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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9708185" data-attributes="member: 6799660">Is why I asked. For some reason my work internet blocks his blog, so he's often unavailable when I'm thinking of these discussions. Pulling up now on my phone.Hmm. I don't actually like Peterson's logic -- AC is the number you subtract from 20 to get the number-or-higher a first level fighter needs to roll on a D20 to hit in the initial-draft oD&D. That explains what mathematically it is, but not why it is labelled 2-9 -- in that framing, it could have just as easily been 11-18 (or 0-7, as the number you subtract from 18 to achieve the same results, etc.) -- nor is it evidence that that is the why of the labelling. We're still missing a part of the causal chain, or at least Gary saying something like 'yes, it's just what I subtracted from 20 to get the hit percent I wanted.'And it looks like, unsurprisingly, Gary and Dave disagree on the inspiration for AC. At least in this case it is reasonable, as how it differs from any wargame with different to-hurt numbers by troop type is a matter of degree, not type. So if Dave maybe thought he was borrowing from elsewhere for his proto-D&D and Gary thought it came straight from Chainmail, quite possible that that didn't bridge the communication between them as they collaborated on the game. Good to know that Peterson too can't definitively find the specific game Arneson was using.A reasonable candidate, although honestly it might be a little old (do you know if there were reprints?) and some subsequent game that took that concept from it would be more likely. Especially when we consider games he himself might not have owned, but had access to from his wargaming friends, it's really hard to ge a complete picture of what he might have had access to (we can rule things in, but ruling them out is a real beast). What interests me most about this game (other than those strangely high hp totals, like was there a value to that granularity?) is that it has degradation of combat effectiveness as you lost hp. D&D rather famously doesn't have that (cue discussion about monster at 1 hp still getting full counterattack). Now, it could be that Dave simply didn't port that part over, since the piece he wanted was simply a state in between full health and dead (to ameliorate the player frustration previously discussed). It could also mean that the game he borrowed it from (if I'm right about it being a subsequent game which stood on Pratt's shoulders) didn't have this.</blockquote>

Verification