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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9844509" data-attributes="member: 7052563">Yes, IIRC that was exactly the way my junior high school AD&D groups did it.  2E made THAC0 more official, but we were already used to using it anyway.  Players always had their PC’s THAC0 written on their character sheet, and all of the DMs owned some version of the official TSR DM screen, so in practice we rarely had to stop and consult the books.Much of the contemporary discussion about the difficulties of using THAC0 and/or situational modifiers to d20 rolls confuses me, because in my experience of actual 1980s AD&D play even the most casual players and indifferent math students had no problem with those game mechanics once they got up to speed with playing the game.  I don’t want to downplay anyone’s actual difficulties related to, say, different learning styles, because there was little awareness of those issues back then, and I am quite sure no one at TSR ever factored any of that into the writing of the rulebooks.  But once we had settled on a standard method we no longer really needed to stop and think about it much at all because it just became second nature.  AD&D had relatively few situational modifiers anyway, and they were often so deeply buried in odd corners of the 1E or 2E DMGs that most DMs did not even know about them, let alone use them.  I never played any games in the “D&D 3” family of rule sets (3.0, 3.5, PF1, etc), but I get the impression that there were tons of possible modifiers that added to the high crunch level of those games, and contributed to the desire to simplify everything with the advantage mechanic.  I like advantage but I think it should complement a robust system of pluses and minuses applied to d20 rolls, not replace them altogether.</blockquote>

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