cross-posted from: https://lemmus.org/post/20990084
32 AC, +3 Will save. Gets mind controlled and slaughters the party.
The old 3.5e frenzied berserker Barbarian was fun. If you run out of enemies while frenzying, you start attacking your own party. Had a wizard in the party with calm emotions prepared at all times just in case.
That campaign ended when we entered a cave, and a goblin archer hit me for 2 damage or something silly. Failed my will save, started frenzying. Wizard, in a panic, cast light over the archers so I could see them. My character leaped over a gap, needed an 18 to not fall to his death. Proceeded to slaughter all the goblins in 2 turns.
Wizard cast calm emotions, will save passed. Proceeded to jump over the gap again and massacre the party. Last other PC bleeding out on the floor, and goblin reinforcements arrive. My character tries to jump over the gap again, finally fails the athletics roll and falls to his death.
Nobody could breathe due to laughter for quite a bit after that. The silliest TPK I've ever seen.
AC is only line of defense; don't forget your reflexes and will can be targeted to do much worse things than just hurt you.
In Pathfinder 2e it is not true that rolling a 20 means an automatic hit. Rolling a 20 only automatically increases the degree of success by one. For example; if a character with +0 to their attack rolls a 19 versus an AC of 30 it results in a critical miss (19 is more than 10 below the target number). If they roll a 20 however it gets upgraded by one level and becomes a regular miss.
While true, it basically never happens that such a massive power imbalance would happen in a real campaign outside of either a set-piece where a PC tries to punch a god, or a comedic moment where a toddler tries to slap a PC. You're basically never going to see a 30 point difference between AC and +to hit.
In combat, yes, you probably won't see it. The same rule (in Pathfinder, not D&D 5e with rules as written) applies to other skill checks. It's part of why I like Pathfinder 2e more. People think of D&D as "the easy to learn game", but I disagree. P2e is more consistent. D&D 5e you have you learn tons of exceptions, and things like attacks behaving differently than skill checks, and all kinds of dumb things.
The reason why I love the 10 point difference rule is that it makes every buff on your allies and every debuff on your enemies feel super impactful. A bard in DnD giving a +1 to hit feels very meh, but a bard in pf2e doing the same thing gets to be like "I did that! I'm helping!" when an ally crits on an 18 instead of a 19 due to that +1.
Plus the bard is able to continually give that bonus in PF2E and it just works. I can't tell you how many times I gave out inspiration dice in 5e only for the player to either forget it or bank it like it was wheels of cheese in Skyrim, only to be wasted with the end of yhe encounter.
5e bards suck. PF2E bards are awesome, and easily the one of most useful choices for a party of 5+ players
Of course, that was just for demonstration.
Though after a campaign has hit level ~8 or so it can be a fun reward to players to let them just squash a group of 1st level mooks as a kind of reminder of how far they've come since 1st level. At 9th level it's reasonable to have +20 to your attack, and an NPC only has an AC of 10..
Ever since I've seen and played systems were armor is damage reduction instead of damage avoidance, AC became silly :)
Yeah, dnd's "armor as avoidance" is really unsatisfying to me now. That and how you can beat their AC by 15 and then roll minimum damage. At least pf2e addresses that.
I want to be able to mechanically distinguish between "hard to hit" and "hard to damage", and DND generally doesn't deliver.
That pose on second panel is recognisable everywhere.
stupid yamcha. too much time getting fellatio and not enough training/being a different species
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