Dexterity in Melee in AD&D?

[Morty]

So, I'm curious - is there any way to make a character in AD&D who uses Dexterity rather than Strength for melee attacks? My guess is that there isn't, but maybe I'll be surprised.

[Yora]

If so, it would probably be a fighter, ranger, or thief class kit.

[Greylond]

Officially, No. Not without House Rules.

This is effectively what Kenzer&Co did with their new version of HackMaster. HM is a game that is heavily influnced by 1st Edition AD&D but with different mechanics. Str, Int, Wis and Dex all affect Melee. Int and Dex modify your chance to hit, Wis and Dex affect reaction speed, i.e. Surprise and Str modifies your Melee Damage. With rules like this, you can end up with many different variations of fighters.

[meschlum]

Two possible tricky ways, skirting on the letter of the law.

- Have lots of daggers. Be a specialist fighter. Throw them in melee. Dexterity helps you hit, and you get a lot of attacks.

- Two weapon fighting gives you penalties unless your Dexterity is significant (and your weapons are properly set up). So again high Dexterity helps you hit, and two weapons can do more damage than one, so it even helps with damage!

[viking vince]

If your DM allows classes from Dragon, ask him/her about the Duelist.

[Joe the Rat]

1e: Two-weapon ("off-hand" weapon) fighting is as close as it gets from the base rules, but that's just to offset penalties. (statistically this can work out as better damage output with high enough dex, but doesn't improve odds much on low-AC targets. (If you're looking at a Fighter, you can play around with taking specialization in dagger or handaxe - the two "allowable" off-hand weapons unless you use yet another Dragon article on weapon sizes and hand-usage.

The Duelist (were they allowed armor?) and meschlum's dagger-spam are more off-beat approaches.

2e: If you're willing to take a dip in the dark side, Weapon Finesse popped up in the Player's Options era.

[Belril Duskwalk]

- Two weapon fighting gives you penalties unless your Dexterity is significant (and your weapons are properly set up). So again high Dexterity helps you hit, and two weapons can do more damage than one, so it even helps with damage!

This is about the best you will get I think. Given a Dex of at least 17 and an off-hand weapon smaller than the primary weapon, your penalty for dual-wielding is 0/-2. Effectively, your off-hand attack is a free attack, if perhaps one that is less likely to hit.

If you use the Complete Fighter's Handbook, you can take Two-Weapon Fighting as a Style Specialization (which costs one weapon proficiency). The Style makes the base penalty 0/-2 when two weapon fighting, so that 17 Dex would now make the penalty 0/0, meaning the off-hand attack comes with no strings attached.

Anything that boosts dagger damage (ie. Dagger Specialization) may also help as you could get the pluses to hit and damage on both weapons. Two attacks at one better than base THAC0 that each deal 1d4+2 damage might not be earth-shattering, but it isn't shabby for a character that doesn't need magic or Strength Bonuses to get there.

[Morty]

Hm, so either houserules or some creative use of the written rules. I'm not really planning anything - I was just curious. Thanks for enlightening me.

[Matthew]

Fighting with two-weapons is the way dexterity benefits a close combat character the most. It does not replace strength, though, it just combines with it. Basically, 18 dexterity gets a fighter or thief the following:

AC: −4
Surprise: Removes three segments
Fighting with two-weapons: +0/−1

So, for example, the character can fight with a long sword (1d8 damage) and hand axe (1d6 damage) with virtually no penalty.

[ThiagoMartell]

For some reason, this reminded me of a popular story in Brazil, back in the 90s.

There was an AD&D Fighter with only Strength 10. He fought using trickery and dexterity, but felt bad since he lacked the strength bonus to attack and damage other fighters had. He survived level after level, always envying that which he did not have. Finally, the Fighter got a wish from a genie.
"I want to be the strongest fighter in the world!", he said.
And from that day forward, all fighters in the world had Strength 9.

[Scowling Dragon]

Thats cruel. Im just thinking of a disease patient in critical condition who gets weaker as he is a "Fighter".

[Toofey]

1) Spam darts. bonus points if you can talk your DM into letting you throw darts with both hands.

2).... archers?

3) houserules.

It seems like no one thought of this when making 2e, I have a house ruled WP that each slot spent on lets you apply up to +2, according to the AC bonus to dex, to attacks and damage.

[Premier]

It seems like no one thought of this when making 2e

It's not that no one thought of it, it's just that it's not a very good idea. The whole point of having six different attribute scores is to ensure that every character has strengths and weaknesses You're supposed to be a mortal adventurer with mortal limitations, far below Superman's level of prowess. High STR? Good close combat fighter. High DEX? Good ranged fighter, good thief, harder to hit. High CON? Good at surviving damage. But you won't have a high score in EVERYTHING. You WILL have weaknesses and part of the game is about learning to cope nevertheless.

But if you allow one attribute to take over the role of another - while retaining its own -, then you've just made that attribute more important than the rest and the other one less so, which is against the basic principle of the whole attribute system.

Also, it's a slippery slope. If you allow DEX to take over STR's place, what's next? Some houserule to appease high-CON, low-STR, low-DEX fighters that allows them to substitute their CON bonus for attack rolls, damage AND armour class modifier? A way to let low-WIS clerics use, I don't know, CHA or INT (or DEX) instead for extra spells? Why not just eliminate all attributes and replace them with a single Awesome score which determines everything? Then no fighter will ever be "cheated" by a low STR or CON score, no multiclass Cleric/Wizard "screwed over" by a low WIS (or INT), and no Assassin "let down" by its low DEX.

And that's not even remotely as farcical as you might believe. There ARE games with no attribute scores but instead some altogether different mechanic to determine how good you are at what you do. But that's just not D&D. On the level of core assumptions, D&D must have attribute scores, and those in turn must mean that if you have a low score in one attribute, you'll be comparatively weaker in that area.

[The Glyphstone]

3.5 survived the addition of Weapon Finesse without the utter and total collapse of the system, I don't see why AD&D couldn't. Dexterity still doesn't add to your damage, so it'd only be effective for thieves and/or archers - the sort of people who take Weapon Finesse in 3.X anyways.

[Premier]

And there are plenty of people out there, myself included, who think that 3.5E is a bad game. Not because of just this one thing, obviously, but the underlying mentality of "no player should ever suffer hardship (such as, in this case, a suboptimal ability at something)" is certainly a huge turnoff for many.

I didn't say it will "collapse the game", I said it's "bad". You disagree, you're free to hold your own personal, subjective opinion. But please don't try to imply that my opinion is somehow objectively wrong by pointing out how the game didn't turn into a black hole or something.

[The Glyphstone]

Your entire post was a detailed explanation of how any give in player flexibility would start us down the slippery slope that leads to everyone being awesome at everything with no downsides. That seemed like a pretty solid condemnation of any sort of alt-stat usage, and so I provided a solid example of a game (D&D, even if it's not your preferred edition) that provides (limited) ability to re-prioritize stats to match character concepts without falling apart, which you seem to think would happen if this was allowed in AD&D.

A lithe, agile thief who can land his backstabs without being a over-muscled hulking brute isn't exactly a gamebreaking character or an unreasonable concept, and I'd trust most DMs capable of allowing such a thing without it becoming a gateway drug into Awesomestatitude.

[Morty]

I suppose it could be said that a possibility of adding Dexterity to melee attacks might be game-breaking in AD&D. However, I think it's a flaw in the system and not in the concept. I don't think AD&D is worse than 3e, and in some respects it's better. But it's even more restrictive than 3e in terms of character concepts.
Frankly, I don't think your argument about how characters are meant to cope with weaknesses is at all relevant to the subject. It's not about building a character with no weak points. It's about making concepts that are perfectly logical and yet disallowed by the system work. An agile fighter who relies on his Dexterity and neglects Strength would still have a weakness - he would not be effective at anything that requires Strength out of combat, such as breaking bonds, pushing or carrying capacity, all of which are likely obstacles for an adventurer.

[The Glyphstone]

I suppose it could be said that a possibility of adding Dexterity to melee attacks might be game-breaking in AD&D. However, I think it's a flaw in the system and not in the concept. I don't think AD&D is worse than 3e, and in some respects it's better. But it's even more restrictive than 3e in terms of character concepts.

True, and I know for a lot of people that's part of the inherent charm/attraction. But considering how many official kits and variant classes were published for AD&D anyways, making a thief kit that allows Dexterity to modify both ranged and melee to-hit in exchange for something, I dunno what, doesn't seem like it'd be too awful.

[Morty]

I don't think it would be awful either. I don't know enough about AD&D to tell what an appropriate price would be, though. If we were to make a Fighter kit, perhaps restricting its armour proficiency would work.

[The Glyphstone]

It doesn't feel appropriate for a Fighter kit, in part because a Fighter without Strength will have no bonus damage. Thieves at least get backstab multipliers.

[Morty]

Well, no bonus damage might be an appropriate loss for getting Dexterity to melee attacks. And I mostly had warrior types in mind when I started this thread, really.

[SimperingToad]

Hopefully no one takes this as flaming, for such is not the intent certainly.

The AD&D* rules already allow the thief a bonus to his rather dextrous backstab attack: he gets a +2 'to hit' bonus above and beyond the standard +2 which all other characters enjoy for attacking from behind.

Dexterity already affects AC, reactions to surprise, and attacks with ranged weapons. It once was used to determine who struck first in the combat round. Do none of these fall into the concept of a 'lithe, agile thief?' Exactly why must melee attacks also gain a modifier?

There seems to be a misconception that adding a modifier of some kind magically makes the character able to do something he could not otherwise. How does a modifier change the way a dagger is used? Does it force the character to stop making large, overarching hacking swings like a battle axe? Of course not. It was and still is wielded the same - with quickness and agility. The AD&D rules as written actually allow multiple attacks when used against an opponent with large, unwieldy weapons. Is this not agility in action?

Adding yet another modifier does not 'free' the player or make the character concept more flexible. Imagination does. How do the players of OD&D get by with so few bonuses? They play their characters differently, not the game system.

*I'm speaking of AD&D, not AD&D2E

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Adding yet another modifier does not 'free' the player or make the character concept more flexible. Imagination does. How do the players of OD&D get by with so few bonuses? They play their characters differently, not the game system.

And if they imagine their character as a canny swashbuckler who out-fights his enemies with finesse but the actual outcome is that they fail to kill things because they have Str 6 and Dex 16 and can't hit anything in combat, then playing their characters differently won't help that fact.

Flavor and mechanics should match. If you want your thief to hit people with finesse, either flavor a high Str as fighting with precision and just dealing lots of damage when they hit a weak point, or add mechanics to a high Dex to back up the finesse flavor. If you have a low Str and don't change Dex, the flavor says you fight with finesse and the mechanics say you suck at fighting, which isn't a good thing (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GameplayAndStorySegregation).

[John Campbell]

I'm running a campaign where the characters started out as 3.P characters in Faerûn, and have been getting bounced from world to world kind of Sliders-style - and switching DMs each time we switch worlds. When I took over the game on the most recent world switch, I tossed the PCs into an AD&D 2E homebrew world, and converted the characters - who'd leveled up to 12-13 in play by this point - over to AD&D stats and mechanics. This required playing a little fast and loose with the character creation rules to keep the 2E versions true to the original characters, but I tried to do it without making them too broken.

But in particular, we have a rogue/swashbuckler/duelist rapier fighter with a very high Dex and an average Str (and I mean really average, not front-line fighter PC average). He wasn't our combat monster by any means - that was actually my ranger/barbarian, who is trapped back in the previous world for the duration of my DMing - but he was effective in a fight, even if he couldn't get Sneak Attack, and I wanted to keep him effective, particularly since I'm not big on the classic dungeon crawl loaded with traps and locked doors for the thief to disarm and open, and I don't want the player to feel useless. He's generally party face, too, but there are a lot of stretches where that's not much of a job.

Anyway, I converted him to a multiclassed (despite being human) Fighter/Thief 8/10 (levels I figured just by doing a straight-up XP transfer; the 12-13 party ended up 8-10, depending on class and multiclassing). And... I gave him a "Finesse Fighter" "combat style", which cost him a weapon proficiency slot, and lets him use his Dex missile-attack modifier on melee attacks instead of Str attack modifier, which he doesn't have anyway.

He's still easily the weakest of the PCs in combat. Lack of Str bonus to damage means that even if he gets a backstab off, which is a lot harder in AD&D than Sneak Attack in 3.x, he's only doing about as much damage as the fighter/cleric does with ordinary attacks, and he can't whip out the kind of phenomenal destruction at need that the mage can (the mage is actually currently forbidden by local law from casting spells, and has still been out-damaging the rogue with her wands). But the finesse thing means that he's at least hitting things for his 2-7 points of damage.

[Premier]

And if they imagine their character as a canny swashbuckler who out-fights his enemies with finesse but the actual outcome is that they fail to kill things because they have Str 6 and Dex 16 and can't hit anything in combat, then playing their characters differently won't help that fact.

And that's because AD&D - and let's remember this thread is about that, not "D&D in general" isn't supposed to model Three Musketeers-style swashbuckling games. It just isn't designed to do that. It sets out to run games within the conventions of a certain genre, and if you try to cram the conventions of another one into it, it will break. And that's perfectly normal: nobody tries to cram cyberpunk-style games into AD&D, either, or 20th century noir/espionage elements. It's just not the system for these things, just how it isn't the system for unarmoured swashbucklers.

And as a note, the whole notion of "the unarmoured warrior will use his dextrous litheness to dance around to slow metal-clad oaf" is nothing more than a fanciful swashbuckling genre convention. It's fictional. It is patently NOT a realistic notion, so one shouldn't demand it of AD&D on the grounds that "the game should be realistic". As it were, the game is realistic: a soldier wearing good metal armour will, by-and-large, handily defeant a soldier not wearing one.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

And that's because AD&D - and let's remember this thread is about that, not "D&D in general" isn't supposed to model Three Musketeers-style swashbuckling games. It just isn't designed to do that. It sets out to run games within the conventions of a certain genre, and if you try to cram the conventions of another one into it, it will break

I'm well aware of that, and my point is that no amount of imagining their characters differently or "playing the system, not the rules" is going to change that at all. If you want to play a lightly-armored swashbuckler instead of the usual heavily-armored soldier in a system designed to favor soldiers and discourage swashbucklers, you have three choices: you can build yourself a soldier and flavor it as a swashbuckler and have a competent character, you can change or add rules to make a swashbuckler as effective as a soldier and have a competent character, or you can build a swashbuckler by the book and have a less-than-competent character.

Change the flavor, change the rules, or be ineffective, those are your choices if you want to play an unsupported character, so adding a way to add Dex to attack and damage does in fact "free" the player to play the character they want and broaden the pool of available concepts.

[The Glyphstone]

And that's because AD&D - and let's remember this thread is about that, not "D&D in general" isn't supposed to model Three Musketeers-style swashbuckling games. It just isn't designed to do that. It sets out to run games within the conventions of a certain genre, and if you try to cram the conventions of another one into it, it will break. And that's perfectly normal: nobody tries to cram cyberpunk-style games into AD&D, either, or 20th century noir/espionage elements. It's just not the system for these things, just how it isn't the system for unarmoured swashbucklers.

And as a note, the whole notion of "the unarmoured warrior will use his dextrous litheness to dance around to slow metal-clad oaf" is nothing more than a fanciful swashbuckling genre convention. It's fictional. It is patently NOT a realistic notion, so one shouldn't demand it of AD&D on the grounds that "the game should be realistic". As it were, the game is realistic: a soldier wearing good metal armour will, by-and-large, handily defeant a soldier not wearing one.

You do realize we're discussing a game with wizards who shoot magic death rays from their fingers, giant winged fire-breathing lizards, priests who can regrow severed limbs by chanting really loudly, and literal angels and demons that hit things with swords, right? Complaining that these are okay, but the fictional archetype of the lightly armored swashbuckling hero isn't, is kind of odd to say the least.

[MeeposFire]

You do realize we're discussing a game with wizards who shoot magic death rays from their fingers, giant winged fire-breathing lizards, priests who can regrow severed limbs by chanting really loudly, and literal angels and demons that hit things with swords, right? Complaining that these are okay, but the fictional archetype of the lightly armored swashbuckling hero isn't, is kind of odd to say the least.

Further I would say that after playing the game for years that I find it highly unlikely that making mechanic that gave bonuses in melee for high dex would break the game. Heck you barely get bonuses at all for str unless you get into percentiles so assuming you gave bonuses in line with either non percentile str or dex ranged attack bonuses I don't see how this is game breaking anyway.

[LibraryOgre]

FWIW, only two stats in Hackmaster don't have a direct impact on combat: Charisma and Looks. Dex adds to your defense and your bonus to hit.

[ThiagoMartell]

And that's because AD&D - and let's remember this thread is about that, not "D&D in general" isn't supposed to model Three Musketeers-style swashbuckling games.

What about the Swashbuckler kit?

[White Tornado]

I am currently playing a fighter in our ongoing second edition game. Took the swashbuckler kit, rapier specialist and just became 5th level and rapier master (we are using the Combat & Tactics rules).

My character gains no bonuses from his Str 14, but does gain extra WP and NWP slots from his Int 16, and a bunch of bonuses from his Dex 17. He spent two slots on two-weapon fighting style specialization (again, C&T), so he can wield two rapiers at once, gaining his +3/+3 mastery bonus to all his attacks (two attacks in the 1st, 3rd, etc round, three in the 2nd, 4th etc round). If he didn't have Dex 17, I would probably also spent a slot on Ambidexterity to offset the penalty, but that's not necessary.

Besides offsetting the two-weapon penalty, I get an AC bonus of -3 and +2 to hit with missile weapons. The AC bonus is huge, most PC's in our group have high Dexterity mainly to gain the AC bonus. Combined with a leather armor and a kit benefit, I have AC 3, which is the equivalent of plate mail (without shield or Dex bonuses) without being slowed down or looking intimidating.

Because most of the others PC's are priests and rogues, I'm a freaking god of melee. So yeah, I think you can totally pull the concept off without changing any rules, as long as you use Fighters Handbook and Combat & Tactics.

I wouldn't like the rule change proposed. High Dex means you are better at dodging attacks (up to AC -4, let's not forget how huge that is), so you are busier moving around and changing directions. I would say, realistically speaking, you need all your Dexterity to prevent getting an attack penalty for all that moving and dodging you do ^_^

[Premier]

If you want to play a lightly-armored swashbuckler instead of the usual heavily-armored soldier in a system designed to favor soldiers and discourage swashbucklers, you have three choices: you can build yourself a soldier and flavor it as a swashbuckler and have a competent character, you can change or add rules to make a swashbuckler as effective as a soldier and have a competent character, or you can build a swashbuckler by the book and have a less-than-competent character.

Or... you ditch the system in favour of one that actually supports a swashbuckling gameplay. There's nothing wrong with that, and, in fact, it strikes me as the obvious option.


Change the flavor, change the rules, or be ineffective, those are your choices if you want to play an unsupported character, so adding a way to add Dex to attack and damage does in fact "free" the player to play the character they want and broaden the pool of available concepts.

and, since it's pretty much the same argument with different words:

You do realize we're discussing a game with wizards who shoot magic death rays from their fingers, giant winged fire-breathing lizards, priests who can regrow severed limbs by chanting really loudly, and literal angels and demons that hit things with swords, right? Complaining that these are okay, but the fictional archetype of the lightly armored swashbuckling hero isn't, is kind of odd to say the least.

My point of contention with this is that broadening the pool of available concepts is not necessarily a good thing. Most games, such "universal" systems as GURPS excepted, are NOT meant to allow for an unlimited scope of playstyles, adventure types or character concepts. This is a simple matter of understanding the concept of style. As Saint-Exupery said: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

This isn't just an RPG thing, but a general artistic concept. Style is defined not just by what you put in a story/book/film/game/whatever, but by what you leave out of it. You might think that giant robots are cool and awesome, but adding giant robots to The Lord of the Rings wouldn't make it even more awesome than it already is; in fact, it would ruin it, because giant robots have no place in the High Fantasy genre. A cynical noir private investigator is a cool thing to write (or play) in something inspired by The Maltese Falcon; not quite so much in a Conan short story (or RPG).

So to answer Glyphstone, all those Fireballing wizards and dragons and whatnot are parts of the stylistic and genre conventions AD&D has consciously designed to adopt. Because yes, AD&D has made a conscious decision towards a certain specific style, it wasn't just a hodgepodge of everything Gary Gygax decided to throw in the broth. (Specifically, a genre that could be described as a mixture of High Fantasy, Sword & Sorcery and Low Fantasy, acutely outlined in Appendix N.) And no, swashbuckling just isn't part of it, sorry.


What about the Swashbuckler kit?

That's 2nd edition AD&D. While the edition deserves praise for a number of things, mainly the creation of a number of intriguing campaign settings, it was nevertheless designed without the clear overarching vision of what it should be that 1st edition had. All the kit splatbooks are a sign of trying to spread everywhere, but frankly, most of the kits are not at all that interesting or superbly designed.

The Swashbuckler specifically is an interesting case in regards to the argument here, because it isn't actually a very "effective" kit in the sense 3E (and post that) players like to be. It offers absolutely no special bennies for a high Dex, it only gives you slightly more weapon proficiencies, an AC bonus when wearing no or leather armour (which will quickly get you killed, because even with the bonus you're still a lot squishier than someone wearing proper armour), and a bonus to reaction rolls from members of the opposite sex. So what it shows that even while deliberately trying to cater to people who wnat to play in a swashbuckling style, they just couldn't make it really viable.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Or... you ditch the system in favour of one that actually supports a swashbuckling gameplay. There's nothing wrong with that, and, in fact, it strikes me as the obvious option.

The obvious option if the entire group wants to do that, yes. If you're one player who wants to make a swashbuckler type in a group of people who want to play D&D, forcing everyone else to change systems isn't tenable or fair. The entire purpose of reflavoring, houseruling, etc. different character concepts in is so that you don't have to switch systems every time you want to play a slightly-out-of-genre character.

[The Glyphstone]

[i] So what it shows that even while deliberately trying to cater to people who wnat to play in a swashbuckling style, they just couldn't make it really viable.

More accurately, they chose not to make it viable. The 'Swashbuckler' kit was a bone thrown to people wanting to play a Swashbuckler without any real effort made to allow Swashbuckling as an effective fighting style.

[Toofey]

It's not that no one thought of it, it's just that it's not a very good idea. The whole point of having six different attribute scores is to ensure that every character has strengths and weaknesses You're supposed to be a mortal adventurer with mortal limitations, far below Superman's level of prowess. High STR? Good close combat fighter. High DEX? Good ranged fighter, good thief, harder to hit. High CON? Good at surviving damage. But you won't have a high score in EVERYTHING. You WILL have weaknesses and part of the game is about learning to cope nevertheless.

But if you allow one attribute to take over the role of another - while retaining its own -, then you've just made that attribute more important than the rest and the other one less so, which is against the basic principle of the whole attribute system.

Also, it's a slippery slope. If you allow DEX to take over STR's place, what's next? Some houserule to appease high-CON, low-STR, low-DEX fighters that allows them to substitute their CON bonus for attack rolls, damage AND armour class modifier? A way to let low-WIS clerics use, I don't know, CHA or INT (or DEX) instead for extra spells? Why not just eliminate all attributes and replace them with a single Awesome score which determines everything? Then no fighter will ever be "cheated" by a low STR or CON score, no multiclass Cleric/Wizard "screwed over" by a low WIS (or INT), and no Assassin "let down" by its low DEX.

And that's not even remotely as farcical as you might believe. There ARE games with no attribute scores but instead some altogether different mechanic to determine how good you are at what you do. But that's just not D&D. On the level of core assumptions, D&D must have attribute scores, and those in turn must mean that if you have a low score in one attribute, you'll be comparatively weaker in that area.


And I would put back to you the question that we should all ask ourselves when we have strong opinions about Game rules... Why does that really matter?

That house rule is fun in my game, so I use it. nuff said.

[John Campbell]

Part of the problem is that D&D's core combat mechanic is fundamentally bass-ackwards. Armor makes you harder to hit, experience makes you harder to damage (or the same damage has less effect; it amounts to the same thing). This leads to all of the combat terms existing in some weird nebulous quantum state where a "hit" might not be a hit, and a "miss" might not be a miss, and it's not entirely clear what hit points really represent, and the stat that determines your odds of hitting something is your Strength, because it's in large part representing not your ability to actually hit things, but your ability for your hits to effectively penetrate your target's armor, thus counting as a "hit" in D&D terms. (And even then it might not be a hit, because it's only wearing away some of those hit points that represent dodging ability acquired with experience, and not dealing an actual wound...)

Really, armor should not provide AC; it should provide DR. Leveling shouldn't increase your hit points much, if at all; it should instead give you an "AC" bonus, representing your increasing skill in dodging, parrying, and just not being where your opponent can effectively attack you.

And everybody should be using Dex as both attack and defense stat, leaving Str to determine if, once you've hit the bugger, if you hit him hard enough to actually hurt him through all the metal he's covered in. This is the real advantage of heavy armored fighters - not that they're difficult to hit, but that they're the next best thing to invulnerable to anything you can do to them with unassisted human muscle. And this leaves unarmored fighters with their real weakness - even if they're real dodgy, they're going to get hit sooner or later, and when you do hit them, they just kind of come apart messily. And nothing's stopping the guy in plate armor from being just as dodgy (especially in AD&D, which hasn't got never-to-be-sufficiently-cursed Dex caps)... while also being able to shrug off an axe to the face.

This doesn't work in 3.x, because of the ridiculous inflation that damage has undergone, but the old d20 Game of Thrones RPG, which is based on 3.0 but doesn't have all the sources of magic damage and ridiculous stat-inflation magic and feat power creep and so on that 3.x proper does, uses it, and it's by far the best D&D-based combat system I've ever played with. (And I'm saying this as a guy who's actually been fighting in heavy armor for nigh on twenty years.) Heavy armor is wonderful... the difference between mail and plate is the difference between a moderately strong guy with a longsword being able to hurt you with a decent damage roll, and anyone who's not giant's-blooded or swinging a two-handed weapon having to crit you to hurt you at all. And Strength is really valuable, much more valuable than Dex, because hitting somebody isn't all that hard, and dodging not all that effective (BAB goes up faster than defense bonus for almost everybody), but you need the Str to make the difference between being able to hurt the guy in even just mail with an average longsword blow, and having to roll max damage or crit him to accomplish anything at all.

AD&D's in a similar boat; damage values are much lower than in 3.x, and they don't go up much as you level. An Armor-As-DR system should work fine.

[Matthew]

Really, armor should not provide AC; it should provide DR. Leveling shouldn't increase your hit points much, if at all; it should instead give you an "AC" bonus, representing your increasing skill in dodging, parrying, and just not being where your opponent can effectively attack you.

It depends what you are trying to model. Armour should not always equate to DR, despite what might be assumed, because in fact when the enemy is armoured you try and go around the armour effectively making them harder to hit. A combination of the two is largely preferable, with the least alterations to the game. Fact is, though, a physically weak combatant is at a disadvantage, partly because speed is related to muscle.