An elegant design solution

After reading this article at rpg.net about cheap ways to launch a tabletop gaming company, I decided to download Scribus and use that for formatting my books.

The biggest problem is I don't seem to have a backup of my latest builds. I only have PDFs of my most recent changes. So I'm having to copy and past, page by page, and paste the text into the text boxes on a document, then properly align them (when I paste, it seems to add characters that shouldn't be in there or spaces that shouldn't be there, and all the alignment and bolding of text is gone). 

I spent 6 hours doing it yesterday, and only got about 80 pages done. The player handbook has 400 pages. So that's 4 days of work.

Another problem I have is with the Accuracy rolls, and it's a problem that needs an elegant solution in order to satisfy my design sensibilities. 

The problem is that when I add up the max Defense roll a well geared level 1 player character can make, this value is 13 points higher than the highest Accuracy roll a well geared level 1 character can actually make. This means characters fully decked out in plate armor are basically impossible to hit, unless the character lands a critical blow.

The easiest solution to the problem is to simply add a base value of +13 to the base accuracy roll, but this offends my design sensibilities because no other roll has a base value that high. So it breaks a pattern and I want my design to have patterns that apply in all situations as much as possible, without weird things like "Accuracy rolls need a base value of 13 at all times" to make the mechanics work.

Plus, if Accuracy rolls ALWAYS have a +13 value, then characters wearing nothing but "light" armor will always get hit no matter what, as their Defense roll range is 13 to 23. An Accuracy roll would be 13 + 2d6, creating a range from 15 to 25. So that character will always get hit, unless they manage to critically defend by rolling a 12 or the attacker rolls a critical miss by rolling a 2. And I don't like that. Only a well geared character should be able to land a blow all the time on light geared characters, not someone who is just throwing a punch at them (Weapon Power is added as a bonus to Accuracy in my system, so it's a problem if a character without a weapon can always land blows against characters wearing even light armor).

The solution I'm considering implementing is adding a bonus to Weapon proficiency feats. Normally in a d20 / OGL system, having a Weapon Proficiency means you don't have a penalty to the roll where you have to deduct several points. So let's say you roll a 6 while swinging a sword. If your character is not proficient with swords, you must shave off -2 points from 6, so your roll is actually a 4. 

Instead of having a penalty, I can make it so having a Proficiency with swords grants you a +2 bonus, so your roll of a 6 without a proficiency remains 6, but with the proficiency you had a +2 bonus to 6, making 8.

Adding a bonus to proficiency rather than removing a penalty cannot be the whole solution, though. Again, if I made it so having a proficiency granted a +13 bonus that would make it so every character with a proficiency is always hitting lightly armored characters. So instead what I'll do is be crafty; 

-- A weapon proficiency awards a +4 bonus to Accuracy rolls. 

-- A character can invest skill points into Weapon Technique skills, increasing the accuracy bonus of using that skill. This will now be the primary method of attacking with weapons, and just regularly "swinging a sword" won't be something they do all the time. Instead they'll have "double swing" or "hard slash" or whatever, and these can be used every turn with no cooldown. At level 1, the character can invest a total of 6 points into a Weapon skill. 

--Classes that are melee oriented will have a talent at the start of their talent trees that add a +3 bonus to all Accuracy rolls with weapon attacks. 

Combined together, we now have our 13 missing points and the system works and it works in an elegant way while hiding the mathematical issues from the players. Instead they feel like their characters are getting stronger, when actually they need to have this stuff for the system to work. 

It does have the impact of making it so non-melee classes cannot normally land a blow on well armored characters (they need to make a critical hit to do so) but that is acceptable to me, because only characters that are melee weapon experts should be able to have a decent chance of landing a blow on a character decked out in full platemail. 

So Warriors, Vagrants and Hunters will be able to land blows on heavily armored characters with a good degree of chance.

Nobles, Servants, Doctors, Minstrels and Dancers need to land critical blows on heavily armored characters, or use magic attacks to get around the high Def values. 

Balance. Success. 

Now I just need to design the Defense and Accuracy values for NPCs so they scale well.