D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[TiQuinn]

That’s where you’re wrong. A lot of the changes are proposed by and cheered on by, people who have been in the game since the ‘80s.

Your acting like the game in the 80s was a monolith. In support of that framing, you are making unsupported claims like « no one yad a problem with THAC0 » even in the face of people telling you they had problems with THAC0.

Yeah, our group was still together when we made the switch from 2e to 3e and we definitely felt that moving from THAC0 to ascending AC was a positive change. Just because you become accustomed to a way of doing things doesn’t mean it couldn’t be improved upon.

 

[FrozenNorth]

People didn't though march into a room exclaiming how bad the stupid clown was. It was usually a reply to someone, an individual Twitter or post USING it as an insult.

That just isn’t the case. The thread in the enworld forum wasn’t prompted by anything.

D&D General Thread 'Thaco the angry clown... really?'

Oct 7, 2021

WotC has a new NPC in it's latest book, Witchlight.

Thaco the CN retired clown who doesn't want people touching his stuff and hates kids.

Very subtle. Like a brick through a window.

• DarkCrisis
• Replies: 482
• Forum: *Dungeons & Dragons

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In this thread, THAC0 the clown was brought up by @Micah Sweet who was definitely not using it as an insult.

More generally, in order to get the reference you pretty much had to have played 2nd edition., so it doesn’t make sense as an insult.

 

[AnotherGuy]

That just isn’t the case. The thread in the enworld forum wasn’t prompted by anything.

D&D General Thread 'Thaco the angry clown... really?'

Oct 7, 2021

WotC has a new NPC in it's latest book, Witchlight.

Thaco the CN retired clown who doesn't want people touching his stuff and hates kids.

Very subtle. Like a brick through a window.

• DarkCrisis
• Replies: 482
• Forum: *Dungeons & Dragons

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Wow that thread's first page is a hoot!
And this is from players who played and loved 1e and 2e.
I feel that is how it was meant to be taken.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

Ha - learned something new today: THACO is an entry in the 2014 PHB index!

 

[Hussar]

I never really though there was anything "silly" about it really because it works the same way.

"+" does not mean "add", it means improve. Plate mail armor is AC 3 (3rd armor class), so Plate mail armor +2 is improved by two classes... to AC 1, the 1st armor class.

If you have to tell people that "+ X" doesn't mean "add X", there's something seriously wrong with the definitions your game is using.

It's actually kinda funny when you think about it. People went on and on and on about how later era D&D uses jargon and not plain English definitions of words. Here we have one of the most fundamental mechanics in the game - calculating how hard something is to be hit - something that is done for every single PC and NPC in the game - and "+" doesn't mean "add".

 

[Bae'zel]

The first RPG I ever encountered was 2nd ed D&D. Up to that point, my experiences with RPGs, or RPG-adjacent material was Milton Bradley's HeroQuest and NES games like Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. THAC0 was weird and obtuse to me then. Wow did WFRP 1E and World of Darkness RPGs made a hell of a lot more sense in just about every way. You can guess which games dominated the 90s to me and my friends.

Even Robotech (Palladium) was more intuitive to me LOL

 

[FrozenNorth]

One of the things I really liked about GP as XP as a mechanic (especially with monster XP generally being paltry in comparison) was it makes it crystal-clear to the players that "violence is not the only option" - in fact, it's probably in your INTEREST to consider "bilking the ogre out of his hoard" or "let's distract him and steal it" or any number of non-combat options.

Meanwhile, I dislike the mechanic because most of the PCs I play with aren’t motivated by greed, so I don’t like how it incentivizes them to be greedy even in cases where they wouldn’t be otherwise.

 

[ezo]

If you have to tell people that "+ X" doesn't mean "add X", there's something seriously wrong with the definitions your game is using.

It's a game terminology, and we used it for literally decades without any issue. No one I knew had issue with it, but I imagine they are out there.

It was based on the systems people knew at the time, so it worked for them. Otherwise, they wouldn't have done it.

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Anyway...

I missed the THAC0 the Clown thread, never bothered with the book he came from, so didn't even know about him until this thread.

No, not funny at all. Pretty insulting, actually. Shame WotC, shame on you. This is clearly mocking and meant to be so. WotC gets knocked down another peg IMO.

THAC0 was a system and there was nothing wrong with it. It worked. For many years. Ascending AC is another system, and it works as well. And guess what? People STILL have issues with Ascending AC. Of course some people had issues with THAC0, claiming otherwise is completely delusional, but Ascending AC isn't better, isn't worse, it is just different.

 

[Remathilis]

Meanwhile, I dislike the mechanic because most of the PCs I play with aren’t motivated by greed, so I don’t like how it incentivizes them to be greedy even in cases where they wouldn’t be otherwise.

It also encouraged players to argue about every scrap of trash's inherent value. My players were notorious junk dealers, if I had pegged XP to GP, they would have sold each other repeatedly just to level!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The first RPG I ever encountered was 2nd ed D&D. Up to that point, my experiences with RPGs, or RPG-adjacent material was Milton Bradley's HeroQuest and NES games like Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. THAC0 was weird and obtuse to me then. Wow did WFRP 1E and World of Darkness RPGs made a hell of a lot more sense in just about every way. You can guess which games dominated the 90s to me and my friends.

Even Robotech (Palladium) was more intuitive to me LOL

Yeah looking back, I think 2E AD&D was probably the most obtuse and inconsistently designed major TTRPG in the 1990s. It's a little surprising it did as well as it did - mostly a testament to the sheer inertia of how popular D&D was in the 1980s, and how just putting out loads and load of wide-spectrum support probably kept it moving longer than it otherwise would have (even if they were losing money doing so).

Every other RPG made more sense and was more consistent - Palladium's ones were probably the next least-consistent/most obtuse set. Stuff like Shadowrun, oWoD, Cyberpunk 2020 and so on, even weird things like Amber or Millenium's End just had much more straightforward and consistent rules (as did TSR's own non-AD&D games, for the most part).

This was interesting because whilst in many cases you did need to know more actual rules to play some of them than AD&D (where a lot of rules rarely came up), or even to create a character, they were so much easier to learn that people (including people who hadn't played RPGs before) were getting into them anyway.