Jay Verkuilen
Grand Master of Artificial Flowers
I believe that is incorrect: my understanding is that the non-Chainmail rules in OD&D used some modified naval combat rules, which became standard D&D combat. The ships in these rules were put in "Armor Classes": First Class was hardest to hit, Second Class was slightly easier, etc...
The term "armor class" certainly makes sense because it was adopted from real naval terminology, and I can see lower being better from Royal Navy I believe, which had First through Fifth Rate for ships of the line, originally. Hit points came from actual naval wargaming, which was used heavily IRL when planning operations. The big thing that happened in the early days was that table lookup was considered totally normal. If you've ever played one of those Avalon Hill type wargames they're filled with lookup tables, so this would have been NBD to early players. But for some reason I thought there was some early version where AC went up... could be wrong. It's a small thing.