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Atopian posted:Is Holden still around here? Because I just found "Exalted vs The World of Darkness", and it's hilariously awesome. Nope, booted years ago unless I missed something.
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Aug 7, 2022 16:41
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Nope, booted years ago unless I missed something. Ah well, he'll have to go uncongratulated then. I'm sure he'll cope.
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Aug 7, 2022 17:17
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Holden has had some major surgery today, but I'll let him know you said so, which I'm sure will make him feel better about the whole thing. EXvsWOD definitely shows the strength of what Holden can do when he's not bogged down in dealing with All That, and I hope that one day he gets around to doing so with an IP he can actually make money on. In the meantime, he's currently working on an Exalted "demake" that uses the WoD rules for playing Exalted proper, which is going to be interesting for having takes on various Exalts like the Lunars and Infernals that skews a bit closer to the original plan for 3e, if you like that kind of archaeology. If you're interested, you can get previews by joining his Patreon Discord.
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Aug 8, 2022 03:04
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I have been informed that this comment was "the high point of a very bad day" and asked to return thanks.
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Aug 8, 2022 05:40
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Aww. Well, happy I made his day better, sad that it's bad enough for this to be the high point.
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Aug 8, 2022 07:57
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I'd like a quick sanity check on a position I just held in a discussion. I've been playing D&D from the 90s and I was talking to a dude that started with Path Finder, I'm not trying to be elitist it's just a discussion about what is 2nd edition D&D compared to 3.0/PF. My contention is that THAC0, often held up as the example of 2E's nonsense, is ironically THE mechanic that was taken forward into 3.0 - it's basically the same as a DC check. The revolution of 3.0 is extrapolating that system across almost every mechanic of D&D, whereas 2E uses THAC0 for hitting, NWP checks for skills, saving throw tables for saves, reaction adjustment, bespoke initiative rules, percentage thief skills, etc etc. Is this broadly correct? Is DC just a cleaned up THAC0 and is THAC0 the bedrock of modern D&D?
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Aug 8, 2022 19:43
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Rand Brittain posted:EXvsWOD definitely shows the strength of what Holden can do when he's not bogged down in dealing with All That, and I hope that one day he gets around to doing so with an IP he can actually make money on.
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Aug 8, 2022 19:55
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CitizenKeen posted:I think Godbound and Age of Sigmar shows there's a lot of demand for RPGs that are "Exalted but not Exalted", and any designer who groks what makes Exalted fun could probably do alright pitching their own "super fantasy" RPG. I think there was also Anima and monte cooks Gods of the Fall that tried to play in that ballpark. Dunno how popular they were but AoS: SOulbound seems like a good enough seller as far as non d&d fantasy goes
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Aug 8, 2022 20:00
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Jack B Nimble posted:I'd like a quick sanity check on a position I just held in a discussion. I've been playing D&D from the 90s and I was talking to a dude that started with Path Finder, I'm not trying to be elitist it's just a discussion about what is 2nd edition D&D compared to 3.0/PF. The one big thing you're missing is that it was flipped to ascending, which isn't actually a big deal for the math, obviously, but it was a big thing for clarity and part of making it universal. But I know that existed at least as a house rule because we would use it back in 1997 or whatever, so it's not like it sprang forth out of WotC's head fully-formed like Athena.
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Aug 8, 2022 20:08
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Also making armour class into the DC, which is genius.
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Aug 8, 2022 20:12
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Are you being sarcastic? I think everyone who read 2e as their intro into D&D was kinda baffled about how AC rolls were set up.
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Aug 8, 2022 20:30
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Are you being sarcastic? I think everyone who read 2e as their intro into D&D was kinda baffled about how AC rolls were set up. Which part? That they’re inexplicably backwards for no reason? Quite unintuitive. Not actually hard to understand per se, but leaves you with self-doubt and suspicion because why the hell is it backwards? After that? O yeah this is easy street, just do 1st grade math, get number, bingo bango no prob. It’s like solving the Towers of Hanoi but they make you put your shirt on backwards first. Not actually difficult but with a bizarre bump in the road that is mostly confusing just by existing.
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Aug 8, 2022 20:49
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I glossed over that component in my post here but mentioned it in the actual discussion, but yeah they absolutely made the roll more intuitive, and I didn't mean to down play that. But my essential point was that the core mechanic of the d20 system comes from the THAC0 system used to roll hits in 2E.
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Aug 8, 2022 20:55
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Are you being sarcastic? I think everyone who read 2e as their intro into D&D was kinda baffled about how AC rolls were set up. Or 1e really since it was the same and also unexplained. 2e was completely huge and a massive success, which always seemed like a stroke of luck to me given how much of a scared little placeholder it started out as.
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Aug 8, 2022 20:57
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Jack B Nimble posted:But my essential point was that the core mechanic of the d20 system comes from the THAC0 system used to roll hits in 2E.
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Aug 8, 2022 21:20
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Jack B Nimble posted:My contention is that THAC0, often held up as the example of 2E's nonsense, is ironically THE mechanic that was taken forward into 3.0 - it's basically the same as a DC check. The revolution of 3.0 is extrapolating that system across almost every mechanic of D&D, whereas 2E uses THAC0 for hitting, NWP checks for skills, saving throw tables for saves, reaction adjustment, bespoke initiative rules, percentage thief skills, etc etc. Is this broadly correct? Is DC just a cleaned up THAC0 and is THAC0 the bedrock of modern D&D? THAC0 and BAB give roughly identical math. (It's sometimes off by a point or two, but IIRC so is Basic vs. AD&D). And BAB+d20 vs. AC is the same basic formula used for saves and skill rolls, indeed. But there are other algorithms you could use that give identical math. So I suppose it's more like "THAC0 is mathematically the same as the formula D20 uses for everything." Edit: The thing I forgot to mention is that D20 system math also took a lot of inspiration from Rolemaster, from what I've read. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Aug 8, 2022 |
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Aug 8, 2022 21:24
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mellonbread posted:In what sense - that they're both "die roll with modifiers versus target number"? They're both a single d20 roll, against a target number, modified by the bonuses of the "attacker" and "defender". Yeah, at a far enough distance every dice roll is "roll it and hope its good enough", but every part of the d20 DC check maps onto a part of the AD&D the to-hit roll, and that's not true of other AD&D mechanics/systems. Or am I reading too much into the similarities? Edit: You know, I don't want to over state the case here, I should point out that the original conversation started because I mentioned I was playing Baldur's Gate 2 and a player that owns milk crate after milk crate of Pathfinder books said that Pathfinder and 2E have "nothing in common but the dice", which, I mean, that's an exaggeration for a million reasons but that's why I specifically made the argument that THAC0 is the core of what becomes the d20 DC check. Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Aug 8, 2022 |
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Aug 8, 2022 21:29
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theironjef posted:Or 1e really since it was the same and also unexplained. 2e was completely huge and a massive success, which always seemed like a stroke of luck to me given how much of a scared little placeholder it started out as. I think it's worth mentioning that although Basic, 1e, and 2e all used THAC0 as the essential mechanic, they all provided additional modifiers and subsystems on top of it. 1e's is the most impenetrable because of the weapon vs. armor tables in the DMG, to the point TSR printed an actual cardboard wheel calculator to do that math for you. Basic's was much simpler, so many people didn't actually touch it AS thac0 - instead they gave you these lookup tables, the DM told you the AC of the opponent and you added bonuses for Strength or magic weapons to your roll. 2e put all the math right out in front, and added more modifiers to pretty much every part of it as well as mostly shifting from the lookup tables to just giving you solely THAC0 and making you do the math from that. So 2e's THAC0 is, I think, particularly reviled because it's not only integer math, but it's a lot of it and the game wants you to do it all straight up before you play with all kinds of extra checks. It's the most obviously mechanically complex version of it, and the version that frontloads the most onto new players. It's easy to see why they did it that way for 2e, because it's still simpler and easier and better than 1e, and when 2e was printed Basic still existed so 2e AD&D didn't need to worry about onboarding new players. But during that edition the new player support dwindled to basically nothing, so you had a lot of people going "I want to try D&D" and then the basic mechanic of "hit man with sword" was this horrifying math problem you may not have actually covered in school yet (depending upon when you were taught integer math).
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Aug 8, 2022 21:52
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Arivia posted:2e put all the math right out in front, and added more modifiers to pretty much every part of it as well as mostly shifting from the lookup tables to just giving you solely THAC0 and making you do the math from that. So 2e's THAC0 is, I think, particularly reviled because it's not only integer math, but it's a lot of it and the game wants you to do it all straight up before you play with all kinds of extra checks. It's the most obviously mechanically complex version of it, and the version that frontloads the most onto new players. It's easy to see why they did it that way for 2e, because it's still simpler and easier and better than 1e, and when 2e was printed Basic still existed so 2e AD&D didn't need to worry about onboarding new players. But during that edition the new player support dwindled to basically nothing, so you had a lot of people going "I want to try D&D" and then the basic mechanic of "hit man with sword" was this horrifying math problem you may not have actually covered in school yet (depending upon when you were taught integer math). Thac0 is literally subtracting one number from another number to find your TN. If this is "mechanically complex" to anyone then what.
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Aug 8, 2022 22:26
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THAC0 is counterintuitive because a) a lower THAC0 is better b) a lower armor class is better c) subtracting AC sometimes requires you to subtract a negative number which is unnecessarily confusing Also bear in mind that saying "it's just subtracting a value" isn't quite right since the players were not expected to know enemy AC. Instead, you'd have to roll and say "I hit minus 4", meaning that your roll was 4 points over your THAC0 (see how daft that sign flip is?) I am not aware that any part of 2e AD&D used the "d20 plus player's own modifier vs enemy set DC" mechanism that was at the core of 3e. Most skills were roll-under percentile, saves were variable DCs. Equivalents were used in other games, but it didn't show up at all in 2e. Playing 3e after 2e was a hugely streamlined experience.
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Aug 8, 2022 22:46
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PurpleXVI posted:Thac0 is literally subtracting one number from another number to find your TN. If this is "mechanically complex" to anyone then what. It’s really just pre-algebra. If you have the conceptual frame work of 4 + ??? = 16, you can bootstrap it. So yeah it’s only “advanced math” in the sense of actually needing to understand and be comfortable with basic math to do it. Which it’s funny how at least in my schooling this was about when we learned “in this bag there’s 5 read marbles and 1 blue marble” basic probability problems that also seem to haunt people in this hobby.
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Aug 8, 2022 23:04
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hyphz posted:c) subtracting AC sometimes requires you to subtract a negative number which is unnecessarily confusing I'm sorry but if you're telling me that (X-Y) is difficult maths, I'm going to be left scratching my head. Also I don't think the game ever explicitly tells you whether players are allowed to know enemy stats or not, but I always just revealed the AC once the swinging started so everyone could easily tell if they hit or not and then move on to rolling damage or letting the next person take their turn.
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Aug 8, 2022 23:05
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I guess I might be over reaching then; it seems similar to me but I might be doing a lot of mental gymnastics. I will say that I still use the phrasing of "I hit armor class 21 for 7 slashing" when I'm playing any edition of D&D or PF, it lets the DM keep the mystery of the AC and DR alive a bit longer if I just give that all up front instead of making them conspicuously ask me.
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Aug 8, 2022 23:05
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Wasn't the 3e Armor Class system also influenced by HackMaster's then-current system too? Or was that another D&D-alike that had an understated impact on some key changes in 3e?
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Aug 8, 2022 23:39
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I presume you mean Harnmaster? Hackmaster didn’t come out until after 3e.
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Aug 8, 2022 23:41
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hyphz posted:I presume you mean Harnmaster? Hackmaster didn’t come out until after 3e. No, I'm pretty sure that's too stodgy to have been what I'm thinking of. Maybe Rolemaster? There's too many similarly-named fantasy games out there.
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Aug 8, 2022 23:44
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Hankmaster, the official King of the Hill RPG.
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Aug 8, 2022 23:51
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Nuns with Guns posted:No, I'm pretty sure that's too stodgy to have been what I'm thinking of. Maybe Rolemaster? There's too many similarly-named fantasy games out there. Monte Cook was involved with Rolemaster, iirc, so that would track. Hârnmaster's combat system is nothing like D&D's, so I would be surprised if they took any inspiration from it.
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Aug 9, 2022 00:08
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Most of the people I encounter who still tout Thac0 as relevant or even better (it really happens) are doing so because they are old and crotchety and have a vested interest in believing the poo poo they learned when they were kids was the good poo poo. Like your grandparents complaining that no one write a good letter in cursive anymore.
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Aug 9, 2022 00:13
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Hypnobeard posted:Monte Cook was involved with Rolemaster, iirc, so that would track. Cook was a writer and editor for the end of Rolemaster 2e in the early 90's, then IIRC he started working for TSR after that edition wrapped. While it's an easy assumption to make and seems very plausible, it's also entirely possible that other people working on D&D3 were influenced as strongly or more strongly by RM than Cook. While ICE and RM were already circling the drain by 2000, they were still a long-time major product into the early 2000's and most FRPG authors who could get tapped for D&D at that time were probably at least vaguely familiar with its existence. Especially if they'd been playing in the 80's and ever had someone inflict Arms Law on them for ~increased realism~. Also, while you can definitely draw a believable line from Rolemaster to D&D3, a lot of what it's doing flows pretty readily from "this kind of sucked for almost 30 years, how do we make it better?" The percentile systems used in the past make for an easy transition to the slightly better "everything is d20 + modifier vs target number" without necessarily needing Rolemaster as a guidepost. RM had graded successes and failures as a fundamental part of its resolution, but D&D ignored the hell out of that. TLDR maybe but maybe not but probably at least a little! Or not! Maybe!
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Aug 9, 2022 00:43
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That Old Tree posted:Cook was a writer and editor for the end of Rolemaster 2e in the early 90's, then IIRC he started working for TSR after that edition wrapped. While it's an easy assumption to make and seems very plausible, it's also entirely possible that other people working on D&D3 were influenced as strongly or more strongly by RM than Cook. While ICE and RM were already circling the drain by 2000, they were still a long-time major product into the early 2000's and most FRPG authors who could get tapped for D&D at that time were probably at least vaguely familiar with its existence. Especially if they'd been playing in the 80's and ever had someone inflict Arms Law on them for ~increased realism~. Arms Law? That's new to me and pretty hard to google.
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Aug 9, 2022 00:52
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theironjef posted:Most of the people I encounter who still tout Thac0 as relevant or even better (it really happens) are doing so because they are old and crotchety and have a vested interest in believing the poo poo they learned when they were kids was the good poo poo. Like your grandparents complaining that no one write a good letter in cursive anymore. Oh, yeah, I'm not going to say Thac0 is necessarily superior, I just get annoyed when people say it's difficult. What made 2e superior to 3e were some different things, let me get the book of grudges...
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Aug 9, 2022 00:58
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Xiahou Dun posted:Arms Law? That's new to me and pretty hard to google. https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/9/9479.phtml
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Aug 9, 2022 00:58
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Thank you.
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Aug 9, 2022 01:00
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Not this again! It doesn't really matter if THAC0 is "simple math" because people aren't calculators. Adding is easier than subtracting, for example. Calculators don't get hung up on the difference between adding and subtracting a negative, but people do. I think the best argument against THAC0 is that even its designers didn't think it was ideal. The 2e design team wanted to do something more like BAB, but they were afraid that it was "going too far" for the grognards.
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Aug 9, 2022 01:01
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Xiahou Dun posted:Arms Law? That's new to me and pretty hard to google. What's that you called for a rolemaster Stan what a coincidence I'm right here Arms law is great, though superficially daunting. Basically you get an attack bonus, subtract the defense bonus of your opponent add it to a percentile roll and look it up on a weapon specific chart. So if you are p good at broadswords you might have +60, you're fighting someone with a -20, so you roll and get 82, add 40 to the roll and look up 122 on the broadsword chart. The second trick is that the weapon charts have armour type on them, unarmored is type 1, chain shirt is 13, full plate 20. Each type is a column, so trace up the column. For armour type 13 the result is 13CS, so 13 hp damage and a critical. The weapon charts are alarming looking but in practice it's slick if you have your chart in front of you. The third thing is critical hits, which can be instant death but are mostly stun and bleeding and lasting injury. This is another roll with no modifiers (so say our broadsword crit above rolls a 42, it would add calf strike, bleeding 2 hits per round). Stronger armour will generally reduce critical hits, but a good enough roll will always penetrate it.
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Aug 9, 2022 01:06
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That Old Tree posted:Cook was a writer and editor for the end of Rolemaster 2e in the early 90's, then IIRC he started working for TSR after that edition wrapped. While it's an easy assumption to make and seems very plausible, it's also entirely possible that other people working on D&D3 were influenced as strongly or more strongly by RM than Cook. While ICE and RM were already circling the drain by 2000, they were still a long-time major product into the early 2000's and most FRPG authors who could get tapped for D&D at that time were probably at least vaguely familiar with its existence. Especially if they'd been playing in the 80's and ever had someone inflict Arms Law on them for ~increased realism~. I mean, Tweet was doing his own thing, with Ars Magical, Over the Edge, and Everway, and Skip Williams was pretty much The D&D Rule Guy at the time for the existing editions, so it seems reasonable to me that Monte was the bridge between the two, with his RM experience. There's not a ton of overt influence, it's true, but RM definitely had a unified mechanic and a plethora of spellcasters.
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Aug 9, 2022 01:12
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The upshot is that you get fast, cinematic, lethal fights without needing a lot of system mastery, but you do need to wrangle some scary looking charts.
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Aug 9, 2022 01:17
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Hypnobeard posted:I mean, Tweet was doing his own thing, with Ars Magical, Over the Edge, and Everway, and Skip Williams was pretty much The D&D Rule Guy at the time for the existing editions, so it seems reasonable to me that Monte was the bridge between the two, with his RM experience. There's not a ton of overt influence, it's true, but RM definitely had a unified mechanic and a plethora of spellcasters.
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Aug 9, 2022 01:17
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FMguru posted:The way RM treated classes wearing different kinds of armor was ported almost directly into D&D 3E. I'm quite sure there was a discussion at WOTC about what was out there that could be quickly incorporated into the existing rules to give a different feel without too much effort. Rolemaster, in that sense, was right there, had been doing it forever. They ended up going further in a lot of ways, but it would not surprise me that they started somewhere around there.
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Aug 9, 2022 01:22
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