In 3rd edition D&D (and by extension Pathfinder), was the inclusion of "touch AC" a mistake?
Touch/Flatfooted AC added a sensible new layer to combat that made certain abilities range from not much better than an ordinary ability to extremely useful, depending on the opponent.
Anything that encourages players to analyze their opponents is good in my book, and using touch attacks on slow enemies and avoiding using them on fast ones makes sense.
The issue is that there were few non-spell touch attacks available to players, and there were a few of them with fairly wonky math.
Overall, it's a good design direction, but not one without its flaws.
>>43806108
Yes.
>>43806204
>adding an additional defense that was a joke to hit, but it was ok as long as only Wizard could target it
being 3aboo is suffering.
>>43806204
>>43806219
Both of these.
It was a mistake because Touch AC broke the math and defied core assumptions of the game, building critical weaknesses into characters that needed to be patched (poorly) later on.
However, as a tactical idea, it was a nic thought.
>>43806281
>didn't read the post at all
>just wants to start an edition war
You anti-3.PF trolls really are the worst people on this board.
Having multiple levels of AC seems like pure system bloat.
The mistake was abstracting evasion and resistance to damage into a single stat, and then deciding that some attacks should ignore resistance.
>>43806108
Yes.
>>43806307
It's true tho. Touch AC is a thing only casters can exploit without wasting a ridiculous amount of money on acid/alchemist fire vials.
>>43806569
Speaking core only of course. Once you get into the splats you get some options, especially with ToB.
>>43806569
That was already addressed, you fucking moron.
D&D 4e's solution was to have only four defenses: AC, Fortitude, Reflex, and Will.
Anything that would have been a "touch attack" in 3.X would instead target Reflex, representing a character's ability to avoid attacks that ignored armor. Note that "armor" is the key word here, since shields add to Reflex (+2 Reflex, in fact), thereby allowing shield-bearers to raise their shields to defend against a dragon's breath.
D&D 5e handles this in a somewhat bizarre way: there are *eight* defenses for a character (AC, Strength save, Dexterity save, Constitution save, Intelligence save, Wisdom save, Charisma save, and opposed Acrobatics/Athletics), yet Strength/Intelligence/Charisma saves are rare enough that they may as well just have gone with Fortitude/Reflex/Will, and AC defends against some single-target energy damage spells. Furthermore, shields influence Dexterity saves in no way short of a specific feat. This means that, by default, a fighter or paladin's plate armor and shield provide a stalwart defense against a Fire Bolt or a Scorching Ray targeting AC, but then suddenly become meaningless against a Fireball targeting Dexterity save.
>>43806569
>casters exploit
Only Evokers really, and THOSE aren't the sort of caster people should be bitching about.
Given all the nasty shit a Caster could do, a Wizard roasting a knight with a ray of energy is a fucking kindness.
>>43806774
Ray of enfeeblement.
>>43806774
What is Ray of Enfeeblement, Enervation, and Energy Drain?
>>43806695
Part of me thinks that, instead of AC, Reflex, Fortitude, and Will, it should be something like Block, Dodge, Fortitude, and Will. Fortitude and Will stay as they are (resisting ailments, compulsions, and other bad shit), but Block and Dodge become the two primary defenses for avoiding shit in the first place.
>Oh shit, that's shocking grasp, better dodge that shit
>Oh shit, fireball, time to raise my shield so I can block it
I imagine something like dodge negating all damage completely but being harder to raise, while block is easier to raise but doesn't negate all damage.
>>43808225
That actually sounds a little like the Dodge/Defend/Counterattack system in Super Robot Wars. Your base evasion and defense are always there, but you can choose to focus on one of the two to raise it - if you pick Defend you may still dodge, but picking Evade will double your chances but if you do get hit it hurts a little more.
That would probably slow game play in tabletop because you need to make that decision for every single enemy attack, so just imagine your most indecisive player hemming and hawing about probabilities for every single attack he takes from a half-dozen goblins.
>>43808548
You could just declare which defense you're focusing on at the end of your turn, though - maybe with one reaction allowed between your turn and your next one.
>>43808225
A fireball is an explosion targeting an area, that would be like trying to block a missile with a shield.
>>43806695
I think the 5e stat saves makes perfect sense. Why use additional, derived stats when you can just use the ones you already have? Making saves into ability checks just makes sense, it's instantly understandable and doesn't require you to keep track of yet another number. What's the point of having will, reflex and fortitude when you already have intelligence, dexterity and constitution? They're the same things. Even adding the other stats doesn't actually make the game more complex because they're the stats, everyone already knows what they are and what they do.
It's just like how the whole point of the proficiency bonus in 5e is that it's one number that applies to a bunch of different things instead of needing to have lots of different numbers.
It's effective streamlining.
In regards to the shield thing, I don't see the problem. Raising your shield isn't the same as dodging. It's just a physical barrier in exactly the same way that armour is.
In regards to spells, it's magic. Some spells go through armour, some don't. Fire bolt and fireball are different, one's a flying mote of flame, the other's a violent explosion.
If you want to complain about some things being saves and others being attack rolls, you might as well be asking why we have saves at all. The distinction has always been arbitrary.
>>43809627
It wouldn't be perfect, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than dodging a fireball. Besides, I imagine fireball being like a bomb - it travels a certain distance and then explodes out in all directions. Having a solid object between you and the wall of deadly fire won't negate damage, but it'll help make sure you're just golden brown instead of black and crispy.
>>43808225
Mutants and Masterminds went with that actually.
>>43810142
>it makes a hell of a lot more sense than dodging a fireball.
No it doesn't.
At all.
>>43811120
How so? I gave a reason why I think it makes sense to shield against a fireball, you have yet to give a reason why I'm wrong.
>>43810448
That's pretty cool, did it affect the combat speed very much?
>>43811197
>How so?
An explosion of sufficient strength will go through any armour like tissue paper. The best, and in all likelihood only, way of avoiding being hurt by such an explosion is to simply not be there. The ability to dodge such a blast is therefore far and away a more meaningful defense than the ability to raise your bit of wood and metal in front of you.
I did not previously explain this, because I thought it blindingly obvious.
>>43811333
fireball isn't an explosion though, as it doesn't deal any pressure damage
>>43806108
Pretty much. It becomes an irrelevant detail for just about everything a few levels into the game due to having no natural growth to keep up with BAB.
>>43806811
And shivering touch, which is pretty much a one-shot kill on just about everything that exists.
>>43811333
Fireball is just fire that bursts out in all directions - like >>43811445 said, it doesn't do any pressure or shockwave damage. The fire isn't going to chase you or wrap around to get you (not unless it's sentient or being controlled by the caster), so it's probably going to split a bit when it runs into your shield (similarly to how water splits if it hits a solid object at high speeds).
A bit of flame will probably lick you as it passes by and your shield will almost certainly be damaged unless it's reinforced somehow (not to mention, the heat from the shield will likely transfer to your hand/arm - nonmagical wood will almost certainly get incinerated, I will grant you that), but it's better than getting bathed in flames.
What I'd like to know is how you dodge a wave of fire rushing at you at high speeds. To dodge something, there has to be space to quickly move to where you will be safe from the attack - a sword strike or an arrow is easy to figure out how to dodge because there's a wide area around you to move to. A fireball, however, completely engulfs all open space within its range - there is no unthreatened space to move to because the air around you is on fire.
The only way to "evade" a fireball is to run away from it, and that's not what the rules depict - somehow, the Rogue is shimmying in such a way that he avoids the flaming gas that has engulfed him.
>>43811725
You reflex for half, which I assumed was putting yourself into a position where the fire would deal less damage, such as turning away and curling into a ball, rather than have it hit you in the face.
A warrior lifting his shield to protect him from dragonfire is probably a more iconic image than doing it against a Fireball, I feel, and probably a better example of why 4E's shield-to-Reflex worked.
Although given the lack of forced movement in new editions dodging the fireball without moving makes even less sense. Not to mention Roguespace, where Evasion just makes them go completely unharmed from a point-black explosion in a room smaller than the explosions area.
>>43809732
Attribute-based saves are a good idea with bad execution.
Mostly because the characters can start with a six-point difference between the highest and lowest save that turns into a thirteen-point difference at the highest levels.
That would be alright if the DC didn't scale and it was an AD&D-like situation, but it does and thus you get an even worse problem than 3E had. At least in 3E your bad saves also scaled upwards. Also, there were only three of them.
The basic idea, though, of just using attribute checks for saves? That's not a bad idea. It's one of those things that you could easily backport into a different system, like Advantage.
>>43811759
Except the rogue reflexes for negate.
>>43806108
As a nod to simulationism it's fine, but D&D is not a simulationist game no matter how much some 3aboos want it to be. It violently rapes the corpse of the game's already ruined-beyond-repair math.
>>43806108
Touch AC rarely added anything of value to games of PF, in my experience. I didn't miss it at all when we switched to 5e.
For the most part all it ever did was create a massive, gaping hole in defense-focused characters and monsters which mostly meant that ray spells practically couldn't miss you no matter how good your other defenses were, and then they made guns target this defense for some ungodly reason to make it so that it's basically impossible to block a bullet compared to dodging one.
It's literally just there so that ray and bad touch mages don't bitch about having to suck up the downsides of their shitty BAB when fighting a dude in armor.
>>43809627
Except the Shield Master feat let's you deflect anything I'd you make your save. You can literally block a Meteor from Meteor Swarm.
>>43811759
That's a fair comparison - I guess I did tunnel vision onto completely avoiding damage instead of just minimizing it. Stop drop and roll instead of magic evasion shimmying, I guess.
What does bother me, though, is the situation with Uncanny Dodge (or was it improved Evasion? I forget). Shit would let you be untouched by a point blank fireball because reasons. I get that at that level you're a big bad hero and you can do insane shit physically, but it makes no sense at all to me.
>>43811893
Its a little more difficult to sell, true. But you can always fluff it as say, throwing his cloak in the way of the fire or some such thing.
> was the inclusion of "touch AC" a mistake?
Yes.
In theory I agree with the idea that the more types of attacks and defenses, the more interesting combat gets as you explore more options. But, touch AC usually boiled down to taking classes with notably poor attacks (wizards) and just throwing that disadvantage away by making their targets very easy to hit (people in armor). Casters absolutely did not need this advantage, and if anything, there should have been more rules in the opposite direction where armor and shields offer some measure of protection from magical attacks.
>>43812048
It's especially bizarre since spellcasters typically were the only classes with area-of-effect attacks, which AC doesn't do shit against anyway.
I don't understand why they also needed highly accurate ray attacks. It basically meant AC became a nonfactor if you were fighting a magic-focused encounter.
>>43806108
The real problem was with how they handled Armour Class in general. Armour should mitigate damage suffered, not make you harder to hit.
>>43809732
>Streamlined
>There are now 9 rolled defenses to keep track
>Admits the system is arbitrary while mounting a text wall defense
>I don't know the difference between cover (a shield other than buckler) and body armour.
At least fucking try to be taken seriously.
>>43806388
Absolutely
>>43806108
The essential problem is that AC doesn't make sense. It either means your armor completely deflects something, or does nothing at all. When dealing with ordinary melee attacks, this may hurt immersion (because it doesn't "play" right), but it works out pretty well statistically. But once you start dealing with giants throwing boulders at you, or wizards needing to touch you to do something to you, it all falls apart.
In order to make touch attacks worthwhile (compared to non-touch attacks), wizards, with their shitty attack bonuses, really need some kind of advantage vs. folks in heavy armor, and touch attacks just make sense. But they contribute to the overcomplexity that is part and parcel of 3.x. So you've got your normal AC. Your normal AC without a shield. Your AC when you're flatfooted (and when you're flatfooted without a shield). And your touch AC. Then you start considering armor-related things, so you've got your skills, your skills while you're wearing armor and bearing a shield, and your skills while you're wearing armor but not holding a shield. And god forbid that somebody increases your dexterity or something, because now you have to recalculate everything. And then we have to content with arcane spell failure.
Each individual idea is solid enough and works okay in solitude, but once you put everything together, it's an unmitigated mess, and touch attacks are just one small part of that mess.
>>43806108
"Third Edition was a mistake" - Hayao Miyazaki
>>43806108
The word mistake deceptively implies that it would have worked noticeably better without it. Technically, it's a mistake, but it's just another drop in the bucket from core on.
Besides, you don't want to fix it: people don't Love OGL in-spite of the broken-ness, they love it BECAUSE of the broken-ness. Fixed and balanced 3e would be like cheap Vodka with the alcohol taken out: literally pointless.
>>43812210
When you're harder to hit you take less damage.
>>43812210
>>43817252
The idea behind AC as miss chance is an extremely simplified version of real life: the attack roll governs aiming for gaps and weak spots as well as just hitting thicker areas really hard, and the damage die governs how well you hit those weak spots or how hard you hit the stronger areas.
It works well as an abstract simplification, but it's far from realistic. Problem is, newer editions kept it without realizing why it was there or how it was supposed to work.
Things like adding touch or flat-footed AC, damage reduction, etc are attempts to make it more realistic, but they kept the basic structure because sacred cow.
>>43806281
>>43806108
It's just a reflex defense.
>>43809732
Consolidating ability and defence scores would have been a great move if they didn't then layer "save proficiency" on top of that.
and also the set of abilities should have been cut back to four at the most, each with a well-defined range of attacks it can defend against so they all stay, in theory, equally relevant. But no, you've got to stick to tradition whenever it's inconvenient.
>>43812210
That's not a problem, it works well enough for the game's purposes. You might have a problem with it because it feels unrealistic to you, but that's a separate issue.
It works well enough as an approximation of reality anyway. You're wearing armour and you get hit with a sword, either the armour holds and you don't take serious damage or it hits you somewhere vulnerable and you're in trouble. Yeah ok you might be saved by armour and still get bruises and broken bones but you can't expect perfect simulation from a game that features hit points.
>>43819355
>you might be saved by armour and still get bruises and broken bones
That's what a high attack roll and low damage roll are meant to represent, as I understand it.
The two are meant to go together to describe the attack, not 'attack roll is accuracy and damage roll is force' (though that would be a perfectly good way of doing things, in a game without armor = miss chance).
>>43819312
>Consolidating ability and defence scores would have been a great move if they didn't then layer "save proficiency" on top of that.
What's wrong with save proficiency?
It's simple: roll your ability modifier and add a bonus. It's more streamlined than divorced saves.
>>43820350
why not just have it be 'roll under stat' with the proficiency modifier adding to the stat?
>>43820793
static defences worked so much better...
