(Yet another) Try at fixing the Fighter

[Celebrim]

take ten isn't going to cut it when you are facing a -8 to your balance check (-6 for full plate, -2 for heavy steel shield). The unrushed defender is going to fail their balance check 40% of the time! Gotta suck if want to actually force the action and fight your through the attackers. Especially as Balancing negates any Dex bonus to AC in the first place.

So, I guess you are conceding my point then? Because at some point in this thread, the focus of the argument went from, 'Fighters who wear light armor are unfairly screwed by the RAW so we need house rules to help them out' to now, 'Fighters who wear heavy armor are unfairly screwed by the RAW so we need house rules to help them out'.

And my point all along was that one only needs rules to help out characters in light/medium armor because one has defacto house rules that remove the drawbacks to wearing heavy armor.

I have no need to argue with you over whether your house rules suit your game better than than my house rules suit your game. If you don't like the idea of fighters in heavy armor stumbling around on difficult terrain, that's fine with me.

No, its pretty simple really: the stairs were merely spiralled in such a way that the shield of the attacker couldn't be brought to bear effectively in the stair well.

Well, to begin with, no, that's wrong. The stairs were spiralled in such a way that the sword of the attacker couldn't be brought to bear effectively in the stair well, which the d20 rules quoted above actually attempt to model correctly by giving the higher character a cover bonus. And secondly, the stairs in a castle were also deliberately made uneven so that a person not familiar with the differences in heights would misjudge and stumble on them. Or in game terms, they deliberately designed the stairs to give an attacker a circumstance penalty to balance when using them above and beyond what stairs already give. They wouldn't have bothered doing that if stairs weren't a significant obstacle to begin with.

The stairs weren't the hazard you are making them out to be. Yes, they provided the defender with a small advantage; no, they weren't as difficult to negotiate as the core rules would have us believe, with defender and attacker alike stumbling around dangerously.

Which is a complaint that amounts to, 'How difficult should the balance checks be on a stairway be realisticly?' That's an entirely different thread than 'What can I do to fix the fighter?' Returning to topic, I don't believe 'Make fighting in light or medium armor viable' is really a concern, because it already is if you bother to make use of the skill rules.

 

[Celebrim]

Can someone please post this video of the guy doing cartwheels in armor??

No need. I've seen it.

And yes, I think able to wear armor is better than not. Or wizards/Sorcerers wouldn't need spells to imitate it.

Sure, armor is very useful. The question is, "If you are going to go out into the rugged wilderness, hike across trackless wastes, delve deep into caves, sail across the ocean on sailing ships, explore the frigid arctic and the burning deserts, and fight on treacherous terrain, do the benefits of heavy armor compared to say medium armor outweight the drawbacks?" The intuitive answer to that question is, "No.", and the rules of the game and the historical record would tend to back you up. Full suits of armor were generally employed only when you could carry them on a pack horse and don them before battle. In a set peice battle or combat on flat ground, the added protection is invaluable. But explorers and adventurers generally adopted a lighter suit of armor.

Now, if you want to have a game wear the fact that a character is wearing armor is essentially invisible, where one never has to think about the fact you are wearing armor, where it simply gives the character a number on the page and optionally a mental image of the character, then that's fine with me. That's one style of play, and its certainly the going style of play encouraged by most recent game systems. But optionally, you can make the fact that the character wears armor impinge on the game reality on a regular basis, and that impinging on the game reality will end up creating pack animals and armor bearers and suits of plate mail that are safely put away in saddle bags when the fight starts and alot of other things many people may find inconvenient, and if you feel that way, then that's fine. I'll just keep playing the way I have for 20 years because I'm just that sort of curmudgeon.

 

[green slime]

The unrushed defender is still going to fail their balance check 40% of the time.

 

[Ashtagon]

Since there is a specific negative consequence for failing those skill checks, you can't take 10 or 20 on them (barring certain class features which I'd hazard a guess that a heavily armoured knight is unlikely to have without some odd multi-classing).

On the other hand, RAW doesn't call for such a skill check unless you are running or charging. You can walk up or down those stairs easily (even into a melee) and not need to make a skill check.

The defender has no need to charge. If he's planned ahead, his static position will be superior to any place he could get to in a charge anyway (he's defending a familiar building that he's had time to rig with all sorts of devices). The attacker could charge up the stairs, or walk up them. Either way, the onus is on the attacker to close to melee. The defender can sit still quite happily till then, especially if his allies are peppering the enemy with arrows (you did remember to buy arrows, right?).

tl;dr answer: Now skill checks needed unless you're silly enough to run.

 

[Ilja]

The unrushed defender is still going to fail their balance check 40% of the time.

On could think of a circumstance bonus of +2 to +4 due to knowing the terrain. For whatever reason the defender would want to run in stairs.
Darn, running in such stairs IRL is quite hard even unarmored. If I ran at full speed in such stairs unarmored and didn't know them, I'd probably fall 40% of the time. Granted, I'm a little clumsy, but not extremely.

 

[green slime]

Check
You can walk on a precarious surface. A successful check lets you move at half your speed along the surface for 1 round. A failure by 4 or less means you can’t move for 1 round. A failure by 5 or more means you fall. The difficulty varies with the surface, as follows:

Being Attacked while Balancing
You are considered flat-footed while balancing, since you can’t move to avoid a blow, and thus you lose your Dexterity bonus to AC (if any). If you have 5 or more ranks in Balance, you aren’t considered flat-footed while balancing. If you take damage while balancing, you must make another Balance check against the same DC to remain standing.

Nobody is running. The unhurried defender needs to make DC 10, while moving at half speed.

 

[Ashtagon]

The SRD doesn't identify stairs as an example of a precarious surface.

Precarious in D&D terms generally means a Balance check is required to walk across it.

 

[green slime]

The SRD doesn't identify stairs as an example of a precarious surface.

Precarious in D&D terms generally means a Balance check is required to walk across it.

No, it mentions

Narrow Surface "7-12 inches wide" : DC10.

A stair strikes me as a narrow surface.

 

[Ashtagon]

A single step, yes. An entire flight of them laid end on end, no.

 

[green slime]

A single step, yes. An entire flight of them laid end on end, no.

Seriously? What is the reasoning behind that?