My second unresolved Mystery of Elder Scrolls Past-- Acrobats in Arena. The rules say they're supposed to deduct a chance from the opponent's chance of hitting, making them harder to fight, but as far as I've seen from both fighting acrobat NPC's and playing an acrobat, there's no difference in their defense abilites from any other characters. Is there anyone who's got a copy of the Codex Scientia who can tell for sure? I've seen a listing of the percentages for critical strikes by class per level-- does the supposed defense bonus of the Acrobat class work the same way, so much per level? I've never been able to get an Acrobat character to survive long enough to get to a very high level, so, maybe their defense bonus has never been very big. These are the sorts of mathematical questions they were likely to put into the Codex Scientia.

Thanks!

My second unresolved Mystery of Elder Scrolls Past-- Acrobats in Arena. The rules say they're supposed to deduct a chance from the opponent's chance of hitting, making them harder to fight, but as far as I've seen from both fighting acrobat NPC's and playing an acrobat, there's no difference in their defense abilites from any other characters. Is there anyone who's got a copy of the Codex Scientia who can tell for sure?

I don't have the Codex. That out of the way...

I wouldn't believe what it said any more or any less than I would believe the Arena manual; the source is probably the same, and at the very least equally believable. BTW, I believe the Arena manual; why not? Note that if you wanted to test this empirically, it would be extremely difficult to determine. Say Acrobats had an AC 1 point less than other Thief classes (i.e., they were in theory harder to hit). You would have to do a rather large number of attacks to an Acrobat and to an NPC with a normal Thief AC before you could say with any high percentage of certainty the relative "hittability" of those two NPCs. And even then you can't be sure you're making a worthwhile comparison for the purpose of determining an Acrobat's AC. To do it right, you'd need a few thousand attacks against every type of NPC. Not gonna happen, I'm guessing!

The only way to know for sure is to hack the code and find the class setups. I don't think anyone's ever done that.