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That's what I always did, and indeed still do, as I still run 2E. I just know what AC the target is and call it a day.

Good point, although one can often handle that simply by making them higher level and/or have more items. I was thinking more of peers or near-peers of the PCs.

Of course that's not what happened in 3E. I agree, though only to some extent. One could always use the PC creation rules and, in fact, we often did exactly that with important NPCs back in the day. Yep, this was very much what was going on. 4E went even further, of course, although it backed...

As with everything there are tradeoffs. Having monsters build with the same rules as PCs adds a whole lot of burden to the DM or else the DM just ignores it. I know when I ran 3.5, I tended to ignore a lot of the stat block quite a bit, but I know someone else who felt he really had to work...

I think the publisher pretty much always has to do that at an edition change, while it's in the interest of individual campaigns to move into their own directions, particularly the kind of long-running and heavily customized campaigns many of us here do, and, of course, many other folks don't...

I played it for most of the time, too, and didn't see too many folks really gakking at it personally either, but I also played all of that time with a fairly highly educated set of folks. As much anecdotal experience as you and I have, I've heard plenty of folks say the opposite and WotC decided...

And the original post is about as sandbox as it gets.

I agree, but it really seemed to be for some folks.

I agree with you, but will note that the 2E DMG still has to hit tables in it and they never really tell you what the progressions are exactly. ;) THAC0 and AC going down from 10 is unquestionably harder to manage than ACs going up from 10 as it requires negation. ACs going down doesn't align...

I think it was a necessary change if you were getting rid of lookup tables. The fact that 3E went nuts with modifiers is a separate issue and they shouldn't be conflated. The assumption in the 1E days was that you were not doing any calculation yourself. You were simply looking up number in...

I will say, as someone who lived through that change, that going all goes up wasn't a bad shift. I know the 2E designers had intended to flip to an always roll high system but had been vetoed for reasons of backwards compatibility. There are folks who've studied the cognitive load of addition...

I'm in that age range too. The first scientific calculator I got was when I was about 15, although I'm sure I had a simple calculator before that. However, the math classes didn't accept answers that didn't have full work shown. I taught a good bit of university mathematics as a grad student...

I'm glad it's gone too, but it's just grade school arithmetic.... The 2E designers certainly thought of getting rid of ACs going downward. They were told not to by management. Compared to the tables that were hidden in the 1E DMG, it was a model of transparency!

I think that's a really key insight. Two friends and I were talking about this point regarding very simple game systems. I think Fate came up in this regard, but I can't recall and have never played it myself. One noted that a very rules-light game system tends not to support growth of character...

I agree that there's a value to some "shared experience" like that, in terms of providing a general common language, which is necessary for a community. For instance, a lot of the legendary items of the game such as the Deck of Many Things, Holy Avenger, and so forth, along with the class...

Oh, certainly. There are folks who write whatever on their character sheet and play Greedy. However, I'd say these characters were on the Evil side. For instance, one time we "liberated" a large village from an oppressive cult at the behest of our buddies who were going to basically turn the...

They used the term that served what they wanted to say about how what was good for them was good for us.

My shared experience was with the people I played (and, for some, still play) with. However, that's not something that keeps marketers happy. The interests of players and of a game company are not the same.

I've played in a few "evil" campaigns dating from the mid to late '90s and then recently. I'm still in one that started that way, but due to finding and blowing the Horn of Change, some of our PCs shifted, mine most notably. I was a Bard/Warlock (in the 5E build, this started as a 4E campaign...

I agree that the Wars made Greyhawk really grimdark, but we used it and then just rolled some of that back, putting some of the events in the hands of the PCs. The Greyhawk City module was really fun too, we got a lot of play out of that. You're right, though, there were some mangy dogs.