No topic has ever gotten me into more D&D arguments than saying that a 10th level fighter should be able to fall off an airship, hit the ground and not immediately splat, but rather limp away from it after tanking the 20d6 damage.
I want a squad of Dwarven Fighters to be able to leap off of the same airship and do a three-point landing, because what the hell would Dwarves need parachutes for?!
Eh. If the wizard can conjure it, the rogue should be able to dodge it.
I know it makes my GM twitch whenever my rogue or monk would dodge an explosion. But we have to disillusion ourselves of the ridiculous notion that martial characters have to obey the laws of physics.
I have Evasion, so uhhh… Yup, zero damage.
AC is more than a dex save… And in fact may not involve dex at all if the target is wearing heavy armor.
I’m well aware. I just said that Dex is represented twice, once in each “system”.
There’s nothing arbitrary about it
I mean the division itself is entirely arbitrary.
a unified defense system would no doubt involve a lot of special-casing/ad-hoc calculations to be at all worthwhile, to the point at which it would be far more cumbersome and confusing.
What? No? Why would that be the case?
The two systems could be mostly merged by just having saves be passive, and having the attacker roll to overcome them. Exactly like AC currently works now.
Let’s say we only use AC as a defense and have no saves. How does a spell like Hold Person work?
The caster rolls their spell attack against the target’s Wisdom defence/save. Exactly like how AC works now for physical attacks.
Buffs like could add a flat value to the defence stat, like AC buffs currently do.
The more I think about it, this would actually streamline combat a bit too. Because the “acting” party is doing all the rolling, rather than waiting for the defending party to roll a save to see if attacker gets to continue.
I’m not complaining about having different kinds of opposed checks. I like that there are lots of different things to target, in fact I wish different kinds of checks were more accessible so that combat was more varied.
I just find it weird that they have different game mechanics. Like, attacking has the player rolling against a defender’s static DC. Except actually sometimes the defender rolls to save against an attacker’s static DC? And Dex saves are actually represented twice, once as an actual save to dodge things, and once as AC. Precisely because there are those two overlapping systems at play.
I don’t find 5e bloated exactly. But I do think it has a few too many systems in place, sometimes with overlapping use-cases.
Like attacks, skill checks, saves… They’re all basically the same thing, an opposed check, but they have slightly different rules. Sometimes the player is rolling against a target, but sometimes the target is rolling to save against? It’s a little strange, and adds a bit of extra complexity where I don’t really think it’s necessary.
A lot of it is just legacy systems that are kept because it wouldn’t be D&D without them.
When we were talking about characters that we wanted to make, he suggested an evil female yuan-ti (snakeperson). Starts detailing all these things about the character going further and further. It wasn’t until the combination of “won medals during a chariot race but then ran over someone with their chariot” that I realized he was making Caitlyn Jenner an evil snake person in DnD. Snaiklyn Runnyr.
Pure gold.
Only because the term has mostly fallen out of use. If you still use “gay” as an insult, it absolutely is still homophobic.
I mean, no, the definitions are not disconnected at all. Gay was used as an insult because it meant homosexual.
But that doesn’t mean you have to feel guilty. That’s, usually at least, not what people are asking for either. Guilt isn’t helpful.
Being aware of the social systems we live under, the power structures those systems create, and the blind spots we might have. That’s what’s being asked for.
Evasion reduces dex save effects to half damage on a failure, and no damage on a success. The rogue and the monk can dodge the comet completely.