How important is DR?

[EastbySoutheast]

So at level 1 the War forged fighter with adamantine body is very good at shrugging off hits due to a high AC for his level and some damage reduction that is near unheard of at 1st.

But here's my question how important is DR as you gain levels? Is there a good amount to have for all character types? And how much should you be looking for?

[Karl Aegis]

It's better to be immune to an effect than to reduce the effectiveness. Try not to take damage in the first place. Most likely you'll accomplish this by killing whatever gets close in one hit or forcing them to not be able to attack.

[Amphetryon]

So at level 1 the War forged fighter with adamantine body is very good at shrugging off hits due to a high AC for his level and some damage reduction that is near unheard of at 1st.

But here's my question how important is DR as you gain levels? Is there a good amount to have for all character types? And how much should you be looking for?

This is going to vary considerably based on the types of encounters you typically face. DR is considerably better if you often face attackers with multiple sources of relatively smaller damage per round, than if you face attackers who rely on fewer swings of big honkin' piles of damage. So, for instance, dealing with a bunch of critters with a Claw/Claw/Bite routine (say, 1d4+2/1d4+2/1d6+3) is a bit more manageable if you have DR 2/- to remove 6 damage from the total, but if you're dealing with a bunch of Greatsword-wielding Power Attack Fighters with a single swing, that same DR 2/- only removed 2 damage from the 2d6+6 incoming damage.

As you increase in level and face adversaries with more and more additional modifiers they can add to their damage rolls, DR becomes harder and harder to make meaningful, due to extrapolations of the sort of math in the preceding paragraph. When your opponent is swinging 6d6 +20 per attack, for 3 attacks, even DR 10/- is often going to feel inadequate. . . and that assumes the enemies are using a method of attack that cares about your DR.

[atemu1234]

DR is described by the people who -made- 3e and 3.5e as a "you must be this tall" system to prevent damage, in some dragon magazine article. Granted, this used to be worse (they thought of it as a fix at first for the immune to [non-x] weapons, and when they made 3.5 they realized that they still did it badly, and shifted from DR Y/+X to DR Y/Magic).

I still don't like it very much, mostly because the system penalizes characters that already have a difficult time doing damage. Mainly melee. If you have the right weapon, combat is too easy. If you don't, it becomes a pain in certain ventral areas extremely quickly.

As you level up, the DR will become far less useful, as damage vastly outstrips any scaling a PC's DR will receive. Also, magic is still a thing.

[sleepyphoenixx]

DR isn't all that effective on player characters. Most enemies that are physical threats do their damage in big chunks, so the overall reduction isn't that great.
It's not something i'd go out of my way to get. Temporary HP are preferable imo since they work regardless of how big the hits are and also work against spells.


I still don't like it very much, mostly because the system penalizes characters that already have a difficult time doing damage. Mainly melee. If you have the right weapon, combat is too easy. If you don't, it becomes a pain in certain ventral areas extremely quickly.

Melee characters don't have problems doing damage (if properly built). They have problems doing almost anything else worthwhile that casters don't do easier, better and/or with less investment of build resources.
DR is still easier to get past than energy resistances, and those aren't exactly uncommon either. It's just that casters don't have to pay for attacks with different energy types and have other attack forms beside that.
For a 2H melee with PA it's a minor bump, TWFers and archers tend to have more trouble unless they get some decent bonus damage.

[nedz]

It's a bit like having more HP; though it can help if you face attacks with riders which affect you should you take any damage, e.g. poison, this this is very situational.

[Necroticplague]

It becomes less important. DR doesn't stack, while a lot of damage bonus does, so increased damage will rapidly outstrip you ability to improve your DR. It's easier to just pick up things that make your amount of HP irrelevant to your toughness.

[Red Fel]

I'm going to summarize, because I agree with a lot of what's been said.


This is going to vary considerably based on the types of encounters you typically face. DR is considerably better if you often face attackers with multiple sources of relatively smaller damage per round, than if you face attackers who rely on fewer swings of big honkin' piles of damage.

This is the first point. DR does better against smaller, repetitive amounts of damage than large amounts, because it shaves a bit off of each. That said...


It becomes less important.

This is the second point. DR, like AC, becomes less valuable as enemies grow stronger. As they deal more damage, your DR shaves off less and less, proportionally. As enemies start to use more spells and SLAs, which ignore DR altogether, DR becomes increasingly irrelevant. DR, like AC and HP, does nothing to protect you from a save-or-suck or save-or-die effect.


It's better to be immune to an effect that to reduce the effectiveness.

This is the final point. As mentioned, there are a lot of things from which DR doesn't protect you. When you consider weapons which can overcome your DR, spells and spell-like effects, and various other sources of pain, DR doesn't seem like an awful lot. Even SR, which becomes more relevant as enemies use spells and SLAs more, is just a threshold to be overcome by powerful enemies. By contrast, things like miss chance - which can completely negate an attack - remain relevant even at high levels. The ability to reduce damage to nonlethal damage (e.g. via Regeneration), the ability to completely ignore certain types of damage (such as energy immunity or ability damage immunity), and similar ways to shut down attacks, will serve you far better in the endgame than the ability to shave some damage off of a nonmagical weapon attack. It is better to have a "nope" button than a "yes but" button.

AC has some merit, inasmuch as it gives enemy attacks a chance of failing to hit you. But even AC doesn't scale well. HP is valuable, inasmuch as it allows you to soak some damage when you do get hit. But the best thing is to be able to completely negate damage. DR at low levels is cute. At high levels, invest in miss chance.

[Flickerdart]

Something to mention is that claw/claw/bite is not the only source of multiple low-damage attacks. Fighting 20 low-level orcs works in much the same way, so if your DM loves sending hordes of weenies against you, DR works nicely. Not that anyone needs help against weenies, but between many dice giving them higher chance of crits and distributed HP making it harder to spike-damage the encounter into oblivion, there's something to be said for a weenie encounter and your DR will help you get out unscathed. This is why DR works so well on monsters - the PCs are the weenies in that situation.

The other thing is that injury poison must deal damage to affect you, so DR can often stop annoying poison attacks. But this is also situational - unless you spend much your time fighting snakes, it won't come up a lot.

[Zaq]

DR is pretty useful in an E6 campaign, because in E6, damage doesn't usually scale so high as to make DR totally irrelevant. (There are exceptions, certainly; it doesn't work perfectly against everyone. But it works often enough to be valuable.)

Outside of E6, though, it's almost impossible to get DR high enough to actually protect you against anything that matters. WotC highly overvalued DR, so it's really hard to get it to scale (it doesn't stack, and most sources of it that scale naturally scale really, really slowly), and it tends to be very expensive (in gold or levels or feats) to get it in the first place. Damage bonuses keep scaling, though, so DR steadily becomes less and less useful as you progress in levels.

That's not to say that it's never useful, but unless your GM is going easy on you, I don't think it's viable to have DR be your character's primary source of defense.

[Metahuman1]

It's extremely useful at low levels if you can have it. Course, Low levels have this knack of being a meat grinder. It will become less substantial at high levels, though not totally useless against enemy's of the "Lot's of shots with lesser damage" school of though or against very large numbers of weaker enemy's, which a fair number of DM's like for the cinematic value of fighting of an army.