BAB to AC

[hivedragon]

There are some problems with 3.5
-As you gain levels your attack scales up but your armor does not
-Full BAB isn't nearly as powerful as the designers thought it would be
My solution
Add your highest BAB to your AC as a dodge bonus
How would this effect the tier system?

[GoodbyeSoberDay]

This instantly nerfs touch attacks. Lots of monsters would be very difficult to hit for anyone at certain levels. Denying dex bonus one way or another would be of utmost importance, which means uncanny dodge is suddenly a useful class feature.

All that said, I don't think there's much in the way of tier changing. If anything it's somewhat of a mundane nerf, since casters can still target saves while they're stuck targeting the now-buffed AC.

[jvluso]

This wouldn't touch the tier system. The tier system compares the versatility of classes, and this only makes classes good at what they already do.

This would however keep AC relevant for a few more levels, and make it possible to have a good AC for longer.

[FMArthur]

I'd really hate to be a Warlock in such a game. Or anyone trying to hit people in physical combat, really. You'd better make it an armor bonus and turn actual armor into something else, like damage reduction. Even that still just makes casters even better at handling physical combatants compared to their physical combatant allies.

[Big Fau]

There are some problems with 3.5
-As you gain levels your attack scales up but your armor does not
-Full BAB isn't nearly as powerful as the designers thought it would be
My solution
Add your highest BAB to your AC as a dodge bonus
How would this effect the tier system?

All of a sudden Divine Power becomes even better, and attack rolls become significantly worse. Please be aware that many enemies have a higher BAB than the PCs due to massive amounts of racial HD.


Hell, even the common Zombie becomes a nightmare because of it's HD-derived BAB.

[Telonius]

There are some problems with 3.5
-As you gain levels your attack scales up but your armor does not
-Full BAB isn't nearly as powerful as the designers thought it would be
My solution
Add your highest BAB to your AC as a dodge bonus
How would this effect the tier system?

Full BAB isn't as powerful as the designers thought it would be, so the solution is ... to give everything extra AC, making attack bonus even more useless?

EDIT: Didn't mean for that to sound harsh, but that's the end result. I'd love for BAB to give some extra scaling bonuses, but AC isn't really how it should be done.

[Flickerdart]

It would make it ridiculously difficult to keep up with AC.

Imagine two 20th level Fighters. They both have BAB 20, and let's say 30 STR. With a +5 weapon, each one makes their first attack at +35, at an average of 45. These Fighters also own +5 full plate (let's say Mithral), have a modest 14 DEX and probably invest into a +5 Ring of Protection. Their AC is now 50 apiece, after only rudimentary investment.

Add an Amulet of Natural Armour +5 and the Fighters only hit one another on a natural 20.

[sonofzeal]

BAB to DR would be better.

BAB to AC makes everyone unhittable. See, AC does improve as you level, it just impoves based on your wealth. And, common wisdom asside, it's my experience that for humanoids, attack bonus and AC actually improve at roughly similar rates. Monster attack bonus improves far faster than their AC, but if you're fighting stuff with class levels (and let's face it, most of us are) then currently accessible values for AC are perfectly acceptable.

But I could totally see BAB-to-DR. It's extremely difficult to get decent DR, but DR isn't actually all that useful. At lvl 10, having DR 10/- would be nice but not gamebreaking, and you'd certainly notice the difference between full and 3/4 more.

[Spiryt]

This is pretty damn simple and good idea to me, as AC indeed is treated extremely poorly without HB,in fact I used it a bit.

Although full BaB to AC is indeed to high.

[FMArthur]

I wouldn't be comfortable with BAB to DR unless you also implemented better scaling weapon damage. Weapon damage scales even less than AC without special investment, whereas the ability to negate most of it would come automatically with DR (or AC) dependent on BAB.

However... if you added BAB to weapon damage and DR, full BAB melee attacks would be unchanged against one another, and casters would be slain almost instantly - giving casters weaknesses is not a disaster, but it doesn't lessen their power at all until they disrupt the game by suddenly keeling over. Medium BAB frontliners would decrease in power, and most of them really don't need that (most medium BAB frontliners should have had full BAB to begin with, but that's neither here nor there).

Massive jumps in monster HD over CR also throw a wrench into things, although I wouldn't be opposed to zombies being tougher and scarier. You could reduce certain high-HD creature types to 1/2 BAB, but this is more involved as far as statblock rewriting is concerned.

[Person_Man]

IIRC Star Wars Sage edition has an AC = 10 + Dexterity bonus + 1/2 your class level OR your bonus from wearing physical armor (whichever is higher). Thus at 1st level warrior-ish classes benefit from heavier armor proficiency, and at higher levels it tends to even out for everyone and heroes can walk around without armor (befitting the setting).

[Groverfield]

I'd say 1/3BaB to AC, round down and 1/2 AC to DR, round up (Dropping AC by however much it raises DR, I think there's a page on this as alternate rules in the PHB) for non racial HD... might make things more balanced.

[Prime32]

You're better off using something like "The Edge" from Tome, which grants bonuses if you have higher BAB than your opponent.

Or add your BAB to initiative checks.

As for high-HD monsters, here's a rule I like to use:

Some of these rules reference "virtual" values. A PC's virtual stats are the same as his normal ones, minus the effects of buffs. A monster's virtual level is equal to its CR. To calculate a monster's virtual BAB, treat it as if it had a number of racial HD equal to its CR; for instance a CR 9 Dragon would have +9 BAB, as if it had 9 Dragon HD. A monster with HD equal to double its CR or more increases its virtual BAB by one step (eg. a CR4 Fey with 8HD would have +3 BAB - average rather than poor), while HD triple its CR increases its BAB by two steps. For monsters with class levels, halve the virtual stats gained for nonassociated levels.

[randomhero00]

Low tier classes need gestalt, not raw power. Fighter is low tier but I can build one that can out damage a wizard, druid, and cleric combined.

I'd like to see it as a more regular practice for gestalting t4-5. Maybe up to 3, I forget exactly whats on T3. For example you could gestalt a t5 with a t4 but not a t5 with a t2. So monk//rogue = ok. monk//sorcerer = bad**

I've prob been ninja'd but thought I'd say it anyway

**in a game with tier 1 and 2 players that is. Obviously if everyone is below T3 then gestalting isn't needed.

[kardar233]

The Star Wars Revised Edition (and Iron Heroes, IIRC) assigned armor bonuses to DR and gave each class a "Defense Bonus" that progressed similar to saves, with a "good", "average" and "poor" defense progression that corresponded to what BAB progression they had. A Soldier would have a good progression, while a Noble would have an average progression.

[IncoherentEssay]

Personally i'd use 1/2 class level derived BAB as a Dodge bonus to AC, doesn't get out of hand as easily but still gives an edge. Also does not require rewriting all monster statblocks :smallwink:. And as a dodge bonus, your skill doesn't help you if you get surprised. Though Uncanny Dodge gets quite an increase in value...

Other changes in the same vein that i've contemplated are adding the same 1/2-bab to all weapon damage and as a Dodge bonus to all saves (yes, Dodge bonus to Will sounds incredibly stupid but that's just the mechanical term for a bonus you lose if you can't defend yourself actively.)
Doesn't add anything tier-scrambling, but bumps up the base level of competence for martial types quite nicely. Also gives an incentive to aim for 20/20 bab instead of merely +16, as well as benefitting TWF, Sword-&-Board and Archery far more than THF (in terms of +%damage gained).

As a side effect, treating NPC-classes(sans adept) as monster HD for CR (+1/+2 bab) allows warriors to punch more on-par of their CR without the NPC-wealth in magical junk they'd otherwise use.

(I'd also ban/change bab-altering spells into giving general attack bonuses instead, of course.)

[Eldariel]

Yeah, BAB to AC makes sense and fixes some inherent issues in the system. Most notably, it makes Touch Attacks non-trivial, lessens the item dependence of high level warriors with regards to AC and enables AC to scale properly. Gotta be careful though; fully stacked AC with BAB to AC suddenly makes you pretty unhittable by anything remotely reasonable.

[Ravens_cry]

I would only use this or a similar system (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/defenseBonus.htm) in a game where most armour is simply not available and magic items are rare, like, say a Stone Age campaign.

[HappyBlanket]

Dropping this here, I guess?
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/defenseBonus.htm

Your AC increases just like your BAB, but it scales independently.

edit: Wow ninja'd so badly.

[Larpus]

If the issue you're trying to address is the whole melee vs. magic, I don't think that the problem is with BAB and AC alone, I mean, messing too much with it can and potentially will hurt the non-casting 3/4 BAB classes and/or mess too much with touch attacks; not saying that Sorcs and Wizzies need all the power in the world, but if you're gonna render touches useless, then might as well take them out of the game.

Personally I think that the bigger issue is with Feats instead, which you can consider as being the melee people "spells", you get so little feats that 1 or 2 feats should be enough for you to be the best there is at something (2HW, TWF, S&B, Archery, etc), Midnight_v put it way better than I could at another thread, so I'll quote him (spoilered since it's big, the bolds aren't mine):

4.2 The Failure of Feats
“How about instead of being able to travel anywhere in the multiverse, transform yourself into anything you can think of, stop time, and slay everyone you can see, we just give a nice +1 to hit with your secondary weapon?
Deal?”

Feats were an interesting idea when they were ported to 3rd edition D&D. But let’s face it; they don’t go nearly far enough. Feats were made extremely conservative in their effects on the game because the authors didn’t want to offend people with too radical a change. Well, now we’ve had third edition for 6 years, and we’re offended.
Feats are an interesting and tangible way to get unique abilities onto a character, but they have fallen prey to two key fallacies that has ended up turning the entire concept to ashes in our mouths.
The first is the idea that if you think of something kind of cool for a character to do, you should make it a feat. That sounds compelling, but you only get 7 feats in your whole life. If you have to spend a feat for every cool thing you ever do, you’re not going to do very many cool things in the approximately 260 encounters you’ll have on your way from 1st to 20th level.
The second is the idea that a feat should be equivalent to a cantrip or two.
This one is even less excusable, and just makes us cry. A +1 bonus is something that you seriously might forget that you even have. Having one more +1 bonus doesn’t make your character unique, it makes you a sucker
for spending one of the half dozen feats you’ll ever see on a bonus the other players won’t even mention when discussing your character.
We all understand this problem, what do we do about it? Well, for starters, Feats have to do more things. Many characters are 5th level or so and they only have 2 feats. Those feats should describe their character in a much more salient way than “I’m no worse shooting into melee than I am shooting at people with cover that isn’t my friends.”
This was begun with the tactical feats, but it didn’t go far enough. It’s not enough to add additional feats that do something halfway interesting for high level characters to have – we actually have to replace the stupid one dimensional feats in the PHB with feats that rational people would care about in any way. Spending a single feat should be enough to make you a “sniper character” because for a substantial portion of your life you only get one feat.
Secondly, we have to clear away feats that don’t provide numeric bonuses large enough to care about. The minimum bonus you’ll ever notice is +3, because that’s actually larger than the difference between having rolled well and having rolled poorly on your starting stats.
Numeric bonuses smaller than that are actually insulting and need to be removed from the feats altogether. 3.5 Skill Focus was a nice start, but that’s all it was – a start.
Furthermore, the fundamental structure of feats has been a disaster. The system of prerequisites often ensures that characters won’t get an ability before it would be level appropriate for them to do so, but actually does nothing to ensure that such characters are in fact getting level appropriate abilities. Indeed, if a 12th level character decides that they want to pursue a career in shooting people in the face, they have to start all over gaining an ability that is supposed to be level appropriate for a 1st level character.
Meanwhile, when a wizard of 12th level decides to pursue some new direction in spellcasting – he learns a new 6th level spell right off – and gets an ability that’s level appropriate for a 12th level character.
I agree that AC also has to be addressed, since it quickly loses effect, but just increasing it won't solve anything, sure, everyone will live longer, but combat will be a pain in the ass since everyone will look like retarded blind kids waving sticks randomly in hopes of hitting one another. I believe that DR is the way to go, Armor (at least medium and up) should give some DR and maybe Con as well, this'll help give more importance to proficiencies which, let's face it, aside from weapons hardly make an actual difference (and even weapons is rather meh, usually I'd prefer to have only a single weapon and free Focus or something) and also some more power to physical tankers as opposed to caster battlefield lockers.

[ericgrau]

It's wonky but attack bonus scales mostly by level and AC mostly by equipment. Doing it this way is automatic or dirt cheap (so, yes, optimally you always want to put at least some effort into it), while doing it the reverse way is difficult and very expensive. Both scale at about 1.25 per level in both monsters and PCs so it works out exactly right. Some ways scale slower and can fall behind by up to +5 by level 20, but that's not enough to make rolls impossible. Technically it could fall behind by up to +10 but most of the time in those situations you don't even try or you expend minimal resources on it.

Poor AC optimization skills or equipment-stingy DMs often lead to complaints, but it really is very easy, cheap and smart once you know how. Even knowing this, calculating it in scary nerdy detail, etc., I myself will openly complain about its wonkiness. The low magic item point system link in my sig attempts to get around this by lumping it into level ups instead of gear, along with other stat boosts. For example I pay 17 points for 5 AC, 13 points for an additional 3 touch AC. I paid 6 points for the last point of AC in both cases so I know there's not a cheaper way to do it. All done.