Speculation about "the feelz" of D&D 4th Edition

[Parmandur]

What? How?

How is "running smoothly" tactical? How is "the game does about what you explect it to do" tactical?

How in the 9 hells is "every player option has lore" remotely tactical!?

Well, the built-in lore thing less so (though that is true of any edition of D&D, from my reading?), but the rest sounds more like loaded language for "I like the tactical game" which is fine.

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

 

[Parmandur]

THAC0 included a 1:1 progression for the equivalent of proficiency for the fighter. The math is not replicated, though it's quite close right at the lowest levels.

They're amusing for an hour or two, IMX. But if you want to call back an older melee type, they're admirably one-Dimensional...

I had two character concepts, one of which I got to play through 14th in 3.5, that worked rather like that. 1 Level of Barbarian, then the rest into archery (a Rogue in the 14th level case, Ranger2/FighterX in the other, a mounted archer based loosely on a Rider of Rohan type). Mostly archery, when someone finally pins you down in melee, you open a can of Rage.

I reprised the Barb/Rogue as a Slayer for part of Crystal Cave, using the Berserker MC feat in place of an actual level of Barb, and snagging thievery from a background. Worked OK.

The Archer-Slayer was one of those cute little builds that's obvious at a glance at the class, but feels like it's unintentional. Like the Lazy Warlord, really, that way.

Well, replicated as in there is a bellcurve of power, unlike my 3.x experience of exponential power growth. It was quite a revelation at the time, to me.

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Fair enough; my limited exposure's main takeaway was that THAC0 was beautiful, and I was happy to see the math replicated in 5E (30 being the new -10).

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

Mechanically THAC0 was a kludge that allowed them to get rid of the combat tables of 1e and keep numerical compatibility. 3e's inversion is beautiful (at least in its basic premise of AC representing the chance to hit someone and increasing).

What actually tended to happen in AD&D was that monsters split into 2 different groups. One group is fairly 'mundane' and includes things like giants, humanoids, and large 'natural' creatures. These have naturalistic AC, usually not much better than AC2. PCs generally start to hit these types of creature more and more often, to the point where high level (level 12 or more) PCs rarely miss them, hitting at least 75% of the time. These types of creatures instead grow linearly in hit points, so a T. Rex has 10x the hit points of a horse, but only a couple points better AC. Meanwhile the PCs AC increases at about the same rate as all monsters to-hits, so they are always being missed around 70% of the time, and the 'squishies' catch up to the fighters at high level (due to bracers, rings, buffs, etc). Thus mundane monsters simply become less and less threatening.

Supra-normal monsters OTOH, outer planar creatures, elder dragons, weird things from the depths of the Earth, etc tend to have ACs that simply keep increasing and are unrelated to any sort of naturalistic logic (this is more pronounced in 2e where many of these creatures are MUCH stronger than in 1e, and the 6x duplicated 20 on the combat chart goes away, making very high AC much stronger). Thus hitting these creatures becomes no easier than hitting low level creatures, and melee simply becomes ineffective as a general tactic against something like a demon lord.

The upshot is AD&D doesn't quite match up with 3e, 4e, or 5e in all ways. It has some elements similar to all of those, but each of AD&D, 3e, 4e, and 5e does slightly different things. I actually think AD&D -> 5e, -> 4e is a continuum, and 3.x, beyond low level, is kind of the oddball.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Well, replicated as in there is a bellcurve of power, unlike my 3.x experience of exponential power growth. It was quite a revelation at the time, to me.

What do you think you mean by 'bellcurve of power?' Because, aside from the neat bell curve you by get generating stats with 3d6, I've never heard it applied to D&D before.

The upshot is AD&D doesn't quite match up with 3e, 4e, or 5e in all ways. It has some elements similar to all of those, but each of AD&D, 3e, 4e, and 5e does slightly different things. I actually think AD&D -> 5e, -> 4e is a continuum, and 3.x, beyond low level, is kind of the oddball.

More generally, I think it's hard to paint any one edition out of the continuum - though it's really easy to re-arrange it along different dimensions.

3e & 4e are at odds with the other eds in that they're so player-focused, for instance. 4e & 5e are at odds with the rest in that they use uniform advancement of attack rolls. The WotC editions are different in that they use skills. 5e is at odds with all other eds in not assuming magic items will be found as part of advancement. 0D&D and 1e are at odds with all other eds in not having any psionic classes. 2e's handling of 'martial arts' is distinct from other editions'. Etc, etc, etc, &c... ;P

 

[Parmandur]

What do you think you mean by 'bellcurve of power?' Because, aside from the neat bell curve you by get generating stats with 3d6, I've never heard it applied to D&D before.

As to AD&D, it may just be that my reading of THAC0 focused on the actual bell curve chart in the book when discussing the topic; this was a long time ago, at this point, ~10-ish years. But my impression was that -10 was a hard limit; nothing could be harder to hot than AC -10, which would match the 30 "impossible" number for rolls in 5E. In 3.x, there is no limit, just ever increasing power.

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

As to AD&D, it may just be that my reading of THAC0 focused on the actual bell curve chart in the book when discussing the topic; this was a long time ago, at this point, ~10-ish years. But my impression was that -10 was a hard limit; nothing could be harder to hot than AC -10, which would match the 30 "impossible" number for rolls in 5E. In 3.x, there is no limit, just ever increasing power.

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

1e's attack matrices only go to -10, but again they replicate a 20 6 times in the to-hits, so in effect there's not a lot of progression at the extreme end of the charts. It isn't clear that ACs better than -10 don't exist, though none are ever published in any book. With the actual THAC0 version there's no indication of a 'best' AC, and the replication of 20 doesn't happen either, meaning the best ACs are much tougher to hit (so presumably there's less need for even better ACs, but they COULD exist).

I too don't quite see what you mean by a 'bell curve'. D&D's math is all linear AFAIK, aside from ability score distribution in editions that use rolling ability scores for character gen.

 

[Tony Vargas]

But my impression was that -10 was a hard limit; nothing could be harder to hot than AC -10, which would match the 30 "impossible" number for rolls in 5E. In 3.x, there is no limit, just ever increasing power.

Nothing to do with Bell Curves or exponential anything, then. ;|

Yeah, -10 was as low (high) as ACs went. That was a cap of sorts, though one rarely touched. 1e had a lot of de-facto caps in the sense of charts that only went so high, and a few hard caps on things like level for certain races and classes. 5e does have a level cap, but no AC cap or anything - just a limited number of theoretically stackable bonuses (BA). I don't recall the highest AC in a 5e source, but I think it's mid 20s - necessarily less of a span from 10 than 2e's 10 to -10, because of Bounded Accuracy, of course. Meanwhile, the Fighter's THAC0 was mathematically equivalent to +1 to hit per level (and /better/ than a Cleric, Theif, or Wizard's), while the 5e fighter's proficiency bonus increases by ~ +1/5 levels, the same as everyone else.

 

[Parmandur]

1e's attack matrices only go to -10, but again they replicate a 20 6 times in the to-hits, so in effect there's not a lot of progression at the extreme end of the charts. It isn't clear that ACs better than -10 don't exist, though none are ever published in any book. With the actual THAC0 version there's no indication of a 'best' AC, and the replication of 20 doesn't happen either, meaning the best ACs are much tougher to hit (so presumably there's less need for even better ACs, but they COULD exist).

I too don't quite see what you mean by a 'bell curve'. D&D's math is all linear AFAIK, aside from ability score distribution in editions that use rolling ability scores for character gen.

Well, I have a degree in English, and this is one of those times it shows: I used the wrong math term. Not a bell curve, but the kind of chart where the curve goes straight up (around -10 in AD&D, 30 in 5E); BA makes it more clear that, no, nothing over 30 exists, but the effect in both cases limits the increasing effectiveness of AC, unlike 3.x, where things stack, and grow, and stack, and grow....

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

 

[MwaO]

1e's attack matrices only go to -10, but again they replicate a 20 6 times in the to-hits, so in effect there's not a lot of progression at the extreme end of the charts. It isn't clear that ACs better than -10 don't exist, though none are ever published in any book.

Lolth had a -10 AC and the ability to cast Protection from Good in AD&D(for an additional -2 to hit from many opponents)

 

[Ratskinner]

This is true.

I remember some military historian commenting that the best model of generalship is that every general has a 50% chance of winning each battle, and 'great generals' show up in history at almost exactly the rate expected by random chance based on that model!

I once heard a similar thing about Professional Baseball Batting averages and great batters.

Of course none of that negates the possibility that Musashi and Robert E. Lee were still the very best of the best in their fields by far more than chance. It just may well be that they are not as rare as we might imagine and even Musashi would get gutted by a lucky peasant sooner or later. Maybe in his case its 1 in 100, we don't really know.

Exactly. Simply put, we don't have a large enough sample size to tell. To me, this would mean that we shouldn't be arguing about thumbs up or down on "Bounded Accuracy" as a concept, but rather how big should BA be? That, I think, is probably a matter of opinion.