AD&D1 Combat Exercise

[Tarek]

Ryan Dancey recently pointed out the reason why there is no facing in 3E. With 6 second rounds there is so much movement that a character would be facing a lot of directions. He recommends you watch a basketball game and see how much movement there is in 6 seconds.

And I would point out to Ryan Dancey that melee combat between multiple participants on both sides is more like football than like basketball, with the distinction that neither side is deliberately allowing themselves to be grappled, and in both games it is possible that someone can 'blindside' you by coming up from behind.

I would also point out to Ryan the known real-world phenomenon of "tunnel vision" in stressful situations.

In short, I believe that Ryan was wrong about facing not mattering, and he should have been honest and said "we made this change to make the game simpler" rather than attempting to justify it.

 

[Glyfair]

And I would point out to Ryan Dancey that melee combat between multiple participants on both sides is more like football than like basketball, with the distinction that neither side is deliberately allowing themselves to be grappled, and in both games it is possible that someone can 'blindside' you by coming up from behind.

I was actually going to mention that football might be a better analogy. Even so, look at 1 minute in football.

If that's not good enough an analogy for you, find a movie with a decent fight scene. Count 6 seconds, count 1 minute and see what happens during those time periods.

6 seconds it's arguable whether facing is important. I don't really think it is that arguable for 1 minute rounds.

 

[Imp]

That is not my understanding of the repeated 20s. It's not a *natural* 20, it's just a 20, after all modifiers.

Nonononono... I am going from memory here, but as I recall, it's supposed to scale from the first 20 (a 20 after all modifiers) up one for each armor class step. So if the bad guy hits AC -2 on a 20, and he has an additional +2 to hit, he'll hit AC -2 on an 18, AC -3 on a 19, AC -4 on a 20, up to whatever he can still hit on the table.

This could have been presented as an optional rule, though.

 

[billd91]

Regarding the OP - I think it was overstating it to say that 1E "used battlegrids". I think there were some illustrations of how to judge encounters where a grid was used as a tool. But as far as I recall grids were never used with the kind of precision that is expected in 3E. They were never a part of the actual "physics" of the game world the way they are in 3E.

Yes and no. There were no grids, per se. The idea was that you'd be looking at miniatures on the tabletop and measuring things with your tape measures. That's what D&D evolved from and that's why ranges for movement, spells, and weapons are all in inches. By the time 1st edition AD&D came out, I expect most people weren't playing with actual miniatures, but the rules still spelled the terms out as if you were.
As far as precision goes, the AD&D 1e rules were both less and more precise. They accounted for facing and whether or not someone was on the shield side or not (more precision), and yet less because there were no grid spaces nor vertices to deal with in terms of targeting, lines of sight, etc.

The thing about 1E is that the rounds are a minute long, so precise positioning would be hard to do because your character bobs and weaves for 60 seconds, meaning he really could move quite a distance in the course of the round if he wanted to. How far though? AFAIK it never says, and IME such things were resolved according to the habits/customs of the DM.

That's really not true in the 1e RAW. There are illustrations for how a PC can be surrounded, who gets the shield AC, who gets the rear AC, and the difference between using square vs hex grids. That implies things being pretty static in overall relationship between attacker and defender. That said, there were also rules for shooting into melee that suggested a certain amount of bobbing and weaving since it was unpredictable who the target of the ranged attack would be.

I wonder if the 1E RAW is a game anyone actually ever played.

If there were anyone who did, I have never encountered them. Tons of rules went out the window, some unpredictably and some quite predictably, from table to table. There may have been some people playing by the RAW initially back when the rules first hit the bookstores, but I expect that most drifted substantially after that.

 

[billd91]

Nonononono... I am going from memory here, but as I recall, it's supposed to scale from the first 20 (a 20 after all modifiers) up one for each armor class step. So if the bad guy hits AC -2 on a 20, and he has an additional +2 to hit, he'll hit AC -2 on an 18, AC -3 on a 19, AC -4 on a 20, up to whatever he can still hit on the table.

This could have been presented as an optional rule, though.

I think it might be worth finding out who exactly understood the repeated 20s rule on the combat table and which ones required natural 20s to hit and which ones didn't. There's a reason THAC0 appeared in later days of 1e, even from semi official sources (RPGA tournaments, as I recall), house ruling the repeated 20s away.

 

[billd91]

4. The extra attack in the 3/2 sequence comes in the odd-numbered rounds, not the even-numbered rounds, and in those rounds there's no need to check initiative (in this case -- if Yrag had companions their actions would still be determined by the initiative roll): Yrag's first attack always occurs first, the goblinoids' attacks always occur second, and Yrag's second attack always occurs last. Likewise with his 9 attacks against the goblins -- his first 4 attacks would occur first, initiative roll would determine which was first between his 5th attack and the goblins' attacks, and then his 6-9th attacks would occur last (note: whether Yrag at the end of his charge gets all 9 of his attacks or only 1 attack (and, in the former case, whether the weapon length first strike rule applies only to the 5th attack or to all 9) is an ambiguity in the rules -- make a ruling and stick to it (because the players will remember if you don't)).

You sure about them coming in odd numbered rounds? That would mean the character gets one in round 1. That doesn't match my recollections.

 

[T. Foster]

To resolve the anomaly of the repeated 20s vs. a net negative modifier, the DMG suggests adjusting the target's AC rather than the die roll (so the hobgoblins' net -3 to hit AC -4 would be effectively an attack against AC -7 -- if they can hit AC -7 on the table with a rolled 20 then they can hit). Another possibility might be to count any roll of natural 20 as 25 before subtracting the modifier (with the caveat that the total can't be above 20); so in this case if the hobgoblin with a net -3 modifier rolled a 20 it would count as (25-3=22 which becomes) 20 -- enough for a hit.

Neither of these is particularly elegant, and I strongly suspect that not a lot of thought was given to how net negative modifiers interact with the repeated 20s on the table. Especially since we know that EGG didn't actually use the weapon vs. AC adjustments (which is where a lot of the negative adjustments come from) it's just probably not something that came up very often.

 

[Delta]

That is not my understanding of the repeated 20s. It's not a *natural* 20, it's just a 20, after all modifiers. For instance, the hobgoblins need a 20 to hit AC -1 to -6, so with their -3 modifier for using longswords against plate & shield, they can't hit any AC better than 0. They can't roll a natural 23 on d20.

The intention is to make sure that even high-AC characters are still hittable with a natural 20. Modifiers really need to be applied to the AC when it makes a difference like that. See p. 70, "Important Note Regarding 'To Hit' Adjustments" and p. 82, "Progression on the Combat Tables".

 

[TerraDave]

ahh, the days of simple, rules light, play.

You should have done tied initiative with different weapon speeds.

 

[king_ghidorah]

Regarding the OP - I think it was overstating it to say that 1E "used battlegrids". I think there were some illustrations of how to judge encounters where a grid was used as a tool. But as far as I recall grids were never used with the kind of precision that is expected in 3E. They were never a part of the actual "physics" of the game world the way they are in 3E.

The point that the game was designed with the thought of a grid or similar setup isn't much of an overstatement, if at all. After all, movement, spell and weapon ranges and the like still were measured in inches, assuming 10ft (or yards outdoors) per inch. The wargame/miniatures aspect, and the assumptions of an official square grid over a hex grid are more than mildly implied.

3E makes a more rigid case for the grid as the only way to do things properly, but that tradition certainly has its roots in 1E.