I have only played 5e, what's THACO, the ability scores?, like MSH's FASERIP?
THACO = To Hit Armour Class 0. The lower your AC, the harder to hit. Tricked out chars with crazy armour would have scores well into the negatives. It was counter - intuitive, but was easy enough to figure out...unless you flipped the page and factored in all the potential modifiers based on the type of armour (plate, chain, banded, leather, etc).
My guys gave up playing with the charts of modifiers, since it bogged the game down so much. The current system is much cleaner, and easier to play.
THAC0 came out in either very late 1st or in 2nd edition. It stands for "To Hit Armor Class Zero", which was a good, but not the best, AC.
Back in the old days, AC started at 10 (the worst) and went down to about 1 or 2, which was as good as you could get without magic, and then with some magic items you could get to as low as -10. Whatever you needed to roll to hit AC 10, you needed to roll +1 to hit AC 9, +2 to hit AC 8, etc. So for example, if you needed a 10 to hit AC 10, then you needed a 20 to hit AC 0, and a 23 to hit AC -3.
In AD&D, they did this with a table... or a series of tables, depending on your class. The table had the 20 ACs (from +10 to -10) and then the character level. For example, a level 1-2 fighter needed a 10 to hit AC 10, and it went up from there (15 to hit AC 5, 20 to hit AC 0, etc). It wasn't always linear (for example, a level 1 fighter could hit AC from 0 to -5 with a 20), but it was close to that. Players, BTW, did not have or know anything about these tables -- they were only known to the DM.
Anyway, looking things up on tables became burdensome, and since mostly it just went up or down by 1 as you went down or up in AC, the shorthand became to tell the DM what they need to hit AC 0 (THAC0), and the DM could then do the math in his/her head. For instance, if the creature has AC 3, and THAC0 is 14, then you need a 14-3 or 11 to hit AC 3.
NOT intuitive at all. Personally, I found the table easier than THAC0.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I have only played 5e, what's THACO, the ability scores?, like MSH's FASERIP?
THACO = To Hit Armour Class 0. The lower your AC, the harder to hit. Tricked out chars with crazy armour would have scores well into the negatives. It was counter - intuitive, but was easy enough to figure out...unless you flipped the page and factored in all the potential modifiers based on the type of armour (plate, chain, banded, leather, etc).
My guys gave up playing with the charts of modifiers, since it bogged the game down so much. The current system is much cleaner, and easier to play.
About a year and a half ago a few friends and I got nostalgic about the old days and we decided, screw it, let's do a one shot old school style. We used 1st edition B/X rules (classic Red Box), played it straight and ran Village of Homlett. We figured it would be a fun beer and pretzel night, something to have a good laugh about. No one in a million years thought that it would be anything more then that.
It took exactly one session for us to effectively dump 5e permanently and completely abandon modern D&D for what I think is pretty much going to be forever. A year and a half later, everyone in the group has sold their books, books we couldn't sell, we gave away. I don't see anyone in this group ever going back to modern D&D again, it's pretty much dead to us.
Certainly not what we expected to happen, I thought perhaps at best it was going to be a fun trek down memory lane, but it turned into a complete 180.
Today we do still play other old school systems and mess with various OSR games, but the primary game is B/X and AD&D.
Genuine question: If you sold/gave away all of your 5e stuff and play exclusively AD&D now, what is the appeal of D&D beyond for you (since most of the content and forums are based around 5e rules)?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Three-time Judge of the Competition of the Finest Brews!Come join us in making fun, unique homebrew and voting for your favorite entries!
My guys gave up playing with the charts of modifiers, since it bogged the game down so much. The current system is much cleaner, and easier to play.
One of the major concessions even most of the more hardcore OSR games make these days is to use ascending AC with the to hit # being the AC #.
Basically, they flip it. AC 10 is still "cloth/unarmored", but instead of going down to 0 and needing a 20 to hit that, they just go up from 10 to 20, and instead of "-10" being the best armor anyone could have, it just goes up to 30.
Similarly you can use something like the level based "proficiency bonus" to mimic going "up the table" from left to right, since it did kind of the same thing in AD&D.
Just those 2 things allow you to cut out like 3 pages of tables.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
My guys gave up playing with the charts of modifiers, since it bogged the game down so much. The current system is much cleaner, and easier to play.
One of the major concessions even most of the more hardcore OSR games make these days is to use ascending AC with the to hit # being the AC #.
Basically, they flip it. AC 10 is still "cloth/unarmored", but instead of going down to 0 and needing a 20 to hit that, they just go up from 10 to 20, and instead of "-10" being the best armor anyone could have, it just goes up to 30.
Similarly you can use something like the level based "proficiency bonus" to mimic going "up the table" from left to right, since it did kind of the same thing in AD&D.
Just those 2 things allow you to cut out like 3 pages of tables.
I guess the real truth is that Old School was not perfect, and some of the current game mechanics are better. But the current theme of "everyone gets a participation ribbon, everyone is special, no one should ever die" is awful.
I guess the real truth is that Old School was not perfect, and some of the current game mechanics are better.
I can't imagine anyone (reasonable) would argue otherwise. No system that comes in 3 books that are hundreds of pages each can possibly be perfect at everything.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
My guys gave up playing with the charts of modifiers, since it bogged the game down so much. The current system is much cleaner, and easier to play.
One of the major concessions even most of the more hardcore OSR games make these days is to use ascending AC with the to hit # being the AC #.
Basically, they flip it. AC 10 is still "cloth/unarmored", but instead of going down to 0 and needing a 20 to hit that, they just go up from 10 to 20, and instead of "-10" being the best armor anyone could have, it just goes up to 30.
Similarly you can use something like the level based "proficiency bonus" to mimic going "up the table" from left to right, since it did kind of the same thing in AD&D.
Just those 2 things allow you to cut out like 3 pages of tables.
Yeah, it was super obvious that some of AD&D's rules (like that one) were put in just to make gameplay that much more complicated.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I agree with Big Lizzy here. The only thing that stumped me about THACO at the time was, Why do I need a 20 to hit AC 0 (or 2 or whatever). Why not have the roll also be for a low number if lower numbers are better. I found nothing odd about Zero being a better AC than 10. I just didn't understand why AC went in one direction and the dice went in the other. Yes, they were university folks so the arithmetic never slowed them down. I am sure their system was easier than some (many?) wargames at the time. And I am sure it was an adaptation of another system from Chainmail.
But ...
The current system of AC going up along with the "good" dice rolls, proficiency modifiers, and all that has made the system more fluid for new players to grasp. It was a problem for me only because I had to shake off what I knew and had to learn the new system.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Yes it should not have been weapon vs. the AC #. It should have been weapon vs. armor type. So you would have some weapons that did well against more flexible armors, worse against rigid, and vice versa. Instead it was by #, but the # could be done by a combination of things. For instance, chain + shield has the same AC value as splint mail in AD&D, but they are very different types of protection in terms of what weapons would do well vs. them.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
There were actual rules, at least in 2nd Edition, for giving bonuses or penalties to hit an enemy based on the damage type of the weapon you were wielding and the type of armor they were wearing. I didn't ever see it used too often outside of the PC games like Baldur's Gate.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
There were actual rules, at least in 2nd Edition, for giving bonuses or penalties to hit an enemy based on the damage type of the weapon you were wielding and the type of armor they were wearing. I didn't ever see it used too often outside of the PC games like Baldur's Gate.
It's D&D so it isn't going to do it well. For people that wanted that kind of crunch I directed them to GURPS.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
So although the title of this thread is 1st ed AD&D Players come on in ... your asserting that players want to modify the 1st ed and play something else?
I came at this from the point of view that 1st ed was a pretty good system and the current system has lost some of the fun from 1st ed.
It can't be disputed that many or most players want something else, although I suspect in a vast majority of cases it is only some minor. This is why there is so much homebrew and the rules make it plain that the system permits that with all the assertion that the DM is free to do other stuff. But I suspect your position is quite different from this sort of modification.
It can't be disputed that many or most players want something else, although I suspect in a vast majority of cases it is only some minor. This is why there is so much homebrew
I'm interpreting that you mean something else from the vanilla 5e rules...
If so, I'm not sure how many players actually want something else. A lot of people on the forum might, but we are a tiny subset of the DDB population which is a subset (no way of knowing how big) of the D&D player population.
How many DMs in the wider D&D population do much homebrew? I don't think there is any way of knowing. I would guess that the majority of DMs are fairly new (since the majority of players are fairly new these days, having come to D&D in its recent popularity surge and not having been playing it all along), and newer DMs will be far less comfortable with homebrewing things than veterans are. I suspect that many DMs simply buy a published adventure and run it as written, and follow whatever rules there are in the book. Their "homebrew" probably consists of making decisions about which "optional" features of the game (like MC and feats) they will allow at their table. And even there, I suspect they will allow whatever they have seen allowed before (either in one of the popular streams, or in a previous game they've played in with another DM). The lion's share play in one of the published settings, mostly in FR, some in Eberron, some in Theros, some in Ravnica or however you spell that.
Again, we have no way of knowing the numbers, and I could very well be wrong on this, but I suspect that the overwhelming majority of tables (or Zooms or Discords) use RAW, a published setting, and one or more of the published adventures, and that's about it. Such folks are not necessarily looking for "something else" and definitely not AD&D.
Now, I bet some of them would have a blast using the old school stuff (just like some would utterly hate it), but I doubt many of them are looking for it specifically or even looking for anything else than what is printed in the existing 5e library.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
If anyone is interested, the book Appendix N covers a lot of this territory: how the original game was imagined, and how Gygax et. al. meant for it to be played. The author is on Twitter, and he's a passionate defender of 1e.
I have played and ran at least one adventure from 2E to 5E. OK, several Campaigns for 2E, 3/3.5E and 5E and only one adventure for 4E. And while I have a lot of books for first, I have never played or run a game of it. Every so often, I think about running a one shot I6 Ravenloft game in 1st to say I've done it, but never been able to pull the trigger on that. But I have my 1st edition PHP, MM, DMG and Unearthed Arcana signed by Gygax.
I would love to know what that would be appraised for.
I have seen some on EBay for around a grand.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
THACO = To Hit Armour Class 0. The lower your AC, the harder to hit. Tricked out chars with crazy armour would have scores well into the negatives. It was counter - intuitive, but was easy enough to figure out...unless you flipped the page and factored in all the potential modifiers based on the type of armour (plate, chain, banded, leather, etc).
My guys gave up playing with the charts of modifiers, since it bogged the game down so much. The current system is much cleaner, and easier to play.
THAC0 came out in either very late 1st or in 2nd edition. It stands for "To Hit Armor Class Zero", which was a good, but not the best, AC.
Back in the old days, AC started at 10 (the worst) and went down to about 1 or 2, which was as good as you could get without magic, and then with some magic items you could get to as low as -10. Whatever you needed to roll to hit AC 10, you needed to roll +1 to hit AC 9, +2 to hit AC 8, etc. So for example, if you needed a 10 to hit AC 10, then you needed a 20 to hit AC 0, and a 23 to hit AC -3.
In AD&D, they did this with a table... or a series of tables, depending on your class. The table had the 20 ACs (from +10 to -10) and then the character level. For example, a level 1-2 fighter needed a 10 to hit AC 10, and it went up from there (15 to hit AC 5, 20 to hit AC 0, etc). It wasn't always linear (for example, a level 1 fighter could hit AC from 0 to -5 with a 20), but it was close to that. Players, BTW, did not have or know anything about these tables -- they were only known to the DM.
Anyway, looking things up on tables became burdensome, and since mostly it just went up or down by 1 as you went down or up in AC, the shorthand became to tell the DM what they need to hit AC 0 (THAC0), and the DM could then do the math in his/her head. For instance, if the creature has AC 3, and THAC0 is 14, then you need a 14-3 or 11 to hit AC 3.
NOT intuitive at all. Personally, I found the table easier than THAC0.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Thanks
Mystic v3 should be official, nuff said.
Genuine question: If you sold/gave away all of your 5e stuff and play exclusively AD&D now, what is the appeal of D&D beyond for you (since most of the content and forums are based around 5e rules)?
Three-time Judge of the Competition of the Finest Brews! Come join us in making fun, unique homebrew and voting for your favorite entries!
One of the major concessions even most of the more hardcore OSR games make these days is to use ascending AC with the to hit # being the AC #.
Basically, they flip it. AC 10 is still "cloth/unarmored", but instead of going down to 0 and needing a 20 to hit that, they just go up from 10 to 20, and instead of "-10" being the best armor anyone could have, it just goes up to 30.
Similarly you can use something like the level based "proficiency bonus" to mimic going "up the table" from left to right, since it did kind of the same thing in AD&D.
Just those 2 things allow you to cut out like 3 pages of tables.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I guess the real truth is that Old School was not perfect, and some of the current game mechanics are better. But the current theme of "everyone gets a participation ribbon, everyone is special, no one should ever die" is awful.
I liked the tables too. They were a lot faster and easier to use.
That's one thing that 1e had in abundance - Tables and charts for EVERYTHING!
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
I can't imagine anyone (reasonable) would argue otherwise. No system that comes in 3 books that are hundreds of pages each can possibly be perfect at everything.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Yeah, it was super obvious that some of AD&D's rules (like that one) were put in just to make gameplay that much more complicated.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I agree with Big Lizzy here. The only thing that stumped me about THACO at the time was, Why do I need a 20 to hit AC 0 (or 2 or whatever). Why not have the roll also be for a low number if lower numbers are better. I found nothing odd about Zero being a better AC than 10. I just didn't understand why AC went in one direction and the dice went in the other. Yes, they were university folks so the arithmetic never slowed them down. I am sure their system was easier than some (many?) wargames at the time. And I am sure it was an adaptation of another system from Chainmail.
But ...
The current system of AC going up along with the "good" dice rolls, proficiency modifiers, and all that has made the system more fluid for new players to grasp. It was a problem for me only because I had to shake off what I knew and had to learn the new system.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
No, it was dumb. It didn't account for magic AC bonuses or Dex or differing monster hide.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
Yes it should not have been weapon vs. the AC #. It should have been weapon vs. armor type. So you would have some weapons that did well against more flexible armors, worse against rigid, and vice versa. Instead it was by #, but the # could be done by a combination of things. For instance, chain + shield has the same AC value as splint mail in AD&D, but they are very different types of protection in terms of what weapons would do well vs. them.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
There were actual rules, at least in 2nd Edition, for giving bonuses or penalties to hit an enemy based on the damage type of the weapon you were wielding and the type of armor they were wearing. I didn't ever see it used too often outside of the PC games like Baldur's Gate.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
It's D&D so it isn't going to do it well. For people that wanted that kind of crunch I directed them to GURPS.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
Yeah, but GURPS has a rule for everything.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
So although the title of this thread is 1st ed AD&D Players come on in ... your asserting that players want to modify the 1st ed and play something else?
I came at this from the point of view that 1st ed was a pretty good system and the current system has lost some of the fun from 1st ed.
It can't be disputed that many or most players want something else, although I suspect in a vast majority of cases it is only some minor. This is why there is so much homebrew and the rules make it plain that the system permits that with all the assertion that the DM is free to do other stuff. But I suspect your position is quite different from this sort of modification.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
I'm interpreting that you mean something else from the vanilla 5e rules...
If so, I'm not sure how many players actually want something else. A lot of people on the forum might, but we are a tiny subset of the DDB population which is a subset (no way of knowing how big) of the D&D player population.
How many DMs in the wider D&D population do much homebrew? I don't think there is any way of knowing. I would guess that the majority of DMs are fairly new (since the majority of players are fairly new these days, having come to D&D in its recent popularity surge and not having been playing it all along), and newer DMs will be far less comfortable with homebrewing things than veterans are. I suspect that many DMs simply buy a published adventure and run it as written, and follow whatever rules there are in the book. Their "homebrew" probably consists of making decisions about which "optional" features of the game (like MC and feats) they will allow at their table. And even there, I suspect they will allow whatever they have seen allowed before (either in one of the popular streams, or in a previous game they've played in with another DM). The lion's share play in one of the published settings, mostly in FR, some in Eberron, some in Theros, some in Ravnica or however you spell that.
Again, we have no way of knowing the numbers, and I could very well be wrong on this, but I suspect that the overwhelming majority of tables (or Zooms or Discords) use RAW, a published setting, and one or more of the published adventures, and that's about it. Such folks are not necessarily looking for "something else" and definitely not AD&D.
Now, I bet some of them would have a blast using the old school stuff (just like some would utterly hate it), but I doubt many of them are looking for it specifically or even looking for anything else than what is printed in the existing 5e library.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
If anyone is interested, the book Appendix N covers a lot of this territory: how the original game was imagined, and how Gygax et. al. meant for it to be played. The author is on Twitter, and he's a passionate defender of 1e.
I have seen some on EBay for around a grand.