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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 781241" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, for that matter, strength and dexterity are not indepedent measurements of physical skill.   No published RPG uses realistic dexterity rules anyway, so why worry about it?  (GULLIVER's natural encumbrance rules come closest.)   You make it sound as if Str and Dex could be reasonably calculated as independent variables.  I dare say that you have not played all that many organized sports, and I know you aren't a gymnest.  How other RPG's handle thier affairs is irrelevant.  95% of all CRPG's use D&D's familiar hit point system (and for that matter it is pervasive in first person shooters of various sorts as well), but that is hardly a realistic system.  It is merely a conveinent and familiar abstraction.What makes you think that you can compare a system using completely different measurements to D&D?  D&D is predicated on entirely different assumptions.  D&D uses completely different abstractions to keep combat simple enough that it doesn't bog the game down.   Other systems use thier own abstractions with varying degrees of success.  Every system breaks down somewhere near one or more of its abstractions and produces seemingly illogical results.  You have cited a breakdown near the touch attack boundary using the standard rules, but conversely using dexterity to determine 'to hit' would breakdown every bit as bad near the boundary of total armor for the simple reason that neither dexterity nor strength fully accounts for the dual nature of D&D's armor abstraction.  But then, no system fully accounts for reality when it abstracts armor and if you were as familiar with those systems as you claim you'd know that.For that matter, you'd probably have enough rules knowledge to devise a good fix rather than spouting some (pardon me but) naivity about using dexterity to determine to hit bonuses.D&D has already made a big step forward towards a more realistic system at the cost of a slight degree of more complexity when it separated AC into named bonuses.   This was a house rule of mine as far back as 12 years ago, so if you had some playing experience this would have not been an unexpected change.A more realistic system would take the extra step of separating the attack bonuses into named bonuses - notably into two camps: 'accuracy' and 'penetration'.   Weapons of various types would have enherent 'accuracy' and 'penetration' bonues depending on their nature.  Strength would contribute to penetration.   Dexterity would likewise contribute to accuracy.  AC's in general would need to be bumped upwards by 4-8 points depending on your system to keep things balanced.  Accuracy would not count against armor bonuses.   Penetration would not count against dodge bonuses.  Your various objections would disappear, but they would do so at the cost of keeping track of two or three other modifiers per attack, and making up to two additional math calculations per attack.But talking about fixing the problem by shifting the burden from strength to dexterity is to be frank quite ridiculous, and comments about D&D being the oddball RPG that has got it all wrong are just lame and shows me you hadn't done alot of thinking about this before you decided to open your mouth and stick your tongue out at the board and the game's designers.</blockquote>

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