D&D 5E Mike Mearls interview - states that they may be getting off of the 2 AP/year train.

[GameOgre]

Thaco was easy.

The new way is easy.

Not everyone is math enabled. If it helped those less inclined to understand a - sign how to play D&D =Awesome.

I don't understand gamer's getting worked up about it.

If you want use thaco right now it's easy enough to do.

 

[Oofta]

I keep seeing statements about THAC0 being/not being hard, or taking/not taking more time...I can't remember any person, in my whole dnd playing life, criticising THAC0 on the basis that it is hard to do/use, or that it takes longer.

The criticism is that it is a silly system, that some people find counter intuitive to remember, and others just find annoying on the basis that there is no reason for it to work the way it does, and nearly any other system would be strictly better.

And it's not just young people today, or people who are used to other systems. These criticisms were common, IME, when 2e was still the current edition. The group I started in used THAC0, but then the group I played with right after them used the same system as Alternity.

And rolling under made sense to me, and the other, slightly newer player. I was like, ok negative bonuses is still just...weird, if nothing else, but fine, at least when I get better at something the number increases.

Then, when we finally gave that up and switched to 3.5 (skipping 3.0) it was like Christmas. Finally, the system wasn't designed like it was trying to keep out the dirty casuals, or by a guy who was too much in the weeds to really take stock of the system's idiosyncrasies and see if they were actually worth keeping or not. I was never convinced it wasn't both.

I would say that roughly half of people in the games I played complained about THAC0. I never complained about it, but still thought it was unnecessary mental gymnastics to have to constantly jump between adding and subtracting. That and remembering that I wanted high to hit and low to save and a few other things. But I don't want to bash 2E. I had fun playing it off and on for it's lifespan.

This is just an example of how people's experiences vary and you can't always take your personal experience and extrapolate out to the gaming community at large.

 

[robus]

I would say that roughly half of people in the games I played complained about THAC0. I never complained about it, but still thought it was unnecessary mental gymnastics to have to constantly jump between adding and subtracting. That and remembering that I wanted high to hit and low to save and a few other things. But I don't want to bash 2E. I had fun playing it off and on for it's lifespan.

This is just an example of how people's experiences vary and you can't always take your personal experience and extrapolate out to the gaming community at large.

I don't remember the history of this - but the "User Interface" is an important aspect of a game and keeping that interface as straightforward as possible is a win for any new user to the game.

5th Edition seems to have paid good attention to the "player interface" which is great. Now if they could up their "DM interface" that would be great (and by that I mean the way adventures are presented which are generally quite user hostile )

 

[Arnwolf666]

I love how people refer to being able to subtract as being a math nerd. Really.

 

[Oofta]

I love how people refer to being able to subtract as being a math nerd. Really.

I don't remember anyone saying it made you a math nerd (I may have missed it). I've certainly never said that you are a math nerd. I have no clue.

I'm just relating that in my experience, that a lot of people hated THAC0.

I didn't hate it, but I disliked it and was happy when it went away. Of course, I'm definitely not a math nerd so YMMV.

 

[Azzy]

I love how people refer to being able to subtract as being a math nerd. Really.

I'm a math nerd, AND I hated THAC0/descending AC.

 

[guachi]

People who hate THAC0 are the same people who hate golf and find its scoring system baffling. To hear the gnashing of teeth about how bad THAC0 is, you'd have expected the entire edifice of the game of golf to have come crashing down over the use of subtraction and negative numbers.

For the record, in the entire time I played D&D from 1983 to 2000 I never heard anyone complain about THAC0 or using an attack matrix. There are dozens of things about D&D more baffling to new players than attack math.

 

[Oofta]

People who hate THAC0 are the same people who hate golf and find its scoring system baffling. To hear the gnashing of teeth about how bad THAC0 is, you'd have expected the entire edifice of the game of golf to have come crashing down over the use of subtraction and negative numbers.

For the record, in the entire time I played D&D from 1983 to 2000 I never heard anyone complain about THAC0 or using an attack matrix. There are dozens of things about D&D more baffling to new players than attack math.

To be fair, I don't hate golf because of the scoring. I hate golf because of that dang windmill. It gets me every time.

Don't even get me started on the clown. Creeps me out.

 

[Arnwolf666]

Tennis scoring system needs revamped too. Love, 15, what the heck.

 

[Demetrios1453]

People who hate THAC0 are the same people who hate golf and find its scoring system baffling. To hear the gnashing of teeth about how bad THAC0 is, you'd have expected the entire edifice of the game of golf to have come crashing down over the use of subtraction and negative numbers.

For the record, in the entire time I played D&D from 1983 to 2000 I never heard anyone complain about THAC0 or using an attack matrix. There are dozens of things about D&D more baffling to new players than attack math.

Well, that's your personal experience, but, as others have stated here, their experience (as well as mine) is that there were plenty of people who thought Thac0 was a clunky system.

I think in the end, what really was odd about it is that you got "pluses" from your abilities and magic items, but to calculate whether you hit, you counteruntuitively subtracted your "pluses"! And then when it came to damage, you (much more logically, but in a complete reversal to what you just did) added them. It just lacked the internal consistency that the post 2e-system of simply just adding things up does...

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