D&D 5E Mike Mearls interview - states that they may be getting off of the 2 AP/year train.

[cmad1977]

People who hate THAC0 are the same people who hate golf and find its scoring system baffling. To hear the gnashing of teeth about how bad THAC0 is, you'd have expected the entire edifice of the game of golf to have come crashing down over the use of subtraction and negative numbers.

For the record, in the entire time I played D&D from 1983 to 2000 I never heard anyone complain about THAC0 or using an attack matrix. There are dozens of things about D&D more baffling to new players than attack math.

Nobody hates golf because of the scoring. People hate golf because
A:walking around isn't an athletic activity so Golf isn't even really a 'sport'.
B: it's about as exciting as watching paint dry. Actually paint drying has more going for it.


And THACO, while I never had a problem with it, is stupid game design. It worked fine, but so did riding horses for long distance travel. Now we realize there are better ways.


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[doctorbadwolf]

Well, that's your personal experience, but, as others have stated here, their experience (as well as mine) is that there were plenty of people who thought Thac0 was a clunky system.

I think in the end, what really was odd about it is that you got "pluses" from your abilities and magic items, but to calculate whether you hit, you counteruntuitively subtracted your "pluses"! And then when it came to damage, you (much more logically, but in a complete reversal to what you just did) [/I]added them. It just lacked the internal consistency that the post 2e-system of simply just adding things up does...

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This. Like [MENTION=6801558]robus[/MENTION] said, it's about the user interface.

THAC0, by itself, isn't that terrible, it's just unnecessarily counter to what most noobs will expect, with absolutely no payout for that counterintuitivity. Combined with the fact that damage goes the other way, in terms of adding bonuses, that ability score bonuses applied to most stuff and thus went both ways, etc, simply means that people have to actively think about how the system works, to a greater degree than with modern d20 systems.

It isn't "hard", but no one is claiming it is. The only place that keeps popping up is in the posts of people defending it, as a strawman of what others are actually saying.

What it is, as you put it, is internally inconsistent. And nothing is gained by that inconsistency. Which is why the math nerds I know think it is a poorly designed system. Added complexity should always have a payoff.

Especially when you're designing the user interface of a system. It's much more forgivable in the backend, bc at least that doesn't make the system work less well for the end user, usually.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Nobody hates golf because of the scoring. People hate golf because
A:walking around isn't an athletic activity so Golf isn't even really a 'sport'.
B: it's about as exciting as watching paint dry. Actually paint drying has more going for it.


And THACO, while I never had a problem with it, is stupid game design. It worked fine, but so did riding horses for long distance travel. Now we realize there are better ways.


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Depending on the paint, it can dramatically change shades, or if the undercoat isn't stark white, it can straight up change colors as it dries! That is only kinda boring! That's like -9000% better than golf!

 

[robus]

Tennis scoring system needs revamped too. Love, 15, what the heck.

Well at least 5e adopted the concept of Advantage...

 

[Arnwolf666]

Well at least 5e adopted the concept of Advantage...

you mean stole!!!