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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Stalker0" data-source="post: 7525831" data-attributes="member: 5889">Lowkey, a wonderfully written response. Full of well thought out points, reasonable facts, and most importantly....not a single touch of anger or disdain. I applaud you, this is what has been missing from this debate.Now let us have a debate ourselves shall we! In terms of my point above, I will stick with the recent conversation, most specifically about the example the OP provided. At one point Sancosanct calls the OP's use of 1e in question over the term THACO.The OP's response: ..."As you pointed out, "To Hit A.C. 0" actually originated on P196 of the 1st edition DMG in Appendex E: "Alphabetical Recapitulation of Monsters (With Experience Point Values)", it was not created in 2nd edition."Sancosanct's response: ..."Every time you post, you display how you really do not in fact, know the rules of the game you keep saying you do. No, people did not refer to "THAC0" in 1e. I wasn't even called that, but spelled out in the only place it appeared in 1e (the DMG appendix)."The OP provided a fact....a fact that both parties seem to agree on. And yet the response amounts to...well yes that existed...but your party did not use that term (trust me I know), so therefore you clearly have little knowledge of the game. Now Sancosanct may ultimately be right....but there is no winning here with that kind of tone and statement. This is the "sneer" I was referring to earlier, and it is destroying what could be an interesting and reasonable debate.Now let me look at one of your statements: "not just because it COULD result in a TPK (depending on party composition) but because EVEN IF IT DIDN'T, IT WOULD LIKELY KILL ONE OR MORE PARTY MEMBERS AND DEVASTATE THEM FOR THE REST OF THE ADVENTURE. This is something so obvious it shouldn't need to be pointed out, which is why many of us were happy to suggest options for the OP if he wanted to avoid the encounter (because many of us had run this)."The bolded section is the point of argument. As you have stated earlier, 1e was an amalgamation of weird house rules, snippets of different books, etc. And unlike 3e and beyond, we did not have the internet to come to at least some understanding of what the "standard dnd game" looks like. So I don't think there is anything obvious here.To the OP's combat analysis, the point of the analysis was to showcase that the purple worm was not the automatic TPK in 1e that people are asserting. The OP's example showcased how the PW could not only be beaten, but actually beaten pretty handily. Is the example typical? That's a key question, and it seems that its one that is hard to answer. The assertion is that the tournament characters are not typical examples. That may be true....how do we prove it? At least those characters are in a book, we can see there stats, its something tangible and something that we all can agree exists. Are there other character examples in any of the old 1e books that could give us a better example of what a typical 1e character looks like? Otherwise we only have the words of nostalgic 1e players to guide us into what the typical party would look like....and unfortunately that is not the strongest evidence of actual results.Perhaps one way to "fake it", would be this question....generally how much variance was there in 1e characters? For example, would it be reasonable to adjust the tournament players by -1 hit, +1 saves (I think its +1) or something like to give a reasonable estimate of what "weaker characters" would look like? With your 1e experience, do you think rerunning the analysis with slightly weaker players would satisfy your concerns about trying a reasonable party against the PW?</blockquote>

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