Yertle wrote:

Norseman wrote:

Mongrel wrote: So I never played D&D, can superdork explain to closet dork please.

AC stands for "Armor Class".  In old school versions of D&D, the lower the AC of your character, the better, and the minimum possible was -10.  Hence, if you were the dude camping the armor spawn location in GoldenEye, you probably got the AC -10 award.

I'm not sure I ever knew the meaning of the AC -10!

Same, just didn't show up much in LTK games.

You calculated whether you hit someone or not by taking your THAC0 ("To Hit Armor Class Zero"), rolling your die, and then adding your opponent's AC. So, if they had an AC of -10 and you had a THAC0 of 10, you'd have to roll a natural 20 (20+(-10)) in order to hit them.

More details can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THAC0

Note that unarmored humans were AC +10, so an AC -10 was pretty damned impressive.

Oatworm wrote:

You calculated whether you hit someone or not by taking your THAC0 ("To Hit Armor Class Zero"), rolling your die, and then adding your opponent's AC. So, if they had an AC of -10 and you had a THAC0 of 10, you'd have to roll a natural 20 (20+(-10)) in order to hit them.

More details can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THAC0

Note that unarmored humans were AC +10, so an AC -10 was pretty damned impressive.

I was wondering if this thread would degenerate into a discussion of THAC0... luckily, later editions made determining hits simpler by having you compare your roll plus a bonus to your opponent's armor class (where a higher armor class was now better).

THAC0 is like Godwin's Law - the probability of every discussion involving armor class devolving into a discussion of THAC0 approaches 1.

Norseman wrote:

Oatworm wrote:

You calculated whether you hit someone or not by taking your THAC0 ("To Hit Armor Class Zero"), rolling your die, and then adding your opponent's AC. So, if they had an AC of -10 and you had a THAC0 of 10, you'd have to roll a natural 20 (20+(-10)) in order to hit them.

More details can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THAC0

Note that unarmored humans were AC +10, so an AC -10 was pretty damned impressive.

I was wondering if this thread would degenerate into a discussion of THAC0... luckily, later editions made determining hits simpler by having you compare your roll plus a bonus to your opponent's armor class (where a higher armor class was now better).

Indeed... I much prefer the newer system (when did they actually switch from THAC0? I don't even remember...).

3rd Edition, I think.

3rd Edition was a f***ing travesty.

My first D&D experience was with 2nd Edition (back when D&D was Advanced) during middle school, and after a long break I recently started playing 4th Edition in the past year or so.  It sounds like it may have been for the best that I skipped over 3rd Edition.

Started with the red box edition (before D&D was Advanced). Played regularly through the 2nd edition. I picked up a 3rd edition book in the bookstore once and it didn't look like the same game.

Somewhere along the the line we eliminated THAC0 and adjusted armor class so that you rolled the die, added all the modifiers and compared that to the AC. I forget exactly how we did it now.

My son just today picked up my tattered copy of Dragons of Autumn Twilight off the bookshelf and started reading it. It may be time to get my books out of the attic.

I played Pogs, is all the stuff you guys are talking about anything like that? :P

You people have derailed the thread!!!

asm wrote: 3rd Edition was a f***ing travesty.

The real travesty is you *** out your own text, as if it wasn't an automated function.

Yertle wrote: I played Pogs, is all the stuff you guys are talking about anything like that? :P

You people have derailed the thread!!!

Here's my offering toward getting the thread back on track.

Random GoldenEye trivia: the Klobb was named after Ken Lobb, one of the designers of the game.

Cramchakle wrote:

asm wrote: 3rd Edition was a f***ing travesty.

The real travesty is you *** out your own text, as if it wasn't an automated function.

I feel I get more mileage out of that because the nanny can't tell what I'm doing. I'd rather have an 'f' and an 'ing' than nothing but a row of #######.

Yertle wrote:

You people have derailed the thread!!!

Sorry dad.

Was never really big on role-playing games personally, though I had quite a few friends back in the day that were. Usually they played "Rifts" or something similar, but they did dust off some D&D 3rd Ed for a while, along with some Shadowrun. Whenever I played, which, like I said, wasn't especially frequently, my goal was usually to wreck the campaign by being as random and ridiculous as possible. It didn't help that most of my friends' idea of "running a campaign" was "hand out XP like it's free candy" and "it's time to take on the gods!" It got old rather quickly.

As for Goldeneye... ah, now that was some good, good stuff right there. Sure, you had "online play" for Doom and Duke Nukem, but it just hadn't matured yet, and besides, not everyone had low-latency connections back then. Goldeneye hit that sweet spot of practical multiplayer better than anything else of the time. Loved it.

I've been playing 4ed and I must say I really like what they've done to the game. They did a good job of keeping it fairly straightforward and balanced but still keeping depth to the game.

I agree Vataro, 4th edition is a nice balance.

Also, I remember fondly the days of never ending bond multi-player and trying to run through boards to unlock cheats. It was one of my favorite N64 games. Alas, in my desire to rid myself to old systems, I sold my N64 and SNES last year.

Alpha wrote: I sold my SNES last year.

Heresy. I WISH I still had my SNES. I gave it to a buddy's little sister when I went off to college and never got it back. Ah, Super Mario Kart. How I love thee.

My one beef with 4e is that combat takes way too long. It seems like plot and RPing have a tendency to take a back seat to the hour-long encounters.

And, to make my post topic-neutral: did anyone else like using the Magnum in License to Kill games? It was definitely slower than the PP7, but the Magnum was so much more conducive to trash-talking.

Norseman wrote: did anyone else like using the Magnum in License to Kill games? It was definitely slower than the PP7, but the Magnum was so much more conducive to trash-talking.

Dude. X1000.  The best was turning a corner into a spraying RCP-90 with a shotgun (or better still the magnum) and saying "silenced" as their screen went bloody.

I always went for the magnum in pistol battles, though the DD Dostoyev had a nice pop to it.