I'm looking at the 3.5 character sheet and realising something that I have never questioned before but I probably should have:
What the actual fucking is Touch AC representing? Cuz there's Flat Footed AC, so I'd assume that that's like your AC minus the "dodge" or "to-hit" bit of the AC (the dex bonus, size modifier etc...) so is sort of an Armor Armor Class, so Touch AC is sort of the Dodge Armor Class?
...but wouldn't all the smaller melee weapons like daggers and shit hit that as well just "touch" spells, the idea that a wizard is more easily able to poke a person in a small gap in their armor than a straight martial, but a fucking rogue can't get a dagger through that same gap is nonsense.
>>43582371
Touch AC is just that: how easy it is to just touch you. A wizard casting Shocking Grasp doesn't give a fuck about your armour - as long as he gets close enough to slap you, you get
Shocked. Dodging helps, armour don't.
Touch is basically what ya use when the armour deflecting shit is irrelevant. For example, shocking grasp targets touch as I recall because it doesn't matter if you ''bite in'' like with a sword for example, just as long as you actually get yer hand on the motherfucker.
Because, ya know, Armour AC is basically its ability to resist or deflect attacks and a touch based spell doesn't need to bite in to do damage
>>43582371
When hitting touch AC, you don't have to get through the armor; you just have to touch it. (Or, in the case of some things that are hitting touch AC, like incorporeal creatures, your hand just goes right through the armor.)
A dagger still has to get through the armor; the beam of fire you're shooting doesn't.
I've always thought that wizard touch spells just go through armor.
>>43582371
have a fight where someone is fighting you and all you have to do is poke them, then have a fight where all you have to do is punch them out. that should demonstrate the concept
>>43582371
>the idea that a wizard is more easily able to poke a person in a small gap in their armor than a straight martial, but a fucking rogue can't get a dagger through that same gap is nonsense.
The design principle that seems to be behind that choice is that touch spells are things like fire, lightning, bad luck concentrated into a beam, etc and so they're not shooting through gaps in armor they just hit the armor and do their thing.
It's an extremely simplified representation of what would actually be happening but people have forgotten that and occasionally try to build more realism into it without understanding the underlying design. So, same as the majority of stuff in D&D.
Ideally, we'd see something where there is no touch AC and being flat-footed merely reduces your armor/defense/whatever by X or X% and armor has some level of protection against even magical attacks, but that would require a fairly extensive overhaul to get right if you wanted anything more complex than just adding some kind of "magic AC" to different armors along with their regular AC bonus.
We shouldn't have to explain it to your dumb ass.
Read the Fucking Manual
>>43582769
The reason that touch AC exists is to try and fix a bug inherent in the D&D system - the fact that armor makes you harder to hit instead of what it really should do, reducing damage. So when it comes the time to find out how hard somebody is to ACTUALLY hit (and not hit + penetrate armor), they have to invent a new derived stat for that. That's touch AC.
It represents bad game design
>>43582952
4e did a pretty good job of fixing it.
Reflex Defense became not just for vs spells but also vs stuff that slips through your armour easily like a lot of Rogue and Monk abilities.
Surprise! A 3.X subsystem is nonsense garbage! Welcome to the new millenium.
>>43582952
That's exactly what it does do though. Remember AC is the difficulty to land a solid, damaging blow. You can easily construe that to mean anything below the AC want even damaging enough to register the minimum 1pt of damage. All you do by using the UA "Armor is DR" variant rule is allow people to get hit by minimum damage more often.
I myself prefer armor equaling DR, but it definitely works well as AC. It's misunderstood just like HP, where not every hit has to cause a flesh wound and shouting at people can help them fight through the pain.
>>43582371
What? It makes perfect sense.
Your full armor class is all your modifiers.
Your flat-footed armor class is all your modifiers minus those modifiers that specifically represent "getting out of the way", like dodge, dex and such.
Your touch AC is all your modifiers minus those modifiers that represent something between you and the attack, like armor, natural thick hide, shields and so on.
It's pretty simple. Touch Ac represents those attacks where merely touching you is enough for the effect to take place, like lightning hands or ice or incorporal ghost fingers.
Out of all the systems in 3.5 one can complain about, I actually thought that was a fairly decent way of resolving the thing since they decided to go with ac making you harder to "hit".
>>43582952
Bio-technical Shielding. Or, in D&D parlance, Vital Arcane Resistance. If a disintegrate ray hits your magical armor, your dweomer has a limited amount of time to nullify it before it touches flesh and permeates through your unprotected body and tests your fortitude of flesh. Same with entropic phenomena, extreme focused heat, high voltages, holy flames, malefic optical radiation, and acid arrows.
>>43586004
meant to be in response to >>43582769
>>43582952
I wouldn't call it a bug, rather a holdover from classic D&D that few people understand anymore. The idea is basically that hitting a thick part of the armor isn't going to do anything most of the time, and so you only do something meaningful (deal damage) when you either hit someplace thinner or you hit really hard or at the right angle or something. Again, it's a simple, quick system that's been carried over into new editions by people who don't understand the reasoning behind it.
tl;dr armor as miss chance isn't a bug, but rather another poorly-understood sacred cow that the designers don't want to get rid of because that's how it's done in deeundee.
>>43582371
Shine a laser pointer at someone, if you saw the dot anywhere on their person you hit their touch AC with a ranged touch attack.
Significantly easier in terms of accuracy than shooting a bow and arrow at them or throwing a rock.
