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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5014766" data-attributes="member: 4937">Says the guy who never did it?Sure.  But you got to remember that by this point, I'd stopped thinking about things having 'AC 2' as if that was a single all inclusive number.  Creatures and PC's had an AC like 4+2, where AC 4 represents chain and shield (or equivalent) with an armor bonus of +2 (from whatever source).   Incidently, if you started digging into the rules of 1st edition, you found that that was exactly how AC was supposed to work under the covers, it was just unfortunately 'bundled together' as a single number.  High dex didn't turn your AC from 8 to 6, it gave you a bonus to AC of 2.  All I really did is started forcing the bonus to AC and the AC itself to be reported separately.*So maybe Black Joe has a shield +1 and plate mail +1 for an AC of 2+2.  Black Joe is fighting a Bugbear with a 17 str and a mace and an AC of 4.  I've got my tables lined up ahead of time.  Black Joe needs a 12 to hit AC 4, all his player has to do is report the die - no math generally required unless Bless or something has been cast (which was rare).  The Bugbear needs a 13 to hit AC 2 with his footman's mace, but because Black Joe's AC is 2+2 he needs a 15.  Done.As for a wizard with bracers of defence, I ruled that counted as armor.  So a wizard with Bracers of Defence AC: 6 and a Ring of Protection +1 had an AC of 6+1 (NOT 5), or AC 6 and AB 1.  The fact that I had to add in a number here to adjust the attack generally didn't make combat any more complicated than it was if I wasn't doing what I had been doing (which generally involves to hit modifiers anyway), and most monsters didn't qualify for much in the way of AB anyway (ei they had less than a 15 dex and no magical enhancement) so most of the time I didn't even have to adjust the players attack but just read off my table.  Looking up a particular player table wasn't any worse than looking at the one on my DM's screen, so no loss there either.  The only loss was an hour or so at character creation when the tables were initially created.  Since I generally had players submit characters before the campaign started, this was just start up costs and changes to the table generally didn't happen more than every third or fourth session.</blockquote>

Verification