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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7033726" data-attributes="member: 82106">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.</blockquote>

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