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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9258294" data-attributes="member: 82106">I have a copy of Swords & Spells which I bought way back in the day. Nobody was ever much interested in using it. Chainmail was always basically the defacto mass combat system, and S&S and BattleSystem neither really caught on at all. I don't recall there being any real reason to want to use either of them, as they're clunkier and don't particularly do a better job. I always thought TSR should have just published a very slightly cleaned up Chainmail that maybe at most tweaked some of the fantasy rules a bit to match better with AD&D monsters, not that they don't do that fairly well already...Are the hit dice in B/X d8? I thought monster hit dice in that system were d6s like they are in the original game and Holmes Basic.At no point is AD&D clear as to what happens when a STR score/attack bonus is mentioned as part of the stats or description of a monster or NPC, is that assumed to need to be added onto the basic to-hit? Or is it just factored in? Or is it a case-by-case basis? This is especially a nice question to ask about giants! IMHO it is like all of AD&D, it totally depends on the situation and is pretty much up to the GM to decide. Why in that case anyone bothered mentioning such numbers is beyond me...Don't stare too closely into the DMG or it will eat your brain...Eh, too late...AD&D is just a maze of design madness, there is neither rhyme nor reason to any of this, and over time it simply got worse. The addition of UA, Tome of Magic, DSG/WSG, and OA (not even to mention the various rules that are established in D&DG or the various MMs) finally brought it to a level of chaos which helped motivate the development of 2e, which DOES at first at least clean house, though without actually fixing any of the underlying issue (a fundamental lack of good design of the core rules and their consistent application). 2e then launches off immediately into even greater madness, culminating in monstrosities like the Complete Book of Elves and Player Options, which are, from a rules perspective, complete dreck. Amusingingly then 3e comes along and executes a perfect engineer's solution to a mess created by artists. It puts all of the 'numbers parts' of D&D on a firm and rational footing, but at the expense of even thinking about the overall game and experience! This results in a much different but equally catastrophic disaster, which eventually leads the developers to conclude that a total ground-up rewrite is required, again. lol.Right, and 2e nor 3e (nor 5e either) address this at all. 4e seems to come down pretty hard on the side of "chargen is just there to make the game playable and fun" BUT you can even counterargue there, as they did provide a complete system of class templates intended to at least give 'classiness' to monsters. DMG1 and DMG2 contain a complete set for PHB1 and PHB2, though I don't think any other classes (of which there are a lot) ever got templates. I also failed to ever witness anyone, WotC or otherwise, actually using one. So I guess it was just one of those odd 4e-isms where WotC could not resist wasting a bit of page count to pay obeisance to outdated ideas. In some ways I feel like D&D held 4e back a lot, lol.</blockquote>

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