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Penny Arcade - Comic - Less Is More
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Less Is More
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
+8
Posts
(Although that's more about expressing 100 as 00)
Yeah, but the thing is, THAC0 wasn't that bad. The idea was that you needed to only know one base number - the roll you needed to hit someone with an armor class of 0. Then, you would subtract the target's AC from that number tto get the target to hit. The problem is that it's horrible design to have high numbers be good in some places, and bad in others.
And that's still in the game
At least they all follow bigger = better, but come on, people, pick up a thesaurus
It's been a while since I've read about it, but if I recall correctly THAC0 came to D&D from naval warfare games by way of Chainmail. The argument I saw made against it (besides the high/low inconsistency) was that the system is very simple in those naval games, or even Chainmail, where the numbers are all fairly static, but in D&D you had buffs and debuffs which were more awkward to handle under THAC0 than they are in modern systems that were purpose-built for a fantasy game.
That doesn't seem any easier to me than just "You have to roll over their AC to hit them." In both cases, you need to know what you rolled (with modifiers) and the target's AC. THAC0 is one more number on top of that!
Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun
ThAC0 is essentially no different than Base Attack Bonus. It's just not rolled into the modifiers like Base Attack Bonus is. I'm not saying that it's preferable (it's not), but it would occupy the same space on a character sheet as BAB.
Oh yeah, totally! I was absolutely one of those assholes that looked down on 3rd and 4th edition players because it was impure or something? I don't know... i can't even relate to that person anymore, but in hindsight, I know the reason we played that was because we all had all the books and we were too broke to buy the new ones, and most importantly it was our groups game and we had modified the crap out of and we didn't want to change.
Its important to remember, you have to start by evaluating a system by what came before it, not after it, if you want to understand why it exists. THAC0 makes sense if you look at the old Old, its big pile of WTF if you look at it from today.
Cut my teeth on 3.5e. A terribly balanced system to be sure, but one that allowed a huge amount of player expression. Unfortunately it was a system that gave us both the Monk and the Druid in the core rulebook, so afterwards the splatbook designers didn't really know which power level they were supposed to target. But you could get insanely creative with the way you stacked regular classes and prestige classes to wind up with some truly abominable (but often quite fun) builds.
4th panel: "Mamma mia! Dat's a spicy murder-ball! Ya-hooo~!"
I see what you're going for, but it doesn't hold in my case. I started D&D in 2nd Edition and hold no love for it. As a system it lacks elegance and as a platform it lacks options. Each successive edition has been superior in my eyes, though 4e and 5e may be close to tied.
Heck, I had no trouble with THAC0 25 years ago, but when I tried to explain it to my current 5e group, I couldn't. It's been too long, and it's not intuitive.
Powers &8^]
much easier to express it as a character having (say) +5 to hit; then you roll, add 5, and see whether that's higher than the enemy AC
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget