mages that should all have a spell to increase their touch ACs since they know it's one of their weak spots against other mages.

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

Doesn't it also tend to push _normal_ ACs higher, though? I'm assuming you're using the UA version of this, which I'm not familiar with the details of, so there could be limiting factors I don't know; but given regular D&D ACs for PCs can already gust quite a bit, and EoM magic seems capable of doing a bit more of this already, this seems like it might be just trading off problems.

Comments?

Not UA, but kinda similar. At high-level D&D, fighter classes essentially auto-hit on the first attack.
The variant makes everyone's ACs higher, so people stay balanced with each other despite the higher ACs.

It might help that the campaign I'm using it in is my siblings campaign, with one 12-year-old and one just 14-year old, so they're not quite so good at making uber-PCs. I'm sure it could be broken by a power-player.

 

[Thomas5251212]

Look at it this way: if it has a low touch-AC, it most likely can survive a round or two of anything a mage can dish at it, unless said mage is really dedicated and using touch range spells. The only ones who don't fit that definition are other mages that should all have a spell to increase their touch ACs since they know it's one of their weak spots against other mages.

The issue was whether the touch version was a clear winner against the Reflex version; against all but a pretty limited subset of targets it sounds like it is. I'm not really fond of mechanical tradeoffs that are theoretically balanced but in actuallity not, and I wanted to know if this was one before I got into using the system. The resposnes so far seem to indicate to me that, at least when used with vanilla D&D assumptions, that's the case, and if I'm going to use it there I need to find some method of balancing them out not included in the basic system.