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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6810125" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, I wanted to get rid of AC, because frankly AC is a sore thumb in the whole 4e system. There clearly has to be SOMETHING to replace it with. You could of course simply have an endless list of keywords that give bonuses to each of the 3 NADs based on what's coming at you, so Plate Armor is "+3 to FORT vs melee and missile keyword attacks", but you can see where THAT leads pretty quickly. It wouldn't be BAD for monsters, where you can just basically toss in a couple such modifiers, but even there you're adding complexity (as many monsters wear armor and such). In fact it really harks back to the old Weapons vs Armor Type table of 1e, and that's the direction I want to AVOID.Of course you could say DR has similar problems, does it apply against spell attacks or not? Or only certain ones? If so what's the list of keywords of THOSE? etc. So, I'm not really all that sure what the answer is, exactly. One thing I've leaned towards however is just overall armor/weapon simplification. There are 3 types of armor, light, medium, and heavy. There are about 12 weapons, EVERYTHING else is one of those 12 (I can see where you might have to bend a bit here, but in general I want to remove excess detail, so in fact all weapons simply have a damage die and handedness, and a category (thrown, missile, sword, axe, etc). I got rid of things like high crit and all that kind of silliness. So that might make the whole defense bonus equation a bit easier. Or perhaps each 'armor' type just has 3 values, a bonus/penalty to FORT, REF, and WILL? Then you'd simply direct each attack against a relevant type. That still leaves some loose ends though, like things that are immune, and the many other keywords and their defense interactions. Suffice it to say there are a few ways to skin the AC cat, but none of them are perfect.</blockquote>

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