Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Composer99" data-source="post: 9398774" data-attributes="member: 7030042">I spent many years around the 3E-4E era playing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_in_Flames" target="_blank">World in Flames</a>, a strategic-operational WW2 game, and I can see why the early iterations of D&D had the varied roll mechanics they did. WiF does the following:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">When you fight an air combat, you want to roll either low or high on 2d10; middling results are poor results.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">When you fight a land combat, you want to roll high on 1d10 or 2d10 (depending on which combat rule you're using).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">When you try to search for enemy naval units, you want to roll low on 1d10.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">When one of your naval units is suffering a naval combat result, you want to roll high on 1d10.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">When you roll for weather, you want to roll low.</li> </ul>With this in mind, things like the to-hit tables do put D&D's wargame roots more front-and-centre, even if D&D came out of miniatures wargaming, rather than hex-and-counter wargaming.Apropos of THAC0, naval units in WiF have a defence or armour rating (you might even call it an "Armour Class") that is also descending (i.e. lower is better), and your naval "saving throw" (as you might call it) needs to be high because you "save" against the result if your roll is greater than the unit's "AC", reducing its severity. E.g. a battleship might have an "AC" of 2 through 4, while a cruiser might have an "AC" of 5 through 7. The lower a naval unit's "AC", the more likely you are to make your save.Where these rolls are easier to understand than THAC0 is that there's a direct relationship between the target number and the range of numbers you want to roll on the die. THAC0 feels muddled because it's an inverse relationship, and due to the number of die roll modifiers that might apply from weapon masteries, spells, magic weapons, or circumstances, often a confusing one at that!If I were to implement a descending AC system in a roleplaying game, I'd have the attacker want to roll low in order to beat the descending AC (or the defender to want to roll high to "save" against it), or implement a to-hit table, only with far fewer ACs (say, 5, tops), make it clear that each AC is a "class" - AC 1 is "1st class", or "1st tier", "1st rate", that sort of thing, and have two or three points of difference between what you need to roll on a die to hit. Something closer to the Chainmail table displayed <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/it-made-sense-at-the-time-descending-ac.695998/" target="_blank">in this thread</a>, say.Oh, and having come to D&D during the THAC0 era, I have to say yes, THAC0 was really that bad, even though everyone I played with at the time had no problem calculating it.</blockquote>

Verification