Adventurer Conquer King (ACKs)

[Zardnaar]

My players have asked me to convert attack throws into BAB. Converting BECMI is easy. AC 9 becomes 1, AC 8 2, AC7 3 etc.

 

[howandwhy99]

In some game elements, I've grown used to 3rd Ed. D&D and find the old school approach jarring. Fer instance, I miss BABs (rather than ACKS' "attack throws") but have somehow held off on converting. It'd be super easy to change, mind you, but I kind of want the full ACKS experience before I start changing things up.

Yeah, I would want to drive a car around for awhile too before chopping it up and modding it to my own custom design. It helps in discovering elements the designers may have built into the system, which aren't immediately obvious without interaction. Once we're more deeply immersed a lot of the subtler nuances reveal themselves. That doesn't necessarily happen if we start replacing a lot of engine parts right away.

BAB isn't "to hit" modifiers, which I'm only guessing is "attack throws" for ACKS. They could all three be different. BAB is an open-ended d20 roll modifier that affects the game strictly linearly. One of the reasons WotC is changing that (or so I believe) is these modifier numbers can quickly advance us outside of the variable outcomes of dice and into all or nothing. The gameplay largely rests in assessing odds, so 50% is nice, but it leaves us with only about 9 or 10 modifier bumps in a bounded system as they call it now before moving certain challenges outside of play range for every level.

Older D&D stats were parabolic, bell curves with negative and positive modifiers depending on the curve from the norm. So bonuses were applied differently depending upon the in-game element altered. Some shift the Target Number. Some shift die result. This frees up a lot more space for modifiers. Plus, results like 20s and targets like AC 0 were not some Kelvin zero absolute bottom. They curved.

So at 1st level you might need better than a 20 To Hit roll vs. a gold dragon and not because it's armor modified your die roll result (as magical armor affected most attacks). Instead you needed a 20 and a second d20 roll vs. the another Target Number depending upon the AC involved. But then that is a very hard to harm creature. Add to that some creatures, like metal golems, whose armor class was beyond the scope of the game odds and some monsters simply were immune to standard attacks (so relatively speaking, like we're immune to cotton balls).

 

[JonWake]

I used ACKs economic system for building the world of Dark Sun. It's filled in a lot of the edge cases of the setting. I've also been using the Domains at War basic rules for mass combat, and they've worked like a charm. My group just staged a surprise attack on the royal guard of Balic's sorcerer King, driving them low with a combination of solid leadership, giants helping out, and a cadre of semi-domesticated behir.

ACKs has let me take a city, figure out how many 6-mile hexes it controls, generate the population density and from that derive the number of shops that sell alchemical reagents and how many people are in the city guard. The system itself is neat, but nothing all that special. It's all the surrounding systems that make the game work.

 

[Zardnaar]

Some of the nitty gritty is to much work. Minor negatives is attack throws over BAB or something similar and thieves still suck.