AD&D 1E A Long Thread about the Weapon's vs. AC Table

[jolt]

If you'd asked me circa 1990 I probably would have said that being more realistic was in itself a good thing, but I probably wouldn't have understood what I meant by "realistic" at the time.

Now I'd say that what I meant by that is that reality is messy and complex and filled with tradeoffs, and that was inherently more interesting than just look down a list and picking the thing that gave you the most damage versus large sized creatures. It's also more interesting as a world to GM, because you have a reason why you might give the BBEG a mace rather than a longsword and he's not necessarily being sub-optimal by taking a mace. There is more to the choice than just flavor.

The first time someone switches from a sword to a pick or flail because the smaller damage dice is mitigated by better chance to hit, I personally feel it's worth it for game play, above and beyond the historian nerds in me going, "In the real world, real knights carried maces and flails as well as swords." Sure, I like the aesthetics of a game world that looks like I imagine the past to look like, but I do think there is more to it than that.

snip

And my answer to your question is, "This is part of a comprehensive approach to combat that forces tactical choices on the players and GM alike, so that if the fighter is beset by wild dogs I as the GM have to come with some believable way those dogs are still a threat to a juggernaut clad in steel beyond just saying, "roll... 16, it's a hit, take roll 3 points of damage."

Agreed. Also, it makes fighters more relevant. Having additional weapon proficiency's is only a benefit if multiple weapons are viable. Without weapon vs ac, there's no reason for a fighter to use anything other than a longsword (for one handed weapons anyway). Standard damage against S/M monsters and superior damage against L. People complained that it was an added complication, but it wasn't. 1E had very few modifiers and adding one in didn't really complicate anything.

 

[Celebrim]

I've decided to put this down for now, on the grounds it's a ton of work and I feel I've learned what I intended to learn from the exercise. Since I don't have any intention of running 1e AD&D any time soon, the work isn't immediately useful to me. Also, publishing "to hit" tables for monsters, while interesting and necessary (so that I can really observe the results of my choices) is brittle in as much as if I was going to modify anything at this point it would probably be further modifications to the "weapons vs. AC modifier" table itself.

I did make a start at annotating MM2, but the monsters in that book are a good deal more advanced and complicated than the MM1 monsters, reflecting maturing design. So the write up would be a good deal more complex.

If anyone is interested in seeing more work particularly if they plan to use it, that might perk up my interest again.

The very observant may have noted that the only monsters in the MM I didn't annotate where the dragons. That's because for my purposes, I'd always use the revised 1e Dragons that I wrote up in a different thread, and that thread for the most part already specifies enough information you can work out pretty quickly how to apply the table.