- fez_machine
- Nov 27, 2004
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Can someone talk to me about the game design behind "saving throws" and defending against spells in general for D&D-esque games?
I understand that some sort of chance to resist a debilitating effect is necessary, since such things tend to be more powerful than raw damage. I also understand that there's some sort of expectation built around (direct damage) spells being defended against by a stat that's NOT Armor Class.
What I'm not quite getting is "a successful save causes half damage, a failed save causes full damage", apart from simply being the way that such a thing has always been done.
To add context, I was tinkering with math and spreadsheets over the weekend, trying to figure out how much damage a "caster"-type enemy should be dealing to the players with a generic "he shoots you with a blast of energy" attack, since the "DPR vs AC" calculations were obviously going to be different. As I was computing average damage between "full damage, failed save hits" and "half damage, successful save hits", it just struck me that there wasn't really any particular rhyme or reason why it had to be like that.
I could justify a "Spell Defense" number that was separate from AC so that the Fighter-type character wasn't necessarily less vulnerable to a Fireball than a Wizard, but why not just boil that down to a plain hit-or-miss mechanic?
Because spell damage was really loving lethal in the early editions, and to make things a tad less insta-death saving throws against spells had to happen.
Also because D&D started out as war game and Wizards are siege weapons/tanks/artillery pieces so of course they have glancing hits, don't always do full damage and more likely to miss than hit.
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Dec 1, 2014 13:07
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May 10, 2024 14:30
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- fez_machine
- Nov 27, 2004
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Watch out for fascist mind control revisionism in the books, according to our good friend who never read them, the Pundit.
The only revisionism in the book, unfortunately, is the continued statements that 4e D&D was a commercial and creative failure.
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Dec 20, 2014 05:19
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Dec 1, 2014 13:07
