sanka wrote:Maybe I misunderstood something, I have tried to refer to the fact that GDR is significant for single, big damage while your proposal sounds to be weak there, but very strong against multiple weaker attacks.
The title isn't just "Replace GDR", it's "Replace AC/GDR". Being "more effective against multiple weaker attacks" is a characteristic of current AC.
Furthermore, if you think of AC as more effective against multiple weaker attacks than single strong ones, then you must necessarily think of current GDR as equally effective against all attacks up to a certain point (the point where you don't have enough AC to fully use your GDR percentage against the attack), otherwise you are being inconsistent. In the most charitable case for "AC is better against weaker attacks and GDR is better against stronger attacks", AC reduces all affected damage by the same absolute value on average, and GDR reduces all affected damage by the same relative value. This allows "AC is better against weaker attacks and GDR is the same against all attacks" if you measure by relative reduction, and it allows "AC is the same against all attacks and GDR is better against stronger attacks" if you measure by absolute reduction, but it doesn't allow both, barring some kind of mathematically nonsensical combination of absolute damage and relative damage.
In the less charitable, and more realistic case, AC and GDR are actually closer together; because you cannot take negative damage, AC's absolute and relative reduction is lower than "expected" for weaker attacks (any attack that does less damage than you have AC), and GDR's absolute and relative reduction is lower than "expected" for stronger attacks (any attack that does more than AC/2 damage).
And let's be clear. GDR is literally a minimum AC roll. The actual value of that minimum changes based on some fairly wacky things (it's been giving the wrong results for monsters with weapons since day 1), but a minimum AC roll is exactly what GDR is. If your AC roll is below X, it gets set to X.
I'm aware there is a popular misinterpretation of GDR where people think that this minimum value, instead of just being a minimum, is
added to your AC roll. That probably
should be the case in this new system, since having a distribution where a single number is far more likely than the rest is silly. But tabstorm avoided actually specifying that.