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Post by Finarvyn on Jan 10, 2015 8:19:19 GMT -6
How am I supposed to interpret the combat matrix? Do magic-users and clerics only advance on the combat matrix after their first couple of levels? Do they advance one step in the combat matrix, or four at once after gaining the necessary level? I'm not sure if this is new or revolutionary, but I wanted to make a thread out of it instead of having it get lost in jonasaap's thread. I'm looking at "Attack Matric I: Men Attacking" on p.19 of M&M. Here's what I did with it long ago. Step One: Go with Acsending Armor Class (AAC) instead of the regular AC. While you can use maths to create this (AC + AAC = 19), the "level 1-3" column actually tells us the answer to how AAC corresponds to regular AC. Plate Armor & Shield = 17 AAC Plate Armor = 16 AAC Chain Mail & Shield = 15 AAC Chain Mail = 14 AAC Leather & Shield = 13 AAC Leather Armor = 12 AAC Shield Only = 11 AAC No Armor or Shield = 10 AAC The AAC number is a "target number", or the number needed to hit the creature. Step Two: Use a "Base Attack Bonus" instead of the chart. The top line of "Attack Matrix I" shows us the way. Look to see how much you need to move numbers to get from one column to the next. The numbers show 17, 15, 12, 10, 8, 5. To get from one column to the next we need +2, then another +3, then another +2, and another +2, then finally another +3. Those are additive, so the row could be replaced with +0, +2, +5, +7, +9, +12. Put it all together to create the progression to replace the chart! Fighting Man1-3 has a BAB of +0 4-6 has a BAB of +2 7-9 has a BAB of +5 10-12 has a BAB of +7 13-15 has a BAB of +9 16+ has a BAB of +12 Cleric1-4 has a BAB of +0 5-8 has a BAB of +2 9-12 has a BAB of +5 13-16 has a BAB of +7 Magic-User1-5 has a BAB of +0 6-10 has a BAB of +2 11-15 has a BAB of +5 16+ has a BAB of +7 I cap the charts at level 16 so that fighting men can surpass clerics and magic users, but you could extend it higher as long as you allow the fighter to progress above that given. Anyhow, that's the way I do it.
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Post by Finarvyn on Jan 10, 2015 8:32:47 GMT -6
I suppose I should also add in my monster chart, which replaces the one on p.20 of M&M. It uses the same base theory as the character attack charts from my previous post.
Monsters Attacking 0 to 1 has a BAB of +0 1+ has a BAB of +1 2 to 3 has a BAB of +2 3+ to 4 has a BAB of +4 4+ to 6 has a BAB of +5 6+ to 8+ has a BAB of +6 9 to 10+ has a BAB of +7 11 and up has a BAB of +9
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Post by Morandir on Jan 10, 2015 11:49:46 GMT -6
This is exactly how I do it; coming from 3.x, ascending AC coupled with a BAB just worked better for my group. And converting old ACs from modules is simple to do on-the-fly (just subtract from 19). Although with monsters I simplified a bit, just giving them a BAB equal to their HD. Works like a charm!
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Post by Zenopus on Jan 10, 2015 19:29:49 GMT -6
Swords & Wizardry has a great simplification for monsters. Base Attack Bonus = HD. Compare the numbers for this with Fin's above; they are pretty close. So if you are running a module with a stat block you can just use the listed HD as the BAB without trying to remember how the HD corresponds to a different number. Edit: Sorry morandir, I missed that you wrote the same exact thing at the end of your post before I wrote mine. You can also simplify the Fighter-Cleric-MU BAB, giving them something like Fighters +1 per 2 levels Clerics +1 per 3 levels MU +1 per 4 levels.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2015 19:31:53 GMT -6
I like the charts better than formulas. I never, ever, ever used THAC0. IN fact, I did a combat chart for Hero Games.
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Post by waysoftheearth on Jan 10, 2015 22:12:05 GMT -6
I cap the charts at level 16 so that fighting men can surpass clerics and magic users, but you could extend it higher as long as you allow the fighter to progress above that given. Bearing in mind that BABs greater than +16 vs AAC 17 (or +9 vs AAC 10) will rarely make any difference to hit probability, cos you can't roll less than 1. +12 is, IMHO, about as high as BABs should go.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 23, 2015 10:24:37 GMT -6
I like the charts better than formulas. I never, ever, ever used THAC0. IN fact, I did a combat chart for Hero Games. You can do things with charts that you can't do with formulas. But it seems that today, game designers insist that any chart has to have a formula behind it. 5e's obsession with "bounded accuracy" is a result of this thought process. It is an admission that they couldn't come up with a formula to handle both low level and high level play.
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Post by sepulchre on Jan 23, 2015 12:09:50 GMT -6
Hedgehobbit wrote: Can you speak more to this? I am unfamiliar with the term "bounded accuracy" and 5e's connection to it.
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jacar
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Post by jacar on Jan 23, 2015 12:26:36 GMT -6
Charts I find are slow. So I always welcome an ascending armor class (AAC) system. However, I don't particularly like THACO either. It seems to me making an AC the target number to hit is the best way to go. Basic Attack Bonus (BAB) is easy enough to do as we pretty much do that anyway. Roll a die. Add your BAB. Is it greater or equal to the AAC of the target? The only difference from the attack matrix is that you don't look anything up.
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Post by Stormcrow on Jan 23, 2015 13:23:38 GMT -6
Complaining about how slow it is to use a chart reminds me of an old TV commercial advertising touchtone phones, which showed a woman extremely frustrated because she wasn't coordinated enough to use a rotary dial phone. I wish I could find it on YouTube; it was inadvertently funny.
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Post by Porphyre on Jan 23, 2015 13:36:02 GMT -6
As I posted in another thread, familiarity is the key. I was used to charts in my Mentzer edition, and nowadays, even if AAC and Attack Bonuses seem simple and intuitive, I still feel the need to mentally convert them. AC 3 is plate armor, 5 is chain mail, 7 is leather , those numbers I know without looking up. AC 13, AC 15, AC 17 are numbers I'm not as famililiar with. It is like tying to explain to an englishman that the metric system is simpler, easier to use and more logical.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 23, 2015 13:44:39 GMT -6
Can you speak more to this? I am unfamiliar with the term "bounded accuracy" and 5e's connection to it. In games such as 3e, characters gain bonuses at different rates. Let's say there's a fighter that gains +1 to-hit per level while a magic-user gains +1 for every 2 levels. The difference in the bonus between these to character will eventually exceed the range of the die roll. So if the DM creates a threat with a target number high enough to challenge the higher value, the character with the lower value will have almost no chance to succeed. Likewise, if you set it low enough for the worse character to succeed, the better character will succeed automatically. It's not just 3e that has the problem, FFG's new Star Wars games are much worse. In order to combat this problem, the designers of 5e decided to do two things which they refer to as bounded accuracy. First, they set a limit on the highest possible target number and then the greatly reduced the rate at which a character's bonus value increases. So a fighter in 5e has an attack bonus at 20th level that's +6. Compared to +20 for 3e and +12 for OD&D. This solves the problem of requiring an optimized character to accomplish anything at the expense of letting high level character ever get really good at anything.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 23, 2015 18:04:09 GMT -6
I like the charts better than formulas. I never, ever, ever used THAC0. IN fact, I did a combat chart for Hero Games. I also much prefer charts, instead of formulas, and I have no interest in using AAC. Just not my style, and for me charts are much easier to use. However, that said, if Fins revision is easier for you, then use it and I will not complain a bit.
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Post by Fearghus on Jan 30, 2015 14:43:41 GMT -6
I have only played one session of 5e, but I like the bounded accuracy and do not see it as a detriment in the least. There are other parts I dislike, but house rules (as always) can fix that.
The only thing I dislike about the original attack matrix is the jump in the number needed to hit (or bonus in AAC). I prefer a streamlined approach. The secondary progression from 3/3.5/PF fits that decently well.
Don't get me wrong. I get it. Normal/hero/superhero. Levels 2 and 3 are just stepping stones to hero status, and 5-7 to super hero.
I started playing in 2nd we with THAC0 and the one thing I liked about 3rd was the ascending system.
1 +0 2 +1 3 +2 4 +3 5 +3 6 +4 7 +5 8 +6 9 +6 10 +7 11 +8 12 +9 13 +9 14 +10 15 +11 16 +12
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Post by Starbeard on Feb 6, 2015 10:00:47 GMT -6
Fighting Man1-3 has a BAB of +0 4-6 has a BAB of +2 7-9 has a BAB of +5 10-12 has a BAB of +7 13-15 has a BAB of +9 16+ has a BAB of +12 Cleric1-4 has a BAB of +0 5-8 has a BAB of +2 9-12 has a BAB of +5 13-16 has a BAB of +7 Magic-User1-5 has a BAB of +0 6-10 has a BAB of +2 11-15 has a BAB of +5 16+ has a BAB of +7 I cap the charts at level 16 so that fighting men can surpass clerics and magic users, but you could extend it higher as long as you allow the fighter to progress above that given. Anyhow, that's the way I do it. That's a very clean way of handling it, very nice. Not that it bothers me one way or the other, but is there a precedent for requiring the Fighting-Man to continue scaling up with the others? I had always interpreted the OD&D combat matrix so that a 16th level Lord, a 21st level Patriarch and a 26th level Wizard all fought on the same column. Flattening out the attack capabilities in the end-game is sort of what happens in Chainmail's tables, so it always made sense to me to treat the alternative matrix that way, too.
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Post by Finarvyn on Feb 6, 2015 15:57:51 GMT -6
(1) It's not as "clean" as some of the newer editions use. I kind of like smoothing over the jumps instead of moving from +0 to +2 (for example). It does match the canon of the original books, however, so that's pretty neat. (2) I'm not sure what you are asking here. Men & Magic clearly gives a progression of three levels per column for fighting men, four levels per column for clerics, and five levels per column for magic users. OD&D does give rules for advancing above "name" level but doesn't give an actual level cap, so any top level would be a house rule. I think the Judges Guild screen gave a cap similar to the one in my post, but OD&D technically doesn't give one. The problem is that if you cap the fighter than eventually everyone else could become as good at fighting, so I used 16-ish as the level at the "top" of combat progression. Is that the question you wanted answered? If not, elaborate and I'll try again!
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Post by Finarvyn on Feb 6, 2015 16:13:26 GMT -6
Okay so this post will be absurd, so be warned... I was looking at my earlier post and thinking about the progression and wondering what it might look like for higher levels if I removed my own level-16 cap. Just for fun I picked up on a pattern and extrapolated it to level 60. (Yikes!) Fin's Absurd Basic Attack Bonus progression: +0, +2, +5, +7, +9, +12, +14, +16, +18, +21, +23, +25, +27, +29, +32, +34, +36, +38, +42. So my chart tells me that the BAB chart would predict that... ... a 60th level fighting man would be at +42 to hit. ... a 60th level cleric would be at +32 to hit. ... a 60th level magic user would be at +25 to hit. I'm not sure there is much value in this because: (1) Such bonuses clearly "break" the d20 die roll mechanic, and (2) I've hardly ever had characters over level 10 in my campaigns, let alone 60. Anyway, it was a fun thought while it lasted and I enjoyed tinkering with it for 10 minutes or so. Just had to share. EDIT: I had a typo in my spreadsheet. Fixed the FABAB progression and the value for the 60th level cleric, for those who are interested.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 6, 2015 16:59:57 GMT -6
Aha! In comes bounded accuracy to FUBAR your silly 60th level demigods!
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Post by Starbeard on Feb 7, 2015 7:06:59 GMT -6
(1) It's not as "clean" as some of the newer editions use. I kind of like smoothing over the jumps instead of moving from +0 to +2 (for example). It does match the canon of the original books, however, so that's pretty neat. (2) I'm not sure what you are asking here. Men & Magic clearly gives a progression of three levels per column for fighting men, four levels per column for clerics, and five levels per column for magic users. OD&D does give rules for advancing above "name" level but doesn't give an actual level cap, so any top level would be a house rule. I think the Judges Guild screen gave a cap similar to the one in my post, but OD&D technically doesn't give one. The problem is that if you cap the fighter than eventually everyone else could become as good at fighting, so I used 16-ish as the level at the "top" of combat progression. Is that the question you wanted answered? If not, elaborate and I'll try again! I've mostly used Chainmail-esque combat, so I've never looked at the D20 matrix very closely. However, unless there's a part somewhere I'm missing (very likely), the brief discussion on how to extrapolate the fighting capabilities of higher levels exclusively references the chainmail system—and when that gets extrapolated, the rate of increase for Fighting-Men vs Clerics vs Magic-Users starts to flatten out a little bit. F-M remain somewhat superior but less so, and Clerics and Magic-Users certainly become more comparable to each other, if I recall. There's obviously no reason the same extrapolation can't be used for the D20 tables, and I'm sure that's what was intended. Still, without further explanation extrapolation of those tables is a bit murky, for these reasons: - As a 1-20 roll, as you say, eventually everything will become an automatic hit unless you give things made-up stats like AC -30.
- The progressions aren't formulaic, and jump oddly between +1s, +2s and +3s without repeating patterns. This makes extrapolating hypothetical columns uncertain—and besides, each column would eventually reach 1+ to hit and stay there. Neither of those becomes an issue by handling '16 & up' as literally meaning that a F-M of level 16 and of level 132 both fight on the same column, their relative difference fighting ability already being represented by their difference in hit dice.
Like I said, I haven't really played with the D20 tables in OD&D, and either way I don't think I've ever fielded a PC or NPC that was above level 16 anyway, so I've never even had to consider what to do about it. But, my first impressions were simply to treat them as meaning that while there are no level caps for characters, there are caps in the D20 combat tables.
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Post by Finarvyn on Feb 8, 2015 6:43:11 GMT -6
Regarding my "absurd" post, I'm not sure I can find a similar pattern for monsters attacking. This means that: (1) Monster AC needs to be amped up in order for them to survive, and (2) It's possible that the top monsters in the game could cap out at +10. I guess I need to fix this before anyone gets absurd PC levels, right? Also, it occurs to me that Arduin may have done this already.
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Post by Scott Anderson on Feb 8, 2015 13:04:15 GMT -6
Or, one might cap levels at 16 (or 14 or whatever). Not XP- you can keep adventurin forever- but just say there's a cap on the potential for greater prowess.
Character classes (not to mention races, which is already cooked into the system) don't necessarily need to have the same level caps, either. Maybe there are only 16 levels to fighter but 26 levels to MU. It's not completely absurd to think of.
In Treasure Hunters, most classes have 14 levels. Druids have 13, and Monks have 17. Why? Because it's easier to master the Druid class than normal and much harder to master the Monk class than normal. Hedge Wizards only go up to 11.
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Post by Starbeard on Feb 8, 2015 15:32:48 GMT -6
How much would it 'break' things if you had infinite levels, but once you reached a certain cap for that class (say, level 16), all level gains beyond that would only give you extra hits?
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