hot cocoa on the couch posted:

poo poo like thac0 is so 80s game design it rules. actually it's bad but it's fun to think about how game designers arrived at it. like a lot of 80s game design, a lot of thought process was put into the end result being high fidelity (as they saw it), so you get these twisted permutations of mathematical functions that don't make any sense to execute, in search of a specific distribution of results along a power or leveling curve. in the end, very little effort is made to have the game mechanics be intuitive or staightforward, so long as the desired result was attained. the philosophy of results over process is also seen in the ludicrous amount of chart look ups required, and cross referencing. doing all this little poo poo was so tedious but the "precision" was seen to deliver a highly specific result. in the end we now know that you can instead use a simple mechanism and a mixture of dice size, volume and combinations to affect a desired outcome, all while still being easy to understand and easy to link conceptually with the uncertainty of the task trying to be simulated by the randomness of dice

another good example of this that i love to hate on becasue the rules are basically unchanged since the original edition in the 80s is battletech. hope you fcuking love table look ups and doing hundreds of single digit additions on dice rolsl every game because thats what it asks of you. especially if you're playing a game where both sides have a bunch of LRMs and ACs and then also targeting computers and artemis and poo poo. the whole system is so algorithmic it begs to be automated. and in fact it has been, to the point where you can use a tablet as an assistant to do all the table look ups and dice rolling for you, because otherwise it's a nightmare. i can only imagine the kind of insanity d&d would have got up to with poo poo lik thac0 if the same brain geniuses were allowed to continue down that line of thinking rather than streamlining into the d20 system of today