Let's Talk About THAC0

Hussar · Jun 8, 2019

Sacrosanct said:
Not asking you to buy into my anecdotes. I’m asking you to look at objective facts, like the character sheets having that info for the players since at least 1980, possibly earlier.

If we ARE going to use anecdotes, at least mine is supported by the official tools we had available at the time, whereas your anecdote depends on ignoring said official material. After all, why would a player ask the DM what AC they hit unless they ignored the character sheets available at the time that did that for the player?

Well, I'm not going to presume that a majority of groups actually used published character sheets, so, umm, I'll stick to the notion that my anecdotes are just as valid as your anecdotes.

Fenris-77 · Jun 8, 2019

Your anecdotes, my anecdotes, whatever. There are too many long time players here for personal anecdotes to carry weight in a conversation like this. However, since that's what we're doing, I've played with THAC0 innmore campaigns I can count, and worked at a FLGS for years with access to hundreds of other players, and THAC0 was never a point of contention or complaint, not once I can remember. People called their hits at AC and everyone went home happy.

cbwjm · Jun 8, 2019

Never had an issue with thac0, generally we'd calculate all of the bonuses I to our thac0 so a 5th level fighter specialised in swords, with a 17 strength, and carrying a +1 sword would have sword listed with a thac0 of 13. Then you just roll the d20 and subtract it from 13 and call out which AC you hit, seemed easy enough back then. The main thing I liked about the changes in 3e wasn't so much the change from thac0 to BaB but the consolidation of skills and attack bonuses to a single d20+modifiers. Got rid of thief skills and merged them with all the other skills which was a massive bonus.

Azzy · Jun 8, 2019

Hussar said:
Well, I'm not going to presume that a majority of groups actually used published character sheets, so, umm, I'll stick to the notion that my anecdotes are just as valid as your anecdotes.

My group never used an official sheet until early in 2e. However, by the time I got my first computer (a Tandy 1000), we made our own sheets in a word processor.

Jer · Jun 8, 2019

Morrus said:
To be fair, nobody has carefully explained to me that subtraction is really hard yet.

Would you like the links to the math education literature on the subject?

Umbran · Jun 8, 2019

Hussar said:
Granted, I only played AD&D from about 1981 to 2000, but, hey, multiple countries and a couple of continents later, including players from lots of different countries, I'm not sure that I really buy your anecdotes.

Before you get even snarkier about it...

There are elements of rules that we are aware of, that sometimes out of tradition we don't use. Like weapon vs armor type tables. The fact that we didn't use them didn't mean we didn't know about them.

So, do you honestly think your players called out the modified hit totals because the thac0 numbers were actually secret from them, and they *couldn't* do the conversion, or because that was just how they did it, by tradition?

Harzel · Jun 8, 2019

Ok, there's a bit of weirdness here for me. I started with 1e and some boxed set that unfortunately I have lost track of and have never been able to identify from my vague recollections. The only books that I ever had were 1e books and we had pretty much quit playing by 1989. However, when I look back at my old (homebrew) dungeon descriptions, they all list THAC0 for the monsters, and I've certainly 'always' known what THAC0 is. So did THAC0 get introduced prior to 2e in one of the Basic versions, or perhaps in Dragon magazine? I didn't realize this was an anomaly in my history until this thread.