Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 4055
Joined: Tuesday, 10th January 2012, 19:49
Re: Shield reform proposal discussion
The situations where you are getting attacked by more than one enemy per turn and you cannot move to a place where this won't happen and you are actually in danger of dying are rare and tend to be really bad situations anyway. You might run into a centaur pack in open space (and in this case a shield is still much better than no shield until you close the gap). That's about it. Stuff like standing next to multiple yaktaurs is fine: yaktaur melee is not very scary unless they found a good melee weapon. Standing next to an orc knight and five orcs is fine: the orc knight is the only dangerous enemy there, and if a single orc knight is scary enough to threaten to kill you then you can move to somewhere where he's the only enemy attacking. So this leaves multiple-attack enemies: mainly various trolls, occasionally hydrae (most characters don't have a shield in lair anyway), some uniques. Personally I think it's ok if shields are less effective against the later attacks, the strongest attack always comes first anyway in a single monster's attack order.
Even in open spaces like much of lair as long as you have corners and obstacles you can usually end up fighting one enemy at a time, though you might be moving a dozen steps between attacks.
The main drawbacks to wearing a shield are these: 1) you cannot use a twohander 2) they hurt spellcasting. These are obviously balanced by the extra defense. The extra defense is noticeable, but so is the loss of damage.
The fact that there is not a lot of incentive to use non-buckler shields is probably a problem but this proposal doesn't seem to me to do much to address this ... big shields will still have the same problem of being awful for characters who kill things unless you get a lot of skill.
My suspicion is that changing shields so that they are equally effective against all attacks in a turn but not telling anyone wouldn't even get noticed for quite a while.