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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 6581437">THAC0 came around in 2nd edition. Before that you had attack matrices and THAC0 was a way of keeping the game backwards compatible and giving folks a simple formula to figure out to hit on the fly (rather than having the attack matrices to look up). The advantage of the decision was you could easily run most 1E modules and supplements in 2E. The downside was people found it less intuitive than something like d20. But I will say d20 still has its flaws. Rolling and adding a number opened up its own can of worms, whereas the old THAC0 and attack matrices were a bit more contained (you just didn't have the huge Difficulty Numbers to hit or the wildly varying modifiers you got during 3E (not knocking 3E as it is a really good system, I am just pointing out that there is usually a downside for any design choice). In the end, I don't think we are going to back to a THAC0 like system. Most people have adopted the d20 mechanic at this point for Dungeons and Dragons. What i would say is it is worthwhile to at least go back and try 1E and 2E and see if you notice anything good about mechanics you might otherwise think of as clunky. When I first returned to 2E (around the time of 4E coming out) I honestly did it mainly as a joke. I had this memory of the system being really clunky, really strange in its use of sometimes rolling high, sometimes rolling low. But I found in practice after playing it again when I'd had years away from it, that some of these choices actually worked better for me than what was in 3E. One thing I liked was the lack of social skills. My games instantly started to feel more like I remembered them (heavier on dialogue and more direct interaction with the environment)----this was something I had been struggling to recapture for a long time and had just chalked it up to nostalgia or me being young and bright eyed when I first started playing. I also noticed a few other things. I preferred the initiative system in 2E (lower was better, but that worked because you count up, which is more intuitive during play for me). I also really preferred NWPs to skills and I greatly preferred roll under your attribute than d20 + attribute modifier (the probabilities just worked better for me). Now, I am sure much of that could be done using regular d20 + modifier as well with the right tweaks to the system. But I do think it is always worthwhile to test some of our assumptions about things and see if a system we think of as clunky or unintuitive has any redeeming qualities. In my own design, I haven't reintroduced THAC0 or anything like that. What I have done is taken some of the lessons I learned about what I like with 2E (despite some of its quirks) and applied that to a streamlined approach.</blockquote>

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