Celebrim
Legend
Perhaps because everyone is talking about that fight scene in “Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” and the fact that I’ve been thinking a lot about what I wish I had used for rules in the 1980’s and 1990’s, it’s only natural that I’ve started thinking a lot about the much maligned “Weapon vs. AC Modifier” originally on page 38 of the 1e AD&D Player’s Handbook.
The “Weapon vs. AC Modifier” table has been always something most people ignored. I ignored it for the first 8-10 years I was playing. Sometime in the early 1990s I started to get uncomfortable with the rules of AD&D, because the release of 2nd edition AD&D really for the first time had forced me to think about the rules and the way I played and the results of those rules on play. Deciding whether or not 2nd edition AD&D was an improvement or a downgrade and picking and choosing what to take made me spend time reading the rules in a way I’d never really done before, and playing with a new group as a player on a long term basis had opened my eyes to different ways to play. I’d also gotten access to Dragon by this time and begun reading the magazine in a more thorough manner than just picking it off the shelf at B. Dalton book stores and glancing through it.
When I finally did pay attention to the weapon vs. AC modifier table, I liked what it was doing a lot. But like the few people who had paid attention to it, I figured out almost immediately that wanting to apply it to your game and actually applying it to your game would be two different things. Despite a lot of hints that many monster designers were aware of this table and its impact on the game, there wasn’t really anything like universal support for the table. Most designers were ignoring it as well. AD&D’s MM2 had been a significant improvement in presentation and sometimes clarity over the first MM, but it hadn’t really addressed this issue. And 2e largely ignored it, with only an optional rule that didn’t capture the original table’s baroque complexity and interest.
Undaunted, and driven by what at the time I thought of as a desire for “greater realism” (though it really wasn’t anything so simple), I set about making the table work for me. That required doing two things. First, I had to whenever I utilized a monster from the Monster Manuals set about deciding the missing information that wasn’t included, by breaking down the AC recorded for the monster into its actual AC and its “bonus to armor class” or (AB). That is to say, it had been usual in my mind to think of a character with mail +1 and a shield +1 as having AC 2, but really it was better to record that as “AC 4 with a +2 bonus” or “AC 2, AB +2” or as I wrote it at the time “AC 2 (+2)”.
The second thing was to make sure that this new number didn’t slow down play. To do that, I took the PC’s in my group and I listed their weapons and for each one made its own “to hit” table. So “Bob” with his longsword +1 he was specialized in got a row for that longsword that factor in not just his THAC0 and the versus AC modifier, but also Bob’s strength bonus and the magical bonus of the sword. This actually proved as revolutionary as adopting the use of the table. Combat actually sped up. The player could just report the result of the dice and I would instantly know whether that roll was good enough to hit, where before there was always a few seconds of mental lag for both of us. The only thing Bob needed to report beside his rolled result was any situational modifiers from things like “bless” which were fairly rare because buffing was not a prevalent strategy the way it would be in 3e D&D after direct damage was nerfed.
The goal of adopting the table had been to make weapon selection more interesting. If you ignored the weapon vs. AC table, the longsword and the two-handed sword were the clear winners. Fighters all had longswords, shields and longbows – and were specialized in one of those two weapons unless they planned on weird dual class builds. The stats were just too good, and the only time it mattered was on a charge when longer reach was sometimes preferable. But that in itself didn’t change the math enough to make all those cool pole arms in the back of the Unearthed Arcana worth looking into. (Speed factor might have but I could never make that work as written.) The weapon vs. AC table changed everything overnight. Suddenly, it was very much worth having a side arm like a flail, mace, or pick, or focusing or even specializing in obscure weapons like the Bec de Corbin, Lucerne Hammer, or Halberd, or using real weapons from history like the morningstar or falchion. The mixed forces of low level monstrous humanoids became more interesting as well, little armies with interesting specialized roles, some becoming relatively more fearsome than before.
You see, within the first year that I DMed I realized that high AC was the PC’s real superpower. Middle school me was simulating combats on the C64 and trying to figure out how many monsters a single 10th level fighter could defeat before going down. Once a character could get something like Plate Mail +1 and a Shield +1, or any other way they could get their AC up to 0 or higher, they got to be darn near invincible. Linear increases in AC led to exponential decreases in damage taken, lengthening how long you could survive and thus how much damage you could dish out. And PC could typically do this by fourth level or so. If they worked at keeping their AC high enough, they were untouchable. The fact that monsters were capped at 16+ HD in terms of THAC0 (or so I thought, not having access to WG4) made the situation worse at higher levels. While conversely, between strength bonuses, magical weapons, and weapon specialization a fighter could almost not fail to hit most monsters. Most monsters had a pretty low AC and the few that didn’t were still not really out of reach of the PC fighter’s weapon. Expected damage per attack against a party with good frontliners with high AC was very low. The tactics that would later define WoW were already in play at my table by say 1985. High AC “tanks” could go toe to toe with the monsters, using the fact that monsters didn’t have bonuses to hit and generally poor THAC0 to minimize damage. Spellcasters, who could not go toe to toe with monsters because of poor AC and general squishiness used the “meat shields” to safely cast spells, winning fights quickly. And clerics could heal the minimal damage the party took in order to stay ready for the next fight. By higher levels, say 10th level, a reasonably well optimized party with good tactics could “ginsu knife” most opponents, with only a few monsters in the monster manual able to provide good challenges.
By 1990, I’d started to think of D&D combat as the initiative roll as being the middle part of combat. Since most D&D combat only went 1-2 rounds, if the party won initiative then they’d attack twice while the foes generally only got one attack. If the monster or monsters lost initiative, they’d generally go down like chumps – doubly so if the PC’s surprised them. By the time the initiative was settled, the combat was almost over and all but decided. And the trouble was very much like the problem with AC – the PCs (or at least most of them) got a bonus on their initiative rolls from high DEX while very few monsters had explicit DEX or explicit bonuses to initiative. So breaking AC in to AC + AB and explicitly deciding what part came from toughness and what part from speed had had the additional effect of me now having good guesses as to the DEX of a lot of monsters. Which meant fewer times that the monster only got to go once before going down, which meant more attack.
The effect of the modifiers was equally interesting. The easy access to high AC made fighters even more godly than they already were at lower levels, but… it was controllable thing. I could make low levels less threatening by employing common sorts of weapons that weren’t particularly effective against good AC, but I could decide at any point to give monsters a bonus that they were sorely lacking just by giving them a better more military sort of weapon. A gnoll with a footman’s flail suddenly got a good deal more threatening. I could give something like a Bugbear a weapon that was really effective against good armor, and keep the threat going for more levels. And I started giving high end monsters like giants explicit weapon use, which combined with their known strength and thus strength bonuses meant I had a much easier time threatening PCs at high level. This was win/win. At the time the PCs were fragile, they got less fragile, but as they got more durable I could find ways to keep challenging them that weren’t cheesy and didn’t add a ton of magic items to the game. I was making monsters that functioned more like PCs – explicit DEX, explicit STR, and weapons that could be selected to grant optimal bonuses. Weapon specialization when I needed to pull out big guns.
By the time my “home brewing” project with the then hybrid 1e/2e AD&D had run its course and I gave up and switched to GURPS, I had just a couple of things left in my project with the weapon vs. AC table. Having realized most AD&D monsters were glass cannons, I was toying with the idea of explicit CON for monsters, and more to the point I was increasingly bothered by something I’d earlier chosen to ignore – natural weapons. Most monsters didn’t use weapons. They used natural weapons that seemed to explicitly not add damage from strength except in a few rare cases and for which there was no entry on the “weapon vs. AC” table. I’d chosen to just assume that natural weapons granted neither a boon nor a penalty against various AC because it was already enough work to work out AC/AB and implied DEX, but of course that wasn’t “realistic”. I’d begun thinking about the idea of adding “small claw”, “large claw”, “talon”, “bite” and so forth to the table, but had never put in the work because I had by that time all sorts of other problems I was thinking about – unarmed combat like grappling, infravision, scent, and most of all NWP and all the problems of AD&D not having a unified notion of skill (How hard was it for a non-thief to climb a wall?). The lack of unified mechanics for anything was making me angry, and I gave up my 1e house rules and went about learning the hard way from GURPS that reading well and being intuitive as processes of play and playing well weren’t the same thing.
Well, out of some strange impulse, I’ve decided to dig out all those old ideas and go the next step forward. This is the rules I would have been using circa 1993 with a couple of new editions. The deliberate changes to battle axe to make it more useful against heavy armor (as a “heavy weapon” halfway between a mace and a sword as I saw it) and the errors(?) in printing the jo stick and bo stick were things I knew about. But I’m not only tweaking the table a bit more that, I’m also going ahead and doing the work I didn’t do back in the day and deciding roughly what the attacks of each published 1e monster equated to in terms of weaponry. Rather than making a bunch of new natural weapon categories as I probably would have back in the day, I’m just arbitrarily (?) declaring each natural weapon equivalent to some existing weapon just as many entries hinted at with respect to armor by declaring the monsters hide equivalent to some existing armor. And while I’m at it, I dealing with a new problem that I didn’t really consider at the time, which is what happen when a monster picks up a new weapon? That is to say, how many weapons is a monster actually proficient in using?
The result of tweaking the weapons table is a whole lot of weapons can be justified in their employment and made dangerous through skilled tactics. There are notable enhancements to the battle axe, bill-guisarme, dagger, halberd, glaive, lucern hammer, spear and pike, while stalwart trusty weapons like the bardiche, bec de corbin, footman’s flail, horseman’s flail, heavy lance, morningstar, footman’s mace, horseman’s mace, scimitar, bastard sword, falchion, longsword, and two-handed sword can give great diversity to the threats and weapons in the game as well.
One thing that many players may not be happy about is that using this table nerfs the monk into the ground. As I already hated the class and it was already a pretty lousy class as written, this doesn’t bother me. Fixing the monk, if that is even a thing worth doing, is a topic for another time.
Working on this has caused me to have many thoughts. Think this is the first time I've actually read the 1e AD&D Monster Manual cover to cover despite playing with it for well over a decade and playing D&D for 40 years now. Many of the entries I'd only glanced over before. I could probably right a whole thread about it now. But I'm getting sidetracked.
The “Weapon vs. AC Modifier” table has been always something most people ignored. I ignored it for the first 8-10 years I was playing. Sometime in the early 1990s I started to get uncomfortable with the rules of AD&D, because the release of 2nd edition AD&D really for the first time had forced me to think about the rules and the way I played and the results of those rules on play. Deciding whether or not 2nd edition AD&D was an improvement or a downgrade and picking and choosing what to take made me spend time reading the rules in a way I’d never really done before, and playing with a new group as a player on a long term basis had opened my eyes to different ways to play. I’d also gotten access to Dragon by this time and begun reading the magazine in a more thorough manner than just picking it off the shelf at B. Dalton book stores and glancing through it.
When I finally did pay attention to the weapon vs. AC modifier table, I liked what it was doing a lot. But like the few people who had paid attention to it, I figured out almost immediately that wanting to apply it to your game and actually applying it to your game would be two different things. Despite a lot of hints that many monster designers were aware of this table and its impact on the game, there wasn’t really anything like universal support for the table. Most designers were ignoring it as well. AD&D’s MM2 had been a significant improvement in presentation and sometimes clarity over the first MM, but it hadn’t really addressed this issue. And 2e largely ignored it, with only an optional rule that didn’t capture the original table’s baroque complexity and interest.
Undaunted, and driven by what at the time I thought of as a desire for “greater realism” (though it really wasn’t anything so simple), I set about making the table work for me. That required doing two things. First, I had to whenever I utilized a monster from the Monster Manuals set about deciding the missing information that wasn’t included, by breaking down the AC recorded for the monster into its actual AC and its “bonus to armor class” or (AB). That is to say, it had been usual in my mind to think of a character with mail +1 and a shield +1 as having AC 2, but really it was better to record that as “AC 4 with a +2 bonus” or “AC 2, AB +2” or as I wrote it at the time “AC 2 (+2)”.
The second thing was to make sure that this new number didn’t slow down play. To do that, I took the PC’s in my group and I listed their weapons and for each one made its own “to hit” table. So “Bob” with his longsword +1 he was specialized in got a row for that longsword that factor in not just his THAC0 and the versus AC modifier, but also Bob’s strength bonus and the magical bonus of the sword. This actually proved as revolutionary as adopting the use of the table. Combat actually sped up. The player could just report the result of the dice and I would instantly know whether that roll was good enough to hit, where before there was always a few seconds of mental lag for both of us. The only thing Bob needed to report beside his rolled result was any situational modifiers from things like “bless” which were fairly rare because buffing was not a prevalent strategy the way it would be in 3e D&D after direct damage was nerfed.
The goal of adopting the table had been to make weapon selection more interesting. If you ignored the weapon vs. AC table, the longsword and the two-handed sword were the clear winners. Fighters all had longswords, shields and longbows – and were specialized in one of those two weapons unless they planned on weird dual class builds. The stats were just too good, and the only time it mattered was on a charge when longer reach was sometimes preferable. But that in itself didn’t change the math enough to make all those cool pole arms in the back of the Unearthed Arcana worth looking into. (Speed factor might have but I could never make that work as written.) The weapon vs. AC table changed everything overnight. Suddenly, it was very much worth having a side arm like a flail, mace, or pick, or focusing or even specializing in obscure weapons like the Bec de Corbin, Lucerne Hammer, or Halberd, or using real weapons from history like the morningstar or falchion. The mixed forces of low level monstrous humanoids became more interesting as well, little armies with interesting specialized roles, some becoming relatively more fearsome than before.
You see, within the first year that I DMed I realized that high AC was the PC’s real superpower. Middle school me was simulating combats on the C64 and trying to figure out how many monsters a single 10th level fighter could defeat before going down. Once a character could get something like Plate Mail +1 and a Shield +1, or any other way they could get their AC up to 0 or higher, they got to be darn near invincible. Linear increases in AC led to exponential decreases in damage taken, lengthening how long you could survive and thus how much damage you could dish out. And PC could typically do this by fourth level or so. If they worked at keeping their AC high enough, they were untouchable. The fact that monsters were capped at 16+ HD in terms of THAC0 (or so I thought, not having access to WG4) made the situation worse at higher levels. While conversely, between strength bonuses, magical weapons, and weapon specialization a fighter could almost not fail to hit most monsters. Most monsters had a pretty low AC and the few that didn’t were still not really out of reach of the PC fighter’s weapon. Expected damage per attack against a party with good frontliners with high AC was very low. The tactics that would later define WoW were already in play at my table by say 1985. High AC “tanks” could go toe to toe with the monsters, using the fact that monsters didn’t have bonuses to hit and generally poor THAC0 to minimize damage. Spellcasters, who could not go toe to toe with monsters because of poor AC and general squishiness used the “meat shields” to safely cast spells, winning fights quickly. And clerics could heal the minimal damage the party took in order to stay ready for the next fight. By higher levels, say 10th level, a reasonably well optimized party with good tactics could “ginsu knife” most opponents, with only a few monsters in the monster manual able to provide good challenges.
By 1990, I’d started to think of D&D combat as the initiative roll as being the middle part of combat. Since most D&D combat only went 1-2 rounds, if the party won initiative then they’d attack twice while the foes generally only got one attack. If the monster or monsters lost initiative, they’d generally go down like chumps – doubly so if the PC’s surprised them. By the time the initiative was settled, the combat was almost over and all but decided. And the trouble was very much like the problem with AC – the PCs (or at least most of them) got a bonus on their initiative rolls from high DEX while very few monsters had explicit DEX or explicit bonuses to initiative. So breaking AC in to AC + AB and explicitly deciding what part came from toughness and what part from speed had had the additional effect of me now having good guesses as to the DEX of a lot of monsters. Which meant fewer times that the monster only got to go once before going down, which meant more attack.
The effect of the modifiers was equally interesting. The easy access to high AC made fighters even more godly than they already were at lower levels, but… it was controllable thing. I could make low levels less threatening by employing common sorts of weapons that weren’t particularly effective against good AC, but I could decide at any point to give monsters a bonus that they were sorely lacking just by giving them a better more military sort of weapon. A gnoll with a footman’s flail suddenly got a good deal more threatening. I could give something like a Bugbear a weapon that was really effective against good armor, and keep the threat going for more levels. And I started giving high end monsters like giants explicit weapon use, which combined with their known strength and thus strength bonuses meant I had a much easier time threatening PCs at high level. This was win/win. At the time the PCs were fragile, they got less fragile, but as they got more durable I could find ways to keep challenging them that weren’t cheesy and didn’t add a ton of magic items to the game. I was making monsters that functioned more like PCs – explicit DEX, explicit STR, and weapons that could be selected to grant optimal bonuses. Weapon specialization when I needed to pull out big guns.
By the time my “home brewing” project with the then hybrid 1e/2e AD&D had run its course and I gave up and switched to GURPS, I had just a couple of things left in my project with the weapon vs. AC table. Having realized most AD&D monsters were glass cannons, I was toying with the idea of explicit CON for monsters, and more to the point I was increasingly bothered by something I’d earlier chosen to ignore – natural weapons. Most monsters didn’t use weapons. They used natural weapons that seemed to explicitly not add damage from strength except in a few rare cases and for which there was no entry on the “weapon vs. AC” table. I’d chosen to just assume that natural weapons granted neither a boon nor a penalty against various AC because it was already enough work to work out AC/AB and implied DEX, but of course that wasn’t “realistic”. I’d begun thinking about the idea of adding “small claw”, “large claw”, “talon”, “bite” and so forth to the table, but had never put in the work because I had by that time all sorts of other problems I was thinking about – unarmed combat like grappling, infravision, scent, and most of all NWP and all the problems of AD&D not having a unified notion of skill (How hard was it for a non-thief to climb a wall?). The lack of unified mechanics for anything was making me angry, and I gave up my 1e house rules and went about learning the hard way from GURPS that reading well and being intuitive as processes of play and playing well weren’t the same thing.
Well, out of some strange impulse, I’ve decided to dig out all those old ideas and go the next step forward. This is the rules I would have been using circa 1993 with a couple of new editions. The deliberate changes to battle axe to make it more useful against heavy armor (as a “heavy weapon” halfway between a mace and a sword as I saw it) and the errors(?) in printing the jo stick and bo stick were things I knew about. But I’m not only tweaking the table a bit more that, I’m also going ahead and doing the work I didn’t do back in the day and deciding roughly what the attacks of each published 1e monster equated to in terms of weaponry. Rather than making a bunch of new natural weapon categories as I probably would have back in the day, I’m just arbitrarily (?) declaring each natural weapon equivalent to some existing weapon just as many entries hinted at with respect to armor by declaring the monsters hide equivalent to some existing armor. And while I’m at it, I dealing with a new problem that I didn’t really consider at the time, which is what happen when a monster picks up a new weapon? That is to say, how many weapons is a monster actually proficient in using?
The result of tweaking the weapons table is a whole lot of weapons can be justified in their employment and made dangerous through skilled tactics. There are notable enhancements to the battle axe, bill-guisarme, dagger, halberd, glaive, lucern hammer, spear and pike, while stalwart trusty weapons like the bardiche, bec de corbin, footman’s flail, horseman’s flail, heavy lance, morningstar, footman’s mace, horseman’s mace, scimitar, bastard sword, falchion, longsword, and two-handed sword can give great diversity to the threats and weapons in the game as well.
One thing that many players may not be happy about is that using this table nerfs the monk into the ground. As I already hated the class and it was already a pretty lousy class as written, this doesn’t bother me. Fixing the monk, if that is even a thing worth doing, is a topic for another time.
Working on this has caused me to have many thoughts. Think this is the first time I've actually read the 1e AD&D Monster Manual cover to cover despite playing with it for well over a decade and playing D&D for 40 years now. Many of the entries I'd only glanced over before. I could probably right a whole thread about it now. But I'm getting sidetracked.
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