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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 4060958" data-attributes="member: 21169">People like metrics. Damage dealt is a clear numerical measure of a character's worth, or contribution, to the team's combat effort. All else being equal, if PC A is consistently dealing 50 pts a round and PC B is dealing 10, then PC B is looking pretty feeble by comparison.Difficulty arises because there are a lot of non-damage contributions a PC can make such as buffs, debuffs, healing and save-or-dies. But to some extent it might be possible to convert these to damage. For example if a wizard takes out three 70hp foes with a SoD in one round, we could count this as 3*70 = 210 pts  of contribution. One could calculate the amount of extra damage dealt due to a bard's inspire courage or a wizard's haste (a heckuva lot in the latter case). You could even do the same for defensive buffs like a druid's barkskin. Calculate how much longer the recipient will stay up thanks to the higher ac, work out how much more damage is dealt as a result and you have a metric for measuring the contribution of barkskin. The same can be done with in combat healing.We can by this system calculate the worth of Aid Another incidentally. Plus 2 to hit, best case scenario, converts to 4 hit points of damage when Power Attacking with a 2h weapon. Not too bad at 1st level, but progressively worse and worse as you go up levels because the expected damage becomes so much higher.Defence is important because if your character goes down because of a lack of hit points, armour class or saves, he's not dealing damage any more. This is the problem with the barbarian imo - poor AC and poor will save. (Plus rage just tends to get you killed when it wears off.) The extra hit points aren't enough to make up for it. I currently play a warblade and he's much more effective in melee than a barbarian would be, mostly due to the lack of weaknesses.</blockquote>

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