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<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7616400" data-attributes="member: 996">To be fair, the move away from THAC0 with 3e was at least /correlated/ with having more than half a dozen modifiers.&nbsp; There were, what? 17 named bonus types in 3e? (Google seems to think it was 18...)And untyped bonuses could stack with those, and eachother.&nbsp; Not that typed bonuses are all bad.&nbsp; In 3e, avoiding anything stacking with armor was a simple matter of giving it an Armor Bonus.&nbsp; In the name of simplicity (actually, natural language) 5e does not use named bonuses.&nbsp; But, it still wants some things to not stack with armor, which has slightly confused people, prompting this 1700 word article (that I stumbled about while googling those bonus names from 3), to accomplish what the two words &quot;armor bonus&quot; did in 3e.&nbsp; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /><a href="http://dmsworkshop.com/2017/05/19/things-you-didnt-know-about-dd-5e-calculating-ac/" target="_blank">http://dmsworkshop.com/2017/05/19/things-you-didnt-know-about-dd-5e-calculating-ac/</a>&nbsp;It couldn't help but be briefer in presentation than the two facing pages of attack matrices in the 1e DMG.&nbsp; But the matrices weren't complicated, a table lookup is really pretty simple.And, THAC0 lost one feature of those matrices:&nbsp; When you had /very/ low (good) ACs, '20' would appear on the table multiple times.&nbsp; The first time, you needed a total of 20, thereafter a natural 20.&nbsp; When you finally got to 21+, you needed a natural 20, and a net bonus.&nbsp; It was a more nuanced progression than 'natural 20s always hit.'&nbsp;A sub-system can be simple, but add to complexity, because it's different for no reason and to no benefit.&nbsp; d20 consolidated sub-systems that used d%, d6, d20 roll-under, and d20 roll-high (among others) into d20 + mods vs DC.&nbsp; That was a simplification.THAC0 definitely belonged on the chopping block because it accomplished the same thing as rolling high to hit an AC - a pass/fail roll on a d20, giving a % chance of success with a granularity of 5% - but did it differently, as you explained: Same maths, two different ways to do them = needless complexity.The same goes for saving throws vs attack spells.&nbsp; There's no mathematical difference between a caster rolling an attack and his target rolling a save - the distinction is just needless complexity.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 7616400, member: 996"] To be fair, the move away from THAC0 with 3e was at least /correlated/ with having more than half a dozen modifiers. There were, what? 17 named bonus types in 3e? (Google seems to think it was 18...) And untyped bonuses could stack with those, and eachother. Not that typed bonuses are all bad. In 3e, avoiding anything stacking with armor was a simple matter of giving it an Armor Bonus. In the name of simplicity (actually, natural language) 5e does not use named bonuses. But, it still wants some things to not stack with armor, which has slightly confused people, prompting this 1700 word article (that I stumbled about while googling those bonus names from 3), to accomplish what the two words "armor bonus" did in 3e. ;) [url]http://dmsworkshop.com/2017/05/19/things-you-didnt-know-about-dd-5e-calculating-ac/[/url] It couldn't help but be briefer in presentation than the two facing pages of attack matrices in the 1e DMG. But the matrices weren't complicated, a table lookup is really pretty simple. And, THAC0 lost one feature of those matrices: When you had /very/ low (good) ACs, '20' would appear on the table multiple times. The first time, you needed a total of 20, thereafter a natural 20. When you finally got to 21+, you needed a natural 20, and a net bonus. It was a more nuanced progression than 'natural 20s always hit.' A sub-system can be simple, but add to complexity, because it's different for no reason and to no benefit. d20 consolidated sub-systems that used d%, d6, d20 roll-under, and d20 roll-high (among others) into d20 + mods vs DC. That was a simplification. THAC0 definitely belonged on the chopping block because it accomplished the same thing as rolling high to hit an AC - a pass/fail roll on a d20, giving a % chance of success with a granularity of 5% - but did it differently, as you explained: Same maths, two different ways to do them = needless complexity. The same goes for saving throws vs attack spells. There's no mathematical difference between a caster rolling an attack and his target rolling a save - the distinction is just needless complexity. [/QUOTE]

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