Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
"PD" was "Passive Defense". Even if you took no Active Defense you could roll agaisnt your Passive Defense to stop an attack. With PD3 or 4 from a shield and another 3 or 4 from armor (even without magic) it wasn't a huge chcne but it ws better than nothing.
The important bit was that when you did take an Active Defense you added your PD to your total defense and rolled v. that. There was no "add" to your Parry in the basic calculations so if you had Broadsword-16 and Combat Reflexes your total Parry was still only 9 or less if you had no armor or shield. With armor and shield you could easily hit 15 or less.
You will note from the above example that with combat normalized for users of both armor and shields, combat without these aids worked very, very poorly. 3e sprouted a lot of kludges over the years trying to mitigate these problems but gained more problems with the solutions. 4e came as close to jettisoning the concept of PD as it could retaining only DB you gain from a shield or magic.
If you wonder what you were suppsed to viaulize PD doing that was asomehat mysterious. When you got to UT it actually was Deflector Shields granting you or your spaceship a bonus to all active Defenses.
I don't miss PD and I doubt many others do either. Not having to deal with PD is a good reason to not go back to 3e.
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Was dodge still Half DX +3?