D&D 5E D&DN going down the wrong path for everyone.

[Celebrim]

Usually the Weapon Vs Armor chart went out when the DM quickly realized that nobody knows what armor 99% of all monsters are wearing, and even for the ones where it IS stated you had to go read through the MM entry to find it. At that point all but the most detail obsessed DMs tossed it. I think Gygax actually said something about putting them in being a 'mistake'. OTOH I expect he was one that tracked encumbrance and components exactly...

The Weapon Vs Armor chart is one of the best things about 1e.

In 1e, you used a sword, right? Probably a long sword; maybe a two-handed sword but definately a sword. Why? Because they had far and away the best damage of any weapon. It was a no brainer. You used a sword because everything else was so inferior.

Because you weren't using the Weapon Vs. Armor chart. The problem with longswords is that though they do good damage and are quick and nimble against lightly armored targets, they really suck against targets in full plate. What you want against an armored target is a morning star, or a mace. Even a spear is better. What the Weapon Vs. Armor chart did was bring balance and trade offs. It was one of the little used discarded rules of 1e combat that, if you actually took the time to use them, brought combat alive and made it tactical, diverse, and interesting.

It was revolutionary to how I looked at the game when I started using it. First, you are right. The armor of monsters wasn't well documented. I had to look at each monster as I used it in my game and figure out what portion was armor, and what portion was everything else. So, the first thing I did was start giving each monster and AC and what I called the AB (Armor Bonus) by breaking them down logically. But that implied very quickly that a portion of the AB was often Dex, and so that entry went along side each monster as well. For the first time, all of my creatures started having ability scores. I could start comparing their abilities to PC abilities. Some of them acquired Initiative bonuses. Strength was already stated or implied in many cases, so why not fill that in two. Intelligence was listed, so now I had that. Ability checks could now become a standardized mechanic, replacing the hodgepodge of percentile tests and other random improvised mechanics used to judge noncombat things before. I was, right about the time I got overwhelmed by the scale of the work converting the rules in a time when the SRD didn't exist and I didn't own a word processor, in the process of converting the monsters attacks into weapon equivalents and thinking about adding Con scores to monsters to solve the problem in 1e of most monsters presenting too little challenge (post adoption of the UA rules).

They actually weren't that hard to use in practice. The PC's were the biggest headache, but they only carried 3-5 weapons each and didn't change armor all the time. It was a simple matter to simply create a to hit table for each PC. That ended up saving more time than any innovation I'd ever done then or now. Instead of players adding up all their piddly bonuses every attack, they just could report the number throne. I had the target numbers for each AC precomputed. No cross referencing. No addition. One table for each PC. After that, I was resolving combats faster and more fluidly using 'to weapon vs. AC' than I had been before using it.

If 3e didn't have so much additional complexity, I'd bring back to weapon vs. AC modifiers in some form for my homebrew. It's one of the few areas of 1e I really miss. Segmented rounds are another one. Simultaneous declarations and resolutions are another. I've been tempted by all three, but I just think it would make the game too complex. There are trade offs in realism vs. playability.

 

[Ratskinner]

Yeah. Well, I'd be very surprised to find that of the major Indie or Indie inspired games out there, that there were more than 30 or 40 tables playing the game on at least a biweekly basis in the entire USA.

My Life with Master? You think there are more than 30 tables playing that?
Dogs in the Vineyard? Maybe 30 tables
Burning Wheel? Maybe 40 tables
All variaties of FATE combined? A couple 100 at most.
Dread?
Monsters and Other Childish Things?

I don't really object to that. I would say though, that those games have much more exposure than the other games cited. Even if its unlikely that you'd find a group playing regularly, you are likely to find folks who have at least read, if not played the games. (I about fell out of my chair when one of my Old-School GMs started talking about MLwM one night.)

We are talking about very small communities that aren't exactly taking the world by storm. I would love to be a player in a MLwM or DitV game with an experienced skillful GM, so that I could pick up some experience. Ditto Dread or Monsters and Other Childish Things. What do you think the chances of that are? There _might_ be one table in the city. There probably aren't more than a half-dozen tables in the state. Once you get into the essential trust issues such games call for, chances are it will never happen. And I know my current table isn't really capable of going there yet, nor am I entirely sure, much as I like these guys, on some of the trust issues involved. There are huges issues of compatibility of personality involved in playing those games not raised by traditional RPGs.

Honestly, in spite of my love for them, I suspect that narrative games/mechanics are simply less appealing to the gaming public at large. Recently I've been wondering (assuming that's right) how much that impacted 4e's reception (especially as people seem to lump all "metagame" mechanics in there). When it comes to groups playing those games....::shrug:: who knows? I know I've played versions of FATE and Gumshoe with my D&D group, but as one-shots. I suspect that that's how most of those games spend most of their play-life, as something that gets whipped out when not enough of the party shows up or something like that. Most of them are very quick on the character gen and roll through the play experience quickly, and I think that's intentional to make them more appealing for both "one-shot" and convention purposes. (Heck, many of them don't even address character "advancement" or anything akin to "levelling up" at all.)

And another issue for me is I read something like MaOCT, and I get the sense that maybe only its creator can actually create the experience envisioned in the text. This isn't anything new. A lot of the talk around Tekumel I can remember was that it was a fantastic setting, but only Barker really new enough about it to understand it and make it come alive. Everyone else was just playing an Empire of the Petal Throne pastiche.

I'm not that familiar with MaOCT, but I hear you with Tekumel. Capes is another deep-end narrative game, but its mechanics are so bizarre that its hard to describe...even in the rulebook. It took me several times through before I was even willing to try and "run" it, and I still got several things wrong. Interestingly, once we "got" Capes, things went very smoothly and right on target. There was very little doubt in our minds that we had "gotten it". Certainly I think that's an issue with some of these games, especially those that rely very heavily on some very light rules. I'm fairly confident that its one of those things where it seems obvious to the author, but he doesn't realize its off most readers' radar screens. Certainly more than once, whilst reading some Indie game, I've found myself thinking "...and what makes that a good idea?"

 

[Ratskinner]

Uhhhhh, you guys have some seriously skewed view of the gaming community out there. Mouse Guard is a VERY popular game, using BW as its core. MHRP? Gumshoe/Trail of Cthulhu/Dresden Files? I have no idea where you guys live that people aren't playing these sorts of games like mad, but around here you can't shake a stick and not hit some group playing some sort of narrativist game. OTOH, yeah, there are D&D groups here and there, but it isn't exactly a booming game. I see that out of the 30 or so groups Enworld lists in my area only ONE shows playing 4e, a couple more play PF, and 3-4 more play 3.5. There's as much BW in its various incarnations as that.

I dunno, man. I mean, I wish/hope you're right. I would love to play those games more often, but finding groups anywhere near me seems pretty tough. Maybe there's (still) more local variability than we'd like to think.

 

[Hussar]

Did anybody use weapon vs armor charts? I played 1E from the late 70s until the late 90s, when I started 2E and I never even heard of anybody using those charts.

Being able to ignore elements is not a win for organization.

There are lots of great things you can say about the 1e core books. Lots of flavour, interesting reads, etc. Organization and ease of understanding? Really? Not so much IMO.

 

[Hussar]

The Weapon Vs Armor chart is one of the best things about 1e.

In 1e, you used a sword, right? Probably a long sword; maybe a two-handed sword but definately a sword. Why? Because they had far and away the best damage of any weapon. It was a no brainer. You used a sword because everything else was so inferior.

Because you weren't using the Weapon Vs. Armor chart. The problem with longswords is that though they do good damage and are quick and nimble against lightly armored targets, they really suck against targets in full plate. What you want against an armored target is a morning star, or a mace. Even a spear is better. What the Weapon Vs. Armor chart did was bring balance and trade offs. It was one of the little used discarded rules of 1e combat that, if you actually took the time to use them, brought combat alive and made it tactical, diverse, and interesting.

It was revolutionary to how I looked at the game when I started using it. First, you are right. The armor of monsters wasn't well documented. I had to look at each monster as I used it in my game and figure out what portion was armor, and what portion was everything else. So, the first thing I did was start giving each monster and AC and what I called the AB (Armor Bonus) by breaking them down logically. But that implied very quickly that a portion of the AB was often Dex, and so that entry went along side each monster as well. For the first time, all of my creatures started having ability scores. I could start comparing their abilities to PC abilities. Some of them acquired Initiative bonuses. Strength was already stated or implied in many cases, so why not fill that in two. Intelligence was listed, so now I had that. Ability checks could now become a standardized mechanic, replacing the hodgepodge of percentile tests and other random improvised mechanics used to judge noncombat things before. I was, right about the time I got overwhelmed by the scale of the work converting the rules in a time when the SRD didn't exist and I didn't own a word processor, in the process of converting the monsters attacks into weapon equivalents and thinking about adding Con scores to monsters to solve the problem in 1e of most monsters presenting too little challenge (post adoption of the UA rules).

They actually weren't that hard to use in practice. The PC's were the biggest headache, but they only carried 3-5 weapons each and didn't change armor all the time. It was a simple matter to simply create a to hit table for each PC. That ended up saving more time than any innovation I'd ever done then or now. Instead of players adding up all their piddly bonuses every attack, they just could report the number throne. I had the target numbers for each AC precomputed. No cross referencing. No addition. One table for each PC. After that, I was resolving combats faster and more fluidly using 'to weapon vs. AC' than I had been before using it.

If 3e didn't have so much additional complexity, I'd bring back to weapon vs. AC modifiers in some form for my homebrew. It's one of the few areas of 1e I really miss. Segmented rounds are another one. Simultaneous declarations and resolutions are another. I've been tempted by all three, but I just think it would make the game too complex. There are trade offs in realism vs. playability.

I don't know what chart you use, but here's the AD&D chart.

At worst, a longsword is 5 behind the best weapon (lance) and a two handed sword is outright better than just about anything at any armor class. And, other than a few polearms, which are almost never magical anyway, a longsword is still the out and out best choice. I notice you talk about full plate, which means I'm using the Unearthed Arcana. I'll take double specs in longsword vs pretty much any other weapon choice out there.

I mean, you mention using a spear (-2 vs full plate) which is exactly the same as a longsword. In a couple of cases, a mace might be better, but, overall? Not so much. And, of course, the fact that almost all magic weapons and certainly the best ones are swords, it's not really a shock that everyone uses swords.

 

[Ratskinner]

Isn't he though? These kids; always think their generation was the first to discover things.

Thanks for the condescension. If you're curious, I've been playing since 1e/BECMI, first DM'ed Keep on the Borderlands in 1980-81. I will grant you that, at the time, I was a kid, but then you're profile indicates that you are actually younger than I am.

<snip> And that's not even to get into how many tables had diverged in practice from exploring RPG in more of a theater game mode than a wargame mode regardless of mechanics or had turned mechanics on their head to support that, or what was going on in LARPs. The very fact that early games didn't tell groups how to use their mechanics often meant that two different tables with the same rules were playing different games entirely.

That is a point I certainly agree with. I have often said that I think the reason so many people look on those old games so fondly is often because they were really playing whatever-the-heck-they-wanted.

IMO, there is very little that Indy games like FATE or BW do that wasn't done before them. I'm not sure about DitV, which in my opinion is further a field in its mechanics and desires than either of them, but I'm fairly sure that the sort of play its intended to create isn't novel. (Is their an earlier generation example of an RPG built around bidding to obtain the conch and FitB in RPGs?) What makes all of them different is a conscious combination of mechancs toward a particular end, but its definately more evolutionary than revolutionary IMO (especially given the relatively low adoption rate of these new games, fairly or unfairly).

Honestly, even though I love it, I don't consider FATE all that deep in the narrative end. Haven't played BW. It doesn't seem all that different to me, but I'm told I'm not seeing something wonderful about it. In their cases, I definitely agree on the evolutionary vs revolutionary thing. I'm a little less clear on Cortex+ a la MHRP. When I squint at it, it looks like FATE with a nifty die mechanic, but then there's that Doom Pool thing. Still probably evolutionary, though.

There are some fairly whacky deep-end narrative games that I would consider revolutionary, but their adoption rates seem even lower (possible exception of Fiasco.) Which only serves to fuel my increasing belief that narrative mechanics are really not that appealing to the majority of the D&D audience.

 

[Ratskinner]

Well, perhaps, I don't know. I lived in several places in the 70's and 80's. I don't recall observing VAST differences, but there were certainly regionalisms. WW games for instance did about squat here where I have been since '85. In fact people are barely right now messing around with some Changeling for the first time. We played a lot of games that were clearly more about story than mechanics though in the 90's. Toon, Paranoia, Gangster!, others I have probably forgotten. D&D would come up and get some play now and then, but after 1994 my last 2e campaign was done and that was just about the last any of us played heavily really right up until 4e. Maybe 2e was 'huge' other places. It existed here, but it wasn't played a lot.

I observed 1e/2e regionalism based (I think) mostly on availability of books. Although my college group seemed to readily adopt 2e and its rich supplement-load, the surrounding community seemed less keen on "keeping up". In my home town across state, only young kids without access to 1e stuff seemed to be picking it up. How much 2e was being played varied a lot with time over its run, from what I saw. It fairly dominated the room for a few years, but all forms of D&D seemed to be dogging it around the time that Skills and Powers stuff came out (1995). I'm not sure whether to blame that on anything in the rpg market or just the rise of that card game.

I did witness a strong regionalism with another game. There was a weird, locally produced, mech/far-future battle game. (It might have had 3000 in the title, memory fails, I never played it.) In my college town, and the other nearby towns and conventions, you'd have thought these guys were doing as well or better than White Wolf. They had uniforms and props, big displays, the whole 9 yards. Whole sections of the convention were devoted to their game. Drive 2 hours down the interstate, though, and nobody knew what you were talking about. They kept on going for several years, expanding with a roleplaying supplement and even minis, if memory serves. I assume they must have been selling somewhere else as well? If so, I never knew where.

 

[Celebrim]

I don't know what chart you use, but here's the AD&D chart/

That's the PH chart. You'd already caught my reference to UA, so why didn't you assume the UA chart?

I grant you that the two-handed sword rocks, as do many other two handed weapons - Halbred, Footman's Flail, Bec de Corbin - but the longsword gets serious problems versus plate or equivalent. You make it sound like the equivalent of -5 to hit is small deal. AC 2 is plate and shield. It gets even worse when we get to full plate. Now you are getting to be like 3 behind the spear, 6 behind the mace, and 8 behind the lance.

Double spec with the longsword is a valid choice, but lets say you are a 2nd level fighter with 17 strength and you are facing off against a 4th level Anti-Paladin, full plate and shield +1, as the BBEG. He's got AC -1, and you need a 20 to hit, but with your double spec and 17 strength now you hit on a 16 or better. But, factor in weapon versus AC modifiers and you still only hit on a 20. Your expected damage per round is a paltry 0.425 per round. But, had you double spec'd in the mace, you'd hit on a 14 or better. Your expected damage per round would then be 2.55 per round. Incidently, in this case, your 2nd level cleric friend with a mace out does the 2nd level double spec'd fighter. Double spec'd or not, your actually better of putting down your long sword and picking up a mace, or keeping a pick as a backup weapon as some did when they needed to peel cans.

Longswords are great weapons and if you can count on pure random treasure placement, maybe in the long run it will be worth it. But the problem with the longsword relative to the mace is that it really starts to fail you just when you need it the most. An effective -6 to hit is pretty huge.

As for the spear, the there are other advantages it picks up when you start using the full rules. It's a pretty brutal weapon used skillfully. Set to recieve charge. Spetum is nice too, but the problem with polearms is you realy have to rely on the DM getting nice and fudging any magic polearms to suit you. That wasn't as big of a problem as it might have been, because DM's that used the rules tended to arm thier NPC's accordingly. How do you get that +3 tin can opener? Because the BBEG is wielding it against you, that's how.

 

[pemerton]

Still 7 years is hardly "RAPIDLY eclipsed by what followed it".

I wasn't really meaning to step into that broader debate, just filling in some info on games I know. (I just went and checked publicatoin date on The Dying Earth - 2001, which fits your timeline.)

A comment and a question. I think that AD&D 2nd ed looked pretty clunky for its time - a legacy PC build and action resolution system which lacked the richness of a game like RQ or Rolemaster but didn't seem to put anything great in its place. (I accept that's a bit of a controversial judgement!) What about Vampire etc - I only ever played one session, and never really got a feel for its mechanics - mechanically was it in any significant way an advance on 2nd ed?

 

[Campbell]

I wasn't really meaning to step into that broader debate, just filling in some info on games I know. (I just went and checked publicatoin date on The Dying Earth - 2001, which fits your timeline.)

A comment and a question. I think that AD&D 2nd ed looked pretty clunky for its time - a legacy PC build and action resolution system which lacked the richness of a game like RQ or Rolemaster but didn't seem to put anything great in its place. (I accept that's a bit of a controversial judgement!) What about Vampire etc - I only ever played one session, and never really got a feel for its mechanics - mechanically was it in any significant way an advance on 2nd ed?

Vampire wasn't particularly innovative mechanically, but it was firmly entrenched in the design ethos of the late 80s and early 90s. A good deal of the system's mechanical underpinnings were "influenced" by Ars Magica including its splat based design (similar to traditions). Of course Rein-Hagen, the creator of Vampire had collaborated with Jonathan Tweet on Ars. It's interesting to note that before they went their separate ways Jonathan Tweet and Rein-Hagen collaborated on some system design experiments with dice pools. Rein-Hagen went with success based dice pools in Vampire while Tweet used additive pools in Over The Edge.

Edit: It should be noted that Ars Magica was something of a watershed for the RPG industry. It was the first game to use variable TNs, featured attribute+skill based rolls, and was created with the help of desktop publishing software. Lisa Stevens of Paizo and Nicole Lindros of Green Ronin were also involved.