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

[Lanefan]

No.

This is flatly untrue. It's not even possible to argue. You're just asserting something that isn't true, but in a format that is popular - the old - "Oh it's not better it's just different...". Sorry, no. That applies when it applies and not when it doesn't.

The majority of people demonstrably and reliably had more issues with THAC0 than with BAB and ascending AC. It's a simple fact of the human brain that it's better at adding than subtracting. You can literally look it up (it's true on multiple levels as well - not only with numbers, but with objects and task and so on, humans always default prefer to add more, even when with some tasks it's a bad idea).

The big issue I had with BAB was that its implementation pushed that mechanic player-side rather than keeping it DM-side.

 

[Lanefan]

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!

I've never used xp-for-treasure and they still argue over every scrap of value.

 

[payn]

The big issue I had with BAB was that its implementation pushed that mechanic player-side rather than keeping it DM-side.

No issue at all. Instead of a 2-3 attack to guess the defense game every single combat, you just get right to it. The suspense is just boring everyone.

 

[Lanefan]

You'd be surprised.

I once witnessed a heated debate between proponents of d100 roll-under vs. d100 roll-high. It was interesting.

I've never understood the objections to roll-under.

If your odds of doing something are 17% then it's intuitive when rolling the d100 that up to 17 means you succeed and over 17 means you fail. It's more brain-work to flip it around and say you need to roll 83 or higher to succeed.

 

[payn]

I've never understood the objections to roll-under.

If your odds of doing something are 17% then it's intuitive when rolling the d100 that up to 17 means you succeed and over 17 means you fail. It's more brain-work to flip it around and say you need to roll 83 or higher to succeed.

 

[Lanefan]

No issue at all. Instead of a 2-3 attack to guess the defense game every single combat, you just get right to it. The suspense is just boring everyone.

Pushing BAB player-side also made it much harder to use as a balancing mechanism through a little gentle tweaking here and there.

And, if the characters wouldn't know their foes' AC right away then neither should the players.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think it also had to do with net effect on play. Shadowrun (1e) had target numbers of 6 even though* you couldn't roll a (net) 6. WoD had that thing (I forget the specifics) where the more dice you rolled, the worse a crit-fail you could have. Cyberpunk had your charisma-equivalent score gate** how much cyberware you could have implanted, so the combat characters would all start out character creation like D&D paladins (but ending up monstrous). All of them had over-complex or broken options, or things which may have been very consistent, but not well designed or playtested. Meanwhile, yes AD&D 2nd edition was AD&D's exception-based design with 10-12 years of additional cruft added on but*** little ability to smooth out or refine. However, by then everyone already wasn't playing AD&D by the rules, and had any one of hundreds of different ways they made it work for them and their group. So I think at the end of the day it ended up effectively being the most obtuse and inconsistent... except for all the others.

I respectfully but firmly disagree.

AD&D was just the most obtuse and inconsistent (of major/successful RPGs). There's no "except all the others" in the 1990s (In the 1980s, especially the earlier half? Sure).

Your examples don't support your argument at all. We're talking about D&D having a large number of inconsistent and obtuse rules. Yet instead of pointing to similar in other games you point to:

1) A single rules issue which people pretty much instantly came up with interpretations to deal with it - I know we did, pre-internet, so it must have been pretty easy. That's bad design but it's not obtuse nor inconsistent. (Likewise the oft-mentioned "characters couldn't die in a single attack, no matter how severe" - that's not obtuse or inconsistent, it's just kind of an arguably silly design - or kind of arguably a smart one, because only very extreme situations which are probably better handled with fiat, make a mockery of it).

2) An arguable RP issue which doesn't reflect on the rules particularly at all - AD&D 2E had numerous RP-conflicts-with-rules issues which I haven't gone into because that's a separate issue.

3) An oddity of an early dice-pool rules design which we didn't even notice until they fixed it.

1 & 3 were also corrected with 3 years by 2nd editions of the two games. This is mere Whataboutery, however well-intended, not actual counter-examples of the same kind of problem.

Also re: "not playing AD&D by the rules", I don't agree that that solved the problem! In fact, in many cases, house rules made problems with 2E AD&D being inconsistent/obtuse much worse! And the sheer number of obscure or poorly-explained rules in AD&D caused the absolute proliferation of house rules - many of them totally unnecessary on a basic level! If I had a penny for every house rule I saw in the 1990s, especially on people's RPG homepages and so on, which only existed because the DM in question had apparently not ever read the PHB and DMG cover-to-cover, or forgotten large parts of them, because the house rule essentially replicated an existing rule, well, I'd have at least a few dollars - which is a lot to get from that! An awful lot!

 

[Faolyn]

I've never understood the objections to roll-under.

If your odds of doing something are 17% then it's intuitive when rolling the d100 that up to 17 means you succeed and over 17 means you fail. It's more brain-work to flip it around and say you need to roll 83 or higher to succeed.

I actually kind of like roll-under, although I rarely get to play in systems that use it (I really want to play Dragonbane, and I have played a lot of GURPS, and one CoC game). However, I can see some "problems" with it that could bother people.

One, as people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread is that modifiers are not always intuitive. A "-3 bonus" is a bit counterintuitive, since we're primed to seeing minuses as negatives and therefore bad. A "+2 penalty" is just as confusing. And as people have said elsewhere in this thread, some games, like AD&D, were very random about how they wrote things. So something might give a +3 bonus, but that actually means subtract 3, but it could also mean the writer always adds 3 to the number they're rolling under--it results in the same thing, but it has a different feel to it. And worse, the writer may not have added the words bonus or penalty, which causes the reader to take an extra second to parse its meaning.

Two, in some games, especially some of the OSR games I've seen where you both roll under your stat for everything and the stats are rolled 3d6, it's pretty easy to fail at early levels. Or even at higher levels, since a lot of those games don't let you easily increase your stats. With a roll-over system, you can set the DCs low enough that low-level characters with middling stats are still likely to succeed at least some of the time. But with roll-under-the-stat system, you may have a stat of 6 or lower, and that's far more likely to fail.

Three, many people like big numbers. You don't really get those in roll-under systems, unless you're using d%s.

These issues can be mitigated by always being consistent with terminology and using point-buy or a basic starting level for your stats like GURPS does, or by being free with bonuses to rolls rather than sticking the rules to them in a little section off to the side.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I actually kind of like roll-under, although I rarely get to play in systems that use it (I really want to play Dragonbane, and I have played a lot of GURPS, and one CoC game). However, I can see some "problems" with it that could bother people.

One, as people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread is that modifiers are not always intuitive. A "-3 bonus" is a bit counterintuitive, since we're primed to seeing minuses as negatives and therefore bad. A "+2 penalty" is just as confusing. And as people have said elsewhere in this thread, some games, like AD&D, were very random about how they wrote things. So something might give a +3 bonus, but that actually means subtract 3, but it could also mean the writer always adds 3 to the number they're rolling under--it results in the same thing, but it has a different feel to it. And worse, the writer may not have added the words bonus or penalty, which causes the reader to take an extra second to parse its meaning.

Two, in some games, especially some of the OSR games I've seen where you both roll under your stat for everything and the stats are rolled 3d6, it's pretty easy to fail at early levels. Or even at higher levels, since a lot of those games don't let you easily increase your stats. With a roll-over system, you can set the DCs low enough that low-level characters with middling stats are still likely to succeed at least some of the time. But with roll-under-the-stat system, you may have a stat of 6 or lower, and that's far more likely to fail.

Three, many people like big numbers. You don't really get those in roll-under systems, unless you're using d%s.

These issues can be mitigated by always being consistent with terminology and using point-buy or a basic starting level for your stats like GURPS does, or by being free with bonuses to rolls rather than sticking the rules to them in a little section off to the side.

We used roll under for every action the PCs tried back in the day that wasn't an attack roll. Sometimes we did something called a "die-die", in which a d6 was rolled, and the player had to roll under their stat using that many d6s. This was for particularly unlikely actions.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The big issue I had with BAB was that its implementation pushed that mechanic player-side rather than keeping it DM-side.

Not arguing but what do you mean? The player already said what they rolled to the DM who knew the AC with THAC0, and the same thing happened with BAB surely? Maybe I'm missing something?