How to Balance Things Out

[Chester]

Hello!

Refresher course: my group of 5 plays on a rotating DM schedule. I'm up soon.

However, I've noticed some imbalance when it comes to taking damage etc. Our party looks like this:

Warforged Barbarian / Fighter -- my character, the party tank. Can take a hit.
Human Fighter / Artificer -- high AC allows him to follow me into battle for support.
Elan Transmuter / Psion -- uses Increased Elan Resilience to avoid damage.
Human Paladin of Freedom / Sorcerer -- our secondary / support combatant
Human Monk / Cleric -- also support.

Here's the issue with balance:My character can take a hit. The Artificer's AC is high enough that he is rarely hit. The Psion does not take damage due to his Resilience. Hence, the Paladin and the Cleric are the only two party members who have been seriously injured or dropped below zero HP.

Are there any suggestions to up the element of danger for the "tough" characters and "share the wealth," so to speak?

[LudicSavant]

Hello!

Refresher course: my group of 5 plays on a rotating DM schedule. I'm up soon.

However, I've noticed some imbalance when it comes to taking damage etc. Our party looks like this:

Warforged Barbarian / Fighter -- my character, the party tank. Can take a hit.
Human Fighter / Artificer -- high AC allows him to follow me into battle for support.
Elan Transmuter / Psion -- uses Increased Elan Resilience to avoid damage.
Human Paladin of Freedom / Sorcerer -- our secondary / support combatant
Human Monk / Cleric -- also support.

Here's the issue with balance:My character can take a hit. The Artificer's AC is high enough that he is rarely hit. The Psion does not take damage due to his Resilience. Hence, the Paladin and the Cleric are the only two party members who have been seriously injured or dropped below zero HP.

Are there any suggestions to up the element of danger for the "tough" characters and "share the wealth," so to speak?

High AC? Use attacks that don't target AC. Or even just more accurate attacks.

Soak a lot of hp damage? Use attacks that don't target hp. Or even just attacks that deal higher hp damage.

Also, Resilience requires an immediate action. That means he can't do a darned thing if he's flat-footed or has already used up his immediate action. Just hit him with multiple attacks or while he's unable to take immediate actions.

The thing about having any one defense high is that attacks in D&D can target different defenses. A truly resilient character needs to have highly diversified countermeasures. Simply having high AC, for instance, is not a strong defense against anything except attacks that target AC.

[RoboEmperor]

Pardon my language, but what you're doing might be a "****" move.

In one of my games a guy invested everything into AC to be the party's tank. He couldn't really do any damage but it worked. Was still not enough though. Against grells who have crazy number of attacks each they would crit once a turn on average and he would still lose about half his hp every fight.

The DM got pissed that only crits would hurt the guy, so he intentionally changed all the monsters to dire wolves and skeleton trolls or ettins, monsters who can land a hit on the guy, and we got slaughtered, party wiped shortly after. The DM later admitted what he did. It was the undermountain campaign by the way, we got party wiped twice already which is why we pulled the optimized high ac dwarf for a level 2 party.

What he did was also totally unnecessary because in the next level, half the enemies had save-or-dies. We got party wiped there too.

Anyways, back on topic.
1. Dire wolves have +11 attack and is only a CR3 monster. They will tear apart low level parties way past level 3.
2. Any kind of skeleton really. Their CR skydives downward when they become skeletons. Young Adult Red Dragon Skeleton is CR8 and has +17 and +12 attacks. Cloud Giant is CR7 and has a whopping +28 to grapple. Troll Skeletons are CR3 and has +8 attack.
3. Save-or-dies. Drow poison, charm person, etc.
4. Spells that target touch ac.

Any kind of spell really. Your party getting greased can really do a lot of damage.

What I was trying to say before was, it's fine if there's no threat of danger if the party is doing everything correctly. You should punish their carelessness or mistakes. If you want to give them a challenge so they're fighting for their life every fight, then remember, they're gonna make mistakes and then get slaughtered as a result.

Some players like feeling powerful, invincible, so if you scale up the fights to make them feel normal or weak, they're gonna complain that the world shouldn't change because of their character build. It's like giving every enemy gear that resists sonic damage only when a player focuses solely on sonic damage. He's gonna throw a fit because he went sonic damage because it's the least resisted type.