Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Sigil" data-source="post: 9272372" data-attributes="member: 2013">The problem as I see it is that even in AD&D we abstracted sufficiently and use terminology that obfuscates what we're trying to communicate.We see things like "Armor Class 5" or "Armor Class -2" and what we've abstracted away is the notion that "Magic Plate and Shield is First Class Armor" (i.e., AC 1), and things after that are "Second Class" or "Third Class" (or "Lesser Class").The fact that Armor Class can go into negative numbers means we overthought the system. Now it's just a mathematical construct instead of what it was originally intended to do..."Best Armor" = First Class (AC 1)"Really Good Armor" = Second Class (AC 2)"Good Armor" = Third Class (AC 3)... and so on.Since we're no longer using AC 1 as shorthand for "the best armor" it now becomes the question of which is the easier mathematical operation:ASCENDING AC: Start with a hit roll. Sum all the bonuses that may apply due to magic, high ability scores, Proficiency/Base Attack/Bonus etc. Compare this final value with the armor class of the defender. If the final result is greater than or equal to the AC of the defender, the attack hits.DESCENDING AC: Start with a hit roll. Sum all the bonuses that may apply due to magic, high ability score, etc. Subtract this modified roll from your THAC0 score. Compare this final value with the armor class of the defender. If the final result is less than or equal to the Armor Class of the defender, the attack hits.ALTERNATIVE DESCENDING AC:  Start with a hit roll. Sum all the bonuses that may apply due to magic, high ability score, etc. Subtract your defender's AC from your THAC0 score. If your modified hit roll is greater than or equal to the result of subtracting the defender's AC from your THAC0 score, you hit.One of these has a lot more steps, including at least one subtraction step (and whether or not we want to admit it, the average person finds addition easier than subtraction, also the "less than" function is confusing when comparing two negative numbers). I think using Ascending AC is a lot cleaner. To say nothing of the counterintuitiveness of magic armor and shields in the Descending AC paradigm LOWERING your armor class by the amount of their "plus" (e.g., "take a fighter in plate mail with a shield... he has an AC of 2. Now hand him a +3 shield. His AC is now -1. Yup, 2 plus 3 equals minus 1.")(I grew up with THAC0 and have no problem immediately looking at a hit roll, a THAC0, the target AC, and knowing whether or not the attack is a hit. Just because I learned it doesn't mean the math is intuitive... just because I can do multi-dimensional linear algebraic transformations and after years of practice they're somewhat intuitive to me does not make them intuitive to most)</blockquote>

Verification