Hold on a second.
My son will be seven in November. Granted, he's bright and familiar with the idea of character levels and hitting monsters, from playing video games. But, I just now went at taught him how to read an AD&D combat matrix. It took less than a minute for me to describe what a matrix was and for him to get the concept and tell me what a 5th level Fighter needed to hit AC0. When I told him to look at it kinda like a calendar, it clicked right in for him. He would have got it sooner, but he was trying to watch Jimmy Neutron, while daddy was distracting him with this little experiment.
Anyhoo, I've been planning on using Ascending AC, just because. I like experimenting. While putting everything else together, I was considering how I would handle multi-classing, deciding to use the AD&D rules for such characters. I then idly wondered how doing it 3e style, might work. I immediately didn't like the idea and here's why.
Now, with the AD&D xp progressions, the To Hit Bonus of a multi-class character might move too far ahead. At low to mid levels, the highest level of a MC character will usually only be 1 behind a single level character. Until the MC character hits its ceiling, that is. With LL/AEC, an MC's highest level will tend towards being 2 or 3 behind. That's from a fairly quick assessment, only checking F/MU's in the systems. All in all, it would require some tweaking, but doable. So, what bothered me about the idea?
You would have to change Saves around, of course. I don't like the 3e Saves. The older schema better emulates, in an abstract way certainly, the idea. Gary goes into Saves a little in the DMG and JB has a wonderful post, along the same lines. I like the Single Save w/class appropriate modifiers, from Swords & Wizardry. Which is what I'm using. Now, if I shuffled it around as well, we could turn that roll into a (+x) + d20 = 20 or better to save, type deal, also. Very close to 3e.
But, not really! 3e takes things in a different direction by making the DC variable. Instead of needing a 20, you might, at the beginning, only need a 14 or so. Some things would hit 18 to 20, for a while. Then, you get one of my biggest dislikes about 3e and you see it across the board. With Saves, Skill Checks, AC's and To Hits. The goal-post moves.
A Thief puts his Skill Points into picking locks, only to find that he's then having to roll against DC 35's and up! The whole Powergaming thing, is certainly a part of the design. "Let's move the characters up in level real fast and blow everything out of proportion so they're not too powerful."
Ok, if said high level Thief was in Hermes' stronghold and trying to pick the lock on the god's vault, I would make things a bit tougher than usual. But that's a rare and special case. A high level Thief should be able to Ghost his way through the vast majority of shit, because he's a high level Thief and that's what they can do!
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I know all this has been hashed out before, and I'm not trying to start any edition war shit. I like 3e. Just less and less as time goes by and I have no desire to DM it ever again.
Now, if I wanted to turn Saves upside down I could. I would just cap it at DC 20. I would certainly cap Ascending AC at 30 (it starts at 10, for those who don't know) and probably never see anything that high. In running a very high level AD&D campaign, I don't think I ever used a -10 AC.
But, after thinking of all this today, that Gygaxian flavor is tasting better and better. I'll certainly still use the traditional Saves and I might just go with descending AC, instead. All in all, it's more pleasing in my eyes and the other direction reminds me of silly things..;)
My personal preference is to keep most bonuses low, especially AC. I only allow the original seven armor classes and +1 magic armor, even for monsters; if I want demons, for example, to be harder to hit, there's stuff like immunity to non-magic weapons, insubstantiality, or reduced damage from some attack types. Similarly, I don't allow other "goalposts" to move too far: there might be a particularly insidious magic that is -4 to resist, but nothing like the high DCs of 3e.
ReplyDeleteAfter thinking about it, I decided that Target 20 by Daniel R. Collins is a pretty damned good way of handling combat and saving throws "the old way" but simpler.
I like Target 20 for monster attacks. Another reason to use descending ac.:)
ReplyDeleteThe advantage a "target20" system has over the 3e/4e "roll-plus-versus" is that the T20 has a fixed threshold, which creates a ceiling for the player-character's plusses. With a fixed target number, there comes a cap beyond which additional pluses are superfluous.
ReplyDeleteWhereas the 3e SRD is unbounded. Every time the player-character gets a plus to their roll, the DM can add another plus to the difficulty. It's an arms race that lengthens and complicates character creation and planning obstacles while distracting from actually adventuring.
For skills, it makes the differences between untrained/untalented (+0) and fully trained characters(+15 or more easily) ludicrous. This spread of capabilities makes it difficult to create an obstacle that challenges an expert without annihilating everyone else.
@James:
ReplyDeleteYou don't like the way Target 20 handles the saving throws?
@heyjames4:
"Whereas the 3e SRD is unbounded. Every time the player-character gets a plus to their roll, the DM can add another plus to the difficulty."
Another argument against ascending AC! I've talked about this in my blog before: although descending AC can be made open-ended by introducing negative ACs (as indeed Greyhawk did,) ascending ACs begin open-ended, and it's harder to make players accept an AC cap.
I totally agree about the moving goalposts and how incredibly irritating they are. You may not be surprised to know that there's a chart telling you how hard to make the DCs for the players depending on whether it should be hard, normal, or easy according to their level. What's the point of giving me +1 to all my skill rolls each level if everything gets harder by one each level?
ReplyDeleteWhy bother making dragons' armor classes 40 when you're going to have to have +15 swords swinging around somewhere? Some things I just don't understand.
Also, I really like the idea that Armor Class zero is very nearly the cap, and that getting negative armor class requires magic of some sort. It just makes sense to me!
"You don't like the way Target 20 handles the saving throws?"
ReplyDeleteI'll have to investigate it more thoroughly.
" You may not be surprised to know that there's a chart telling you how hard to make the DCs for the players depending on whether it should be hard, normal, or easy according to their level.
I dm'd 3e for 7 years. D'oh!
One thing I realised about the difference between D20/3e and AD&D with regard to the attack rolls for monsters, is that because there are considerably fewer modifiers to THAC0 actually makes a lot better sense than it seems to. That is to say:
ReplyDelete1D20 + AC => THAC0
is the most typical scenario, which is actually simpler than:
1D20 + FA + AC => 20
In D20/3e it is:
1D20 + AB => AC
Only when you are often modifying the roll in the case of player characters does it suddenly seem to make more sense to shift THAC0 to a static 20 and a bonus to hit (and even then, it is not really a big deal).
The other downside of the 3e save system is that spell save DCs don't keep up with most characters. A 9th level spell has a save DC =19+Int bonus. A fireball is 13+Int. This means that by the time a wizard gets fireball, the thief is already virtually immune to it, and it will never affect anyone a few levels higher than the wizard. Your chance of getting any 3rd - 6th level spell to work against your opponents once you're past 10th level is almost 0.
ReplyDeleteThe problem can be fixed by having saves and attack bonuses increase at the same rate as skills, or become skills (so that you have to choose between bad-arse pick-pocketing and across-the-board survivability). I think 3e makes the implicit similarity between combat, saves and skills more obvious through the contradictions.