Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
And control over tactics is a good thing, which is not incompatible with preventing stun spamming. You obviously wouldn't put stuns and such at AC+4, you'd put "half speed" or "deafened for a round," saving stuns and other SoLs for +10 or so. In fact, this approach makes stuns less common, because instead of just getting it when you hit with a 19, you'd need to hit with AC+10, which means it's rarer for any enemies with AC above 9 (i.e. most of them), and the same for the other numbers.
I still think you have a math problem there; Doug is right that asking the DM "how much did I beat his AC by?" every time would get old fast. It would make critical hits quite interesting*

Honestly, at this point their best bet is simply making expertise dice work I think. There's plenty of design space for fighter "maneuvers" using them; I think the trick is just giving fighters a nice variety of maneuvers to pick from, scaling them as you level by the higher level maneuvers requiring more expertise dice. So slowing the enemy might cost one expertise dice, but blinding costs two, and outright dazing costs three, etc.

*although you could probably make critical hits interesting for a fighter by simply giving them a free expertise die or two