Armor Class is a Sucker's Game in Pathfinder (Here's A Way To Beat It)

Combat in RPGs, when boiled down to its bare essentials, comprises trying to hit the enemy as hard and as often as you can while attempting not to get hit yourself. While there are a lot of different mechanics for this throughout the gaming spectrum, Pathfinder opts for the passive defense mechanism of armor class. You take your Dexterity modifier, the value of your armor, the value of your shield (if you have one), unique feats and class features, magic items, protective spells, circumstance bonuses, and you add all of those up to determine how good an attack needs to be to actually hit you.

Pretty standard stuff, really.

Crap.

If you've played a long-running campaign, though, then you know armor class is a sucker's game the longer the story goes on. And as someone whose characters draw critical hits like a magnet draws iron, I'd like to share some of what I've learned on the subject of making sure you don't get smashed to a pulp whenever initiative is rolled.

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Diminishing Returns on Your AC

Let's lay some foundational points, here. I'm not saying that armor class is a bad mechanic. I'm not saying that it's broken, or that you shouldn't use it at your table. What I am saying, though, is that if you want your armor class to actually provide a lot of protection as you level up then it's basically the only thing you're going to be investing your resources in to allow you to keep pace with your enemies.

You spent HOW much on that?!

I'll give you a perfect example from my recent Rise of The Runelords playthrough. For that campaign I was running a paladin with a Dexterity focus. At lower levels all it took was decent armor and a shield to avoid getting hit a majority of the time. Sometimes the GM got in a lucky shot, but the character sometimes went through entire encounters with barely a scratch. By the time the party's level hit double digits, though, it didn't matter how high my armor class was. I had enchanted armor, a boosted Dexterity bonus, natural armor, a shield bonus, deflection modifiers, boost spells from the party enchanter, and the huge bonus from active smite on a target, and I was still practically guaranteed to tank at least 2 hits per big bad per round.

Why the change?

Well, part of it is that once you hit high single digits to double digits for character level, you start dealing with one big threat a lot more often than you do squads of smaller threats. While one big threat stands less of a chance of winning (because the party gets more actions, and is therefore more likely to cream that single enemy), these enemies tend to have huge attack bonuses that are practically guaranteed to hit at least once when they unload on a PC. And it's usually more, which can be a problem if those hits are all targeted at one PC instead of spread out among the party. Or, even worse, enemies tend to pack potent magic that targets your touch AC or your saving throws (thus ignoring a lot of buffs), or they opt to try to grapple characters, which targets your combat maneuver defense instead of your armor class.

So, to sum up, the higher your character level gets the less often enemies rely on purely physical attacks to harm you... and when they do rely on physical attacks, they tend to come from massive enemies with huge bonuses to hit so that even the tankiest of tanks is going to lose a hefty chunk of hit points by the time the GM is done rolling dice.

Thinking Beyond Armor Class

Now, for the record, I'm not saying you shouldn't invest in your armor class. Getting a good AC is going to save you from a lot of damage over the long-term, and you'll often be able to shrug off attacks from smaller minions, traps, and other sources of damage that can still pose a serious danger if you go running into battle with nothing but a bedsheet and a buckler.

All right, I'm ready. Let's do this!

There are three categories of defense that I find a lot of players don't invest in, but they can often provide you far more protection than spending all of your gold to get the best magical amulets, shields, cloaks, and armor you can find to boost your armor class. Those areas are:

- Attack Negation

- Miss Chance

- Damage Reduction

The first category is, admittedly, one of the rarest out there. Not only that, but it tends to be pretty narrow in its application. However, this covers class abilities like the swashbuckler or duelist parry, as well as feats like Deflect Arrows, Missile Shield, and Ray Shield. It also covers feats like Snake Style, Cut From The Air and Smash From The Air as well. The idea is that these abilities directly counter an attack that might otherwise hit you, allowing you to use your own prowess instead of relying on your armor class. These abilities tend to have a small pool of uses (they require you to spend attacks of opportunity, or they only function once per round), but they are ideal for characters with high attack bonuses (or just Improved Unarmed Strike) who want to use that offense as a defense.

These don't help much with magical attacks, of course. For that you need a counterspell, or for the caster to miss you entirely... which is where the second category comes in.

Miss chance is what happens when an attack should hit, but due to poor lighting, a magical effect, etc., there's a percentage chance that it doesn't land. You've got either a 20 percent miss chance for concealment, or a 50 percent miss chance for total concealment... and these are going to be far more effective than pumping all your money into your AC just to eke out another 1-4 points that won't stop you from getting your teeth knocked out.

This can be done at all levels, depending on the situation you're involved in. A first level tiefling when fighting humans can use their darkness spell-like ability to lower the lighting conditions in an area, granting themselves a 20 percent miss chance due to concealment. Orcs fighting in total darkness in a cavern can get a 50 percent miss chance if they snuff all the lights in an area. Tossing down a smoke stick creates a cloud of vapor that makes attacks pretty likely to miss you, and is a good strategy if you're all sitting ducks in a hallway with an archer or a blaster at the other end. An invisible character gets that 50 percent miss chance, while a blurred one gets the 20. Magic items like a cloak of displacement are going to be worth more than their cost in terms of blood and suffering when it comes to how much pain they save you. And what's even better is that a miss chance can often save you from precision damage like sneak attack, meaning that even if the rogue or assassin manages to strike a blow, that mountain of d6s isn't going to accompany it.

While some would argue that mirror image isn't technically a miss chance spell, I'll remind folks about it here, because it is a life saver.

What if they don't miss, and you can't block?

If that blow does land, and you're going to take damage, there's still one more trick you can keep up your sleeve... damage reduction.

Damage reduction is usually something monsters get, but players can get their hands on it as well. The most common examples are when it's a class feature, which you see with barbarians, bloodragers, and some fighter and monk archetypes (such as the one I used for my Luke Cage character conversion). Anyone who've ever played a high level barbarian can tell you that ticking off a dozen points of damage that you just don't have to take adds up over the course of a fight. Adamantine armor also grants damage reduction, and spells like defending bone (one of my personal favorites) will also take some of the hits for you. If you have a divine caster who really likes you then you might be able to get them to use shield other on you. Or if you get a familiar, then one with the Protector archetype can do much the same thing around level 5 as long as the two of you are touching.

Layered Defense Works Best

There is no way to completely avoid taking damage in Pathfinder. Sooner or later a lucky shot, an area of effect spell, a trap, or an invisible assassin is going to make you bleed. However, you're going to have far more flexibility (and get screwed far less often) if you can create a layered defense against the threats you're facing.

The first layer of that defense is your armor class, and while it will stop some attacks, there's no way it will stop all of them. An active defense might cut some arrows out of the air, or parry some strikes, but it won't stop every shot coming your way. A miss chance might mean that even a few of the ones that do get through fly harmlessly past. And, lastly, even if the blow manages to land, damage reduction can chop that number down so that it's barely a flesh wound.

This isn't perfect either. Area of effect spells that require Reflex saves are still going to be something you need to contend with, Will saves are going to be a serious threat, and while a miss chance might stop you from getting grappled or tripped, none of the others will affect those attacks. Choking gas clouds, fear effects, an inability to reach flying enemies, illusions... there are still dozens of different challenges and threats you'll need to be ready for.

So keep that in mind before you start feeling too invincible.

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Operator Error is The Biggest Cause of Problems in RPGs

How many times have you been involved in an argument with another player, or even a DM, regarding something happening in your game? How many times did you decide to open the manual, read the section in question, and find out that neither of you were right? Or, alternatively, how many times have you read a section you haven't looked at in a while, and discovered you'd been running a class feature incorrectly for the past six sessions?

My dad was an engineer, and he had a word for this. He called it operator error, and in my own judgment, it's responsible for at least half of the problems people seem to have at their gaming tables.

Shit, my bad, Dave. I've been reading this chart upside down for three sessions.

This may sound simplistic, but you can solve most of your problems by actually opening up the book, and reading what the rules actually say. As opposed to what you think they say, or what your old DM told you they were.

Your Memory is Untrustworthy

Do you know what the least accurate form of evidence in a criminal trial is? The one that is least likely to actually get at the truth of what happened? You might be surprised, but it's eyewitness testimony.

This is my surprised face.

The reason eyewitness testimony is the next best thing to useless is that humans do not have very accurate recollections about details. The sheer number of people who have been exonerated by DNA, and other factual evidence, from sentences given to them based on eyewitness testimony speaks loudly enough on that score. And if it is that hard for people to remember the color of a car involved in a hit-and-run accident, or the facial features of a gunman who robbed them, why would your brain be any better behaved when it comes to remembering whether your bard provides a competence bonus, or a morale bonus?

That's why you should always crack the book, and double check. Because an ounce of preparation is worth a pound of cure in this situation.

You Save Time, Energy, and Ultimately, Face

The longer you play RPGs, the more rules there are to remember. It's perfectly natural for your brain to cross wires and confuse an old 3.5 rule with something in Pathfinder, or to think there was something in the old World of Darkness that made it's way into the new setting when it didn't. Those things happen. Add house rules and playing with different groups into the mix, and you are constantly wading through a morass of half-remembered rules where you find yourself constantly saying, "I know it's in here... somewhere..."

Happy hunting, friend.

You don't need to do this with everything of course. Most of us remember how to roll an attack, make a skill check, and other things that come up every game session. But it pays to sit down and read through the other rules from time to time in order to refresh yourself. Not skipping and skimming, mind you, but actually reading them in their entirety. Also, as I said in my post How to Stop Rules Lawyers From Ruining Your Tabletop Game, you should always go to the book whenever there is a disagreement.

Once you have the rule in question in front of you, and you can read the text out loud, that clears up most problems. When it doesn't clear up a problem, though, that is when the DM weighs in and provides an interpretation for the rules. It's short, simple, and to the point.

It should be mentioned, though, that a DM should rule on what the text actually says instead of getting caught up in semantics and personal opinions. Vital Strike, for instance, is not bound by the same rules as sneak attack. All it does is allow you to take the potential of a full-round attack, condense it into a single swing, and hit extra hard as a standard action. Power Attack already existed, so they had to call it something else. Sneak attack in Pathfinder, despite the name of the class feature, doesn't require the character to be invisible, or to attack from hiding. It simply states that when the target is denied their dexterity bonus, or flanked, that the sneak attacker can hit a vital spot to do extra damage. Only creatures with alien anatomies, incorporeal bodies, and a select few other immunities won't take this damage.

Avoid operator error by opening the book, checking the index, and finding the rule in question. If possible, do all the necessary research before you get to the table, and inform the DM (or the player, if you're the one running the game) how a class feature, spell, feat, etc. actually works. Write it down on your character sheet for future reference, or if the entry is too long, note the page number where the rule is located for quick access.

I guarantee that if you do this your games will run smoother, more regularly, and that your arguments over mechanics will drop. They probably won't go away entirely, but there will be a lot fewer of them.

That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday post. Hopefully it helps folks who have been wondering how to minimize "spirited discussion," but who haven't instituted an "open book" policy to solve it. If you'd like to help support Improved Initiative so I can keep bringing content just like this to you week after week, then stop by The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page. Just pledge $1 a month, and you'll receive both my undying gratitude, and some sweet gaming swag. Lastly, if you haven't followed me on Facebook, Tumblr, or Twitter yet, now would be a great time to start!