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I don't get the AD&D confusion...

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  • PairdicePairdice Member Posts: 15
    @rexreg

    Thanks for the correction, it's been a while since I've played 2.5. Looking forward to some Baldur's Gate action again.
  • sandmanCCLsandmanCCL Member Posts: 1,389
    pacek said:

    MATH

    wat.

    In all seriousness, my brain shut off about sentence two there.

    Things very rarely have 0 AC. Why everything is based off the theoretical AC of something instead of what that AC actually is, I get lost. No amount of trying to explain it is going to make that concept make sense to me.

    Actually, I thought of another thing that drives me insane: The XP charts. They are all bonkers. Clerics, you level up super fast! Until 7. Then mages, which previously leveled the slowest, suddenly level faster than you do. Don't worry, at level 13 you will start to level faster than everyone outside of rogues again.

    What the hell is that.
    SullaDrugarMedullaOblongataSily
  • DrugarDrugar Member Posts: 1,566
    @sandmanCCL
    I would give you all of the agrees if I could.
  • pacekpacek Member Posts: 92
    I was trying to explain that you have overly complicated the system:
    Drugar said:


    Higher level;
    Lookie's modified tach0 is -2
    Zurg's AC is -13
    She attacks with a +5 railgun (giving a -5 on thac0) and rolls a 12

    AC-13 vs thac0 -2 means she needs to roll an 11 (-2--13=11, 12 > 11) She hits again and blasts away Urg's vengeful son.

    Try this:
    She rolls a 12. +5 for railgun. -13 for opponent's AC. (12+5-13) = 4
    4 is greater than your Thac0 of -2, therefore hit.

    Or to put another way, the check is not against your opponent's AC, the check is against your Thac0.


  • AscerionAscerion Member Posts: 271
    ajwz said:

    This reminds me of:

    Friend: "Let me play"
    *skips cutscene*
    turns to you.
    "What am I supposed to do now?"

    Oh my GAWD, yes. So much of my childhood...is THIS.
  • GygaxianProseGygaxianProse Member Posts: 201
    @ladyrhian: @pacek: @sandmanccl: @drugar:

    Ok, I have to admit something rather unseemly here. I only played Mentzer basic/expert, and 1st edition.

    So HERE is the math in 1st: put your negative integer caps on, this is AD&D!!! : )

    say a 15th level halfling paladin ( never once saw race/level limits used. did see many human PCs )
    *glances at screen*
    You need a 19. ( to hit the -13 AC of the Evil Goddess of Chainmail Bikinis)
    Halfling player rolls, adds bonuses, misses, then fails his save vs. uber charm. Spends next 6d6 years as her cabana boy.
    DM screen FTW. *eats pizza*


  • LadyRhianLadyRhian Member Posts: 14,694
    1e halflings couldn't be Paladins. Only humans could be Paladins. Next?!
  • GygaxianProseGygaxianProse Member Posts: 201
    LadyRhian said:

    1e halflings couldn't be Paladins. Only humans could be Paladins. Next?!

    Race/class/level limits were entirely up to the DM. A great many waived...
  • WabbitTwaksWabbitTwaks Member Posts: 54

    @ladyrhian: @pacek: @sandmanccl: @drugar:


    DM screen FTW. *eats pizza*


    Oh, such fond memories... hehe
  • LadyRhianLadyRhian Member Posts: 14,694
    @GygaxianProse In the Players Handbook 1e, it specficially said Paladins must be human. "To become a Paladin, a character must be human, have a strength of not less than 12..." Monks could also only be human, according to the rules. I played by the rules. So did a lot of people. And halflings couldn't be Paladins, nor 15th level. As fighters, they were limited to 6th level.

    And yeah, I still have all my sourcebooks for 1e and 2e (and 3e). image
    MedullaOblongataBelgarathMTH
  • LadyRhianLadyRhian Member Posts: 14,694
    Just gonna say, too, these are the next two shelves down: image
    MedullaOblongataBelgarathMTH
  • CelestianCelestian Member Posts: 4
    I am just happy to see an AD&D rules set game. I am really not fond of the 3e+ mechanics personally (PnP or in a video game).

    *open open open*
  • CelestianCelestian Member Posts: 4
    pacek said:

    I was trying to explain that you have overly complicated the system:

    Drugar said:


    Higher level;
    Lookie's modified tach0 is -2
    Zurg's AC is -13
    She attacks with a +5 railgun (giving a -5 on thac0) and rolls a 12

    AC-13 vs thac0 -2 means she needs to roll an 11 (-2--13=11, 12 > 11) She hits again and blasts away Urg's vengeful son.

    Try this:
    She rolls a 12. +5 for railgun. -13 for opponent's AC. (12+5-13) = 4
    4 is greater than your Thac0 of -2, therefore hit.

    Or to put another way, the check is not against your opponent's AC, the check is against your Thac0.



    Not sure what you guys are trying to complicate:)

    THACO-d20=AC hit.

    The only difference between that and 3e+ ascending AC is this:
    d20+BaB=AC Hit
    (where BaB is your attack bonuses)




  • LordsDarkKnight185LordsDarkKnight185 Member Posts: 615
    @LadyRhian

    <.< Book of Erotic Fantasy, Giggity (I still sometimes lawl randomly over the "Masterwork Condom" )
  • MedullaOblongataMedullaOblongata Member Posts: 434
    Those are some mighty impressive books O_O
  • LadyRhianLadyRhian Member Posts: 14,694
    @LordDarkKnight185 I also own "Naughty and Dice" ;). Because when you are 40+ that shit incites less giggling than it did when you were 20. I did get some entirely nasty ideas out of it, so it was money well spent for me. :D

    @MedullaOblongata Have the rest of my Geek Cred Folder... http://ladyrhianwriter.deviantart.com/gallery/38919912
    LordsDarkKnight185MedullaOblongata
  • LordsDarkKnight185LordsDarkKnight185 Member Posts: 615
    LadyRhian said:

    @LordDarkKnight185 I also own "Naughty and Dice" ;). Because when you are 40+ that shit incites less giggling than it did when you were 20. I did get some entirely nasty ideas out of it, so it was money well spent for me. :D

    @MedullaOblongata Have the rest of my Geek Cred Folder... http://ladyrhianwriter.deviantart.com/gallery/38919912

    Also SO much respect that i see ALL 3e realms suppliments and 0 ebberon (I just...was never fond with that setting at all...I only tolerate it in DDO because there is no better alternative yet *Crossing fingers for Neverwinter soon* )
  • sandmanCCLsandmanCCL Member Posts: 1,389
    LadyRhian said:

    In the Players Handbook 1e, it specficially said Paladins must be human. "To become a Paladin, a character must be human, have a strength of not less than 12..." Monks could also only be human, according to the rules. I played by the rules. So did a lot of people. And halflings couldn't be Paladins, nor 15th level. As fighters, they were limited to 6th level.

    That's a good example of what I meant by arbitrary rules.

    I think a lot of 3e came about because people like me asked "Why can't I do this?" It freed it up. Some might say too much (I'm pretty sure you're in that boat,) but if you couldn't tell by my detest of people wanting to shut down legal things in the Baldur's Gate games they feel are "overpowered," I don't care if the potential for cheesy munchkining is there. I'd rather have the option and choose to ignore it than have to ignore the rule and create my own options.
  • demacydemacy Member Posts: 12
    I'm not the oldest here, certainly not the youngest, but I'll start with saying I've played d&d since 1980 and I've always just enjoyed myself, learning the "rules" took an hour or two on my own reading over some manual before meeting up with the group. (for version changes/updates)

    In my experience there were basically 3 types of players, the first most rare:
    1. I came to have fun, add to the adventure tonight. and am flexible.
    2. I want to have fun but only if we all follow the rules.
    3. I've spent $4000 on D&D books and know everything and your all wrong categorically.

    I still just try to have fun. If you find yourself lamenting over some random obscure rule from version 2.1 versus 2.4 and how the good old days were the best, then... seriously you need some sex, or marijuana or go outside for like 10 minutes... the best cure, would be a fun hobby that requires movement beyond typing.

    {from a confirmed PC nerd} [100+ wpm]
    hobbies include: mountain biking, pumping iron, reading sci-fi, flying R/C helis and aeroplanes.
    building god complex PC's and gaming bringing up the rear.
  • LadyRhianLadyRhian Member Posts: 14,694
    @sandmanCCL It had a reason. AD&D 1e was a human-centric game, so they were set apart as special, not because of the length of their lives (Elves could live to be 2000 years old in 1e AD&D), but in special classes that only they were. Paladins and Monks were those two classes. Humans also had unlimited level advancement because otherwise, with their long lives, you'd have elves and dwarves being so incredibly powerful (due to the ability to be a fighter for hundreds or even a thousand years) how could humans ever compete? And that was the reasoning. Later, they came up with other ways to limit the races, but that was what they started with. Slow levelling (where over level limits non-humans had to amass two or three times the same amount of exp as humans for the same level) was a different way of solving the same problem.
  • sandmanCCLsandmanCCL Member Posts: 1,389
    @LadyRhian: And I consider that a faulty argument on it's premise. The idea was make believe with rules, right? Well, go figure, powerful wizards could figure out ways to extend their lives for eternity. So that elf? Yeah that guy who's 4000 years old? Some 60 year old human wizard is more powerful than that guy, because arbitrary, failed attempt at balancing.

    You don't raise the floor by lowering the ceiling, as I'm fond of saying. Limiting elves/dwarves/whatever didn't make humans any better. It just made it so anyone who wanted the flavor of being one of the demi-humans felt like they were discriminated against.

    Also, I'm of the mind if I'm going to play in a fantasy setting, I want to be something unique and different specific to that setting. It's why I think the Imperial Guard are incredibly lame and boring in Warhammer 40k. You mean instead of being a race of robotic bird men, corrupted men or eldar enslaved by demons, green spore monsters so numerous they'd be the most powerful race in existence if not for their sheer stupidity, robotic skeleton monsters, beings of sheer psychic power that exist between reality, or superhuman 8-foot-tall 700lb space marines, I can control WW2 era Russian sacrificial soldiers with laser beams?

    I'm already a human in real life. I don't need to play one on paper.
  • LadyRhianLadyRhian Member Posts: 14,694
    @sandmanCCL The entirety of D&D came out of playing make believe with metal army men figures. So when it started, there were only fighters and the occasional cleric. I'm not saying it was a perfect game. It was flawed. But this wasn't a flaw as the people who played the game saw it, because that's the way the rules were.

    And actually, limiting the other races DID make humans better, because humans could achieve higher levels than non-human races. So, higher levels=better, yes? And since Original and Basic D&D didn't have a setting, you'd have been SOL at wanting to play something "unique and different to the setting". When Grayhawk got released, maybe you could have played one of the extremely Xenophobic Valley Elves. But you would have had to wait about 6 or 7 years for that. And OD&D and Basic only went levels 1-3.
  • sandmanCCLsandmanCCL Member Posts: 1,389
    Well, no. It doesn't make humans better. It just makes elves and dwarfs, et al. worse. It doesn't make humanity any better or more appealing to play; it simply means everything else becomes less appealing.

    That's the wrong way to handle it. To put it into non-game terms, do you vote for a candidate because you like his policies, or you dislike the other guy's policies? I want to vote for a guy I believe in, not because I don't believe in the other side.

    I really liked 3e that way. I frequently rolled human in it because the extra feat + skill points were super good and a lot better in my mind than a lot of the racial benefits of the other core races. The appeal wasn't they could do stuff others couldn't do (arbitrarily), but because they had legit benefits.

    Nobody wants to feel punished for liking something. That's the true test of game balance: it's not about making sure everything is really "balanced," but about making sure everyone who likes the various aspects of some game feels like they get their value out of it.
  • gdubbs66gdubbs66 Member Posts: 29
    I definitely say it is a generational thing. With my group of friends and I, we sort of feel like the new players while at the same time becoming "old geezers" because we prefer 3.5 (though we have been doing some trials with Pathfinder and liking some of that). Each generation finds their own set of rules "the easiest" when in reality all of it has unique kinks in learning the rules.
    sandmanCCLThomasMink
  • BytebrainBytebrain Member Posts: 602
    The main reason I prefer 3.5 edition, is because the to hit/AC calculations is much easier to grasp for a mathematical challenged person like me.

    I really don't like the tone the OP used, it make it sound like people like me, who have difficulty with the archaic ways rolls are calculated in 2E is sort of stupid.

    Some people are just better with numbers than other people.
    A rule set should make it as easy as possible to comprehend for as many people as possible. There's enough to wrap your head around in AD&D as it is, no need to make it more complicated than necessary.
    MedullaOblongatarexreg
  • ThomasMinkThomasMink Member Posts: 25
    Honestly, every edition has quirks and learning curves. Of course people will complain about things when used to certain sets of rules. I complained about 3rd edition when it was released because I was used to 2nd (and likewise never really played 3.5 until much later). Now I don't really care and can play them both.. ..but I'll still continue to complain about 4th, but that's a whole other story.
  • crawlkillcrawlkill Member Posts: 71
    edited November 2012
    It's the lack of clarity about what direction a bonus and a penalty or a plus and minus are meant to go. If you say "a +4 bonus on a saving throw," does that actually mean raising your target by 4? Presumably not, since that'd be a penalty. But that's not explicit in the Baldur's Gate manual's writeup of 2E rules, though it might have been in the old core book. It's just the tendency of lower derived statistics to be better than higher derived statistics, whereas the stats those stats are derived from tend to be better high than low.

    It's not that complicated, but the wording does confuse things, and the fact that it doesn't use 3E and on's "Higher is always better!" means bonuses and penalties can be swapped depending on syntax and interpretation of plus and minus signs.

    And then there are the totally abstruse and disconnected mechanics. Why the fuck is NPC reaction determined with 2d10+modifiers? The game just tends to pluralize and arbitrary-fy its systems rather'n unifying them. Some people aren't good at shit like that. Shrug. It's kind of charming, in an arcane way, but it's easy to do wrong.
  • GygaxianProseGygaxianProse Member Posts: 201
    @crawlkill: a lot of this is much more apparent when rolling physical dice. Seems to me a lot of the confusion is theoretical. In practice there is no doubt. Roll it. Add bonus. BTW 2d10 gives you a flat spot in your reaction rolling, makes sense to use that, or 2d6, or 2d12....

    @ladyrhian: did you really need 3rd or 4th edition to tell you it was ok to have an elf paladin? That is sad. The spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules. Somewhere in the 1E DMG.

    All this munchkin BS about not having a reason to play humans....guess what? People played humans because...they wanted to....or demi-humans.....if someone's only reason for playing a character is a +1 here and there, they are playing the wrong game, and should stop trying to redesign the most succesful one of its genre.
  • LeronisLeronis Member Posts: 112
    Original DND was merciless. One poor roll was fatal. So we rerolled toons a lot.
    4th was WOW boring, just too easy, and the mechanics didn't invite study or creativity.
    2nd thru 3.5 was the goodness zone, IMO. I vote Pathfinder I guess.

    Trying to relearn ADND for BGEE has been frustrating. Seems every RP idea I have unearths a several "can't do that" rules. Alls I wants is a gnome barbarian dual classed to a sorcerer with Gond's spider mines for my army! And an unseen servant to tidy the dishes.
  • MedullaOblongataMedullaOblongata Member Posts: 434
    edited November 2012

    @crawlkill: a lot of this is much more apparent when rolling physical dice. Seems to me a lot of the confusion is theoretical. In practice there is no doubt. Roll it. Add bonus. BTW 2d10 gives you a flat spot in your reaction rolling, makes sense to use that, or 2d6, or 2d12....

    That is often true... Things often work out better in practice. I screw things up in my head a lot.


    @ladyrhian: did you really need 3rd or 4th edition to tell you it was ok to have an elf paladin? That is sad. The spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules. Somewhere in the 1E DMG.

    All this munchkin BS about not having a reason to play humans....guess what? People played humans because...they wanted to....or demi-humans.....if someone's only reason for playing a character is a +1 here and there, they are playing the wrong game, and should stop trying to redesign the most succesful one of its genre.

    That works fine... If you're playing by yourself.

    I am a "spirit of the game" GM, but we seem to be few and far between. GMs who follow the letter of the rule are a dime a dozen, sadly... And every single one I have met or played with had been uncompromising. "Tough luck"? No thanks. I will take the later editions that do not confine me.

    I'm pro-change, but I also know a lot of people hate change. I've seen it all boil down to that in every argument regarding this.
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