Need help numbercrunching

[The Boz]

Let's say, for a moment, that there are no spellcasters in DnD 3.5. No magic of any kind. No Base Attack Bonus, everyone has 2 attacks per round with the same values. There are Abilities, skills, feats (unless they deal with something magical), equipment.
How do you beat someone who is pumping up heavy armor, shield and a one-handed weapon? If they're at AC 22 at start, with 18 Str and Con, 10 Dex... how do you beat them if you're not pretty much the same yourself? Getting two weapons means you're lowering your AC AND your damage output due to the dual wielding penalty. Grabbing a ranged weapon might work, but most of those are two-handed... How do you go about making sure they're not the kings of your world/ruleset/homebrew?

[Mulletmanalive]

You grab some allies for a mix of Aid Another and Flanking bonuses. That's a flat mechanical advantage right there. Height advantage, tripping and pushing them into difficult terrain are all useful too.

Your query wasn't exactly clear, so that's the only way i can come up with for beating them when you're the same as them.

[Seerow]

Well let's see, if you're wanting good odds of hitting AC 22, you want around +12 to hit, preferably more.

That said I see AC 21 (10+8 [full plate]+1 [dex] + 2 [heavy shield] = 21, or are you using a tower shield for 23? Either way not 22)

You have +4 (str) + 1 (masterwork) + 1 (weapon focus) = +6. Still a low chance of hitting, but a chance. If you are looking at group combat, you are looking at +2-4 additional hit chance, bringing that up to +10, which is acceptable.


That said, why would you go that far with your houserules that attack bonuses are so small, without modifying armor at all? Just cutting armor bonuses down by 1-2 across the board and making base armor 5 instead of 10 for example would help level it out a lot.


ie make full plate 7 AC instead of 8, you have only a shield that is 1 AC and tower shield that is 1. So full plate + tower shield AC would be 5+7+1+2 = 15 AC, vs the attack bonus of +6, hits on a 9.

[The Boz]

1. Lowering default AC to 5 means everyone gets a 50% lethality buff. Doesn't make it relatively more effective. So it's good if you outnumber your enemy, but status quo in an XvX fight.
2. Lowering benefits from Armor would just shift them over to Dexterity... If I reduced armors to 1 and 2 for Light, 3 and 4 for medium and 5 and 6 for heavy, that could make heavy armors good early, but hybrid dex/medium would still have the same problems, and be equally effective whole game, while light armors would start low but scale up to the problem with levels.
3. I was counting 8 + 4 from tower shield, none from Dex. The accuracy isn't that big of a deal, they're still too survivable.

[Seerow]

1. Lowering default AC to 5 means everyone gets a 50% lethality buff. Doesn't make it relatively more effective. So it's good if you outnumber your enemy, but status quo in an XvX fight.
2. Lowering benefits from Armor would just shift them over to Dexterity... If I reduced armors to 1 and 2 for Light, 3 and 4 for medium and 5 and 6 for heavy, that could make heavy armors good early, but hybrid dex/medium would still have the same problems, and be equally effective whole game, while light armors would start low but scale up to the problem with levels.
3. I was counting 8 + 4 from tower shield, none from Dex. The accuracy isn't that big of a deal, they're still too survivable.

Well your problem is you're taking away a vast majority of the things that go into bypassing AC, then not nerfing AC at all. If you think the cuts I suggested are too much, then you could adjust it otherwise, but as it is, anyone sitting around 20-25 AC is going to be extremely hard to hit all the way up to epic levels. (Even a level 20 character with all points put into str would have 23 str at the end, for a net +2 higher hit bonus than the level one character, with maybe another 1-2 from feats. Given the level 1 character is looking at a 75%+ miss rate, the level 20 character is still going to miss about 55-60% of the time against a generic level one mook with some armor.

[The Boz]

I had originally thought that removing bracers, amulets, rings, cloaks and other silly things would also remove the armor advantage...
I think I'll just go pump up the strength of the weapon proficiency feat line a little, and add a few more options here and there such as weapon modifications for attack bonus and the like...

[Eldan]

The guy's in plate. You do hit and run archery. Problem solved. In plate, they will move a lot slower than you, meaning you can move away, shoot, move away, shoot...

[Friv]

Let's say, for a moment, that there are no spellcasters in DnD 3.5. No magic of any kind. No Base Attack Bonus, everyone has 2 attacks per round with the same values. There are Abilities, skills, feats (unless they deal with something magical), equipment.
How do you beat someone who is pumping up heavy armor, shield and a one-handed weapon? If they're at AC 22 at start, with 18 Str and Con, 10 Dex... how do you beat them if you're not pretty much the same yourself? Getting two weapons means you're lowering your AC AND your damage output due to the dual wielding penalty. Grabbing a ranged weapon might work, but most of those are two-handed... How do you go about making sure they're not the kings of your world/ruleset/homebrew?

So, we're assuming two Level 1 characters here, right? I'm honestly not certain that I see an issue. All else being equal, yeah, the guy with better equipment is the guy that's likely to win the fight. This is not exactly a shocking revelation.

I would definitely fight him with a crossbow, though. With Dex 18, you've got +4 to hit, so you're hitting on a 18+. Your movement speed is 30 and his is 20, so just keep your distance and occasionally sacrifice an action to Running when he does the same. If he charges at you, he can't use his tower shield properly and his AC goes down, making you hit him that much better.

*EDIT* Wait, I have two more thoughts. Thought one is, how does he have enough money for that right out of the gate?

Thought two is, with no base attack bonus, it seems like all attack values will cap out at +6, so there's almost no difference between skilled soldiers and green recruits. In that situation, swarming enemies with multiple unskilled enemies is the king of battle, and heroes don't matter as much. For the cost of one suit of plate, you can stick eight guys in chain shirts, and give them AC 15. Since your supersoldier maxes out at +6 to hit, he's only hitting the raw recruits half the time, and the eight of them can land a blow every round or two. He takes more hits than they do, and I bet he doesn't have eight times their health.

[The Boz]

Thought two is, with no base attack bonus, it seems like all attack values will cap out at +6, so there's almost no difference between skilled soldiers and green recruits. In that situation, swarming enemies with multiple unskilled enemies is the king of battle, and heroes don't matter as much. For the cost of one suit of plate, you can stick eight guys in chain shirts, and give them AC 15. Since your supersoldier maxes out at +6 to hit, he's only hitting the raw recruits half the time, and the eight of them can land a blow every round or two. He takes more hits than they do, and I bet he doesn't have eight times their health.

To compensate the skilled vs green, feat and ability score accumulation has been greatly increased.
I think that I have it down now, by toning it down a bit and introducing a few more attack bonus things here and there. When I'm done with the thing, in a few days time, I'll upload it here and you guys can all read it up and say how you like it. Thanks for all the help!

[HalfDragonCube]

Diplomance them? If this is a player, that may not work, so just get a horde of commoners to swarm them, then just keep shooting at them until they die.

[101jir]

If the above don't work, you can always hope for criticals. The way I play, however, criticals are super effective. On a critical hit, all it takes is beating the static AC and IK (the way I play). Multipliers are always nice, but again it comes down to hit and run. Crits are nice for that style.