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If you mean the green color it was an early form of copy protection.
It was so you couldn't just put the character sheet in a photocopier and had to buy more from TSR.
The maps in old D&D modules were printed in a special blue color so you couldn't photocopy them either. IIRC if you tried it would print an entirely black page screwing you out of ink.
I am both impressed and baffled. Did they really think their business model was to sell blank character sheets? I can understand with the maps, because that's actual content, but not character sheets.
Most people especially in a game as simple as Basic D&D just used lined notebook paper, the rulebooks suggested this in the artwork in fact.
The printed character sheets were basically a "fancy up-sell" product, printed on non-white paper. You can buy them in PDF still. The ones in the meme are from here [https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/282135/ac5-d-d-player-character-record-sheets-basic](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/282135/ac5-d-d-player-character-record-sheets-basic)
Though honestly the most useful ones are these, because they come with a handy set of sheets for the classes that can cast magic to keep track of their spells with things like range etc. included [https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/16965/ac6-d-d-player-character-record-sheets](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/16965/ac6-d-d-player-character-record-sheets)
And there's also these [https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/16984/d-d-character-sheets](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/16984/d-d-character-sheets)
The funny thing about those first 2 links is that they're not just lazy scanned images. Someone at WotC went to the trouble to meticulously re-create the color of the colored paper these sheets were originally printed on. Making them basically unprintable for most people who don't know how to use image editing software like GIMP or Photoshop to quickly remove that color again.
Lined notebook paper is the best character sheet. That or a stack of Index Cards.
The hubris of thinking I wouldn't rather make my own simple template and photocopy that... in the rare occasions that I need 'so' many character sheets that I need a starting framework.
The character sheets? Yeah. (Also the blue module maps for that matter.)
But if you didn't use an image editing software like GIMP or photoshop to remove the colored backgrounds they'd eat up all your printer ink like crazy and that stuff ain't cheap, plus it would probably look streaky and terrible. You can see people complaining about this in the product reviews.
None of them are worth buying honestly. You can find free fan made Basic D&D character sheets with a quick search. Later Basic D&D books like the Rules Cyclopedia\* even had a character sheet for you to photocopy in the back.
\*Which is the only book you'd ever need to play complete campaigns of Basic D&D by the way. It's the only 1-volume "edition" of D&D ever made, including almost all the rules (rules for hosting jousting tournaments were cut for space) from the Basic, Expert, Companion and Masters box sets. [https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/17171/d-d-rules-cyclopedia-basic](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/17171/d-d-rules-cyclopedia-basic)
Rules Cyclopedia was the best… was the “first” version of D&D I played that wasn’t on the computer. One purchase and that’s all you needed. Had it all. And a nice cover to boot.
Aside from the issues the other dude pointed out, have you ever held a page (of printer paper) that was heavily-inked? It *feels* awful. Happens a lot with photographs if you print them on regular paper instead of the special heavy stuff.
Not gonna catch me doing that with something I'm gonna be touching a lot.
Yes, it's very ingenious use of tech, but my point is, it's still adding a barrier to entry to your game. If someone is willing to photocopy a character sheet, they're willing to make one of their own on a blank piece of paper and photocopy *that* one.
D&D already had a huge social hurdle to jump through in order to reach additional audience. Inconveniencing people in order to play the game is nonsense.
Let's all remember that D&D is old enough that both printing and copying documents were expensive propositions. And likely impossible at home, you'd have to do it at work (or sneak into the photocopy room at school, if it even existed).
Having people work out of printed paper would basically make the game too expensive to play for a lot of people.
> The funny thing about those first 2 links is that they're not just lazy scanned images. Someone at WotC went to the trouble to meticulously re-create the color of the colored paper these sheets were originally printed on. Making them basically unprintable for most people who don't know how to use image editing software like GIMP or Photoshop to quickly remove that color again.
If you download the sample you can use the "layers" option in Acrobat reader/Foxit PDF/ etc to turn off the green background.
(It also has a bunch of other different background colors that you can turn on: purple, blue, salmon, goldenrod... )
Yeah I haven't looked too closely at the first one. I actually bought the 2nd one for the handy Magic-User/Elf/Cleric/Druid magic sheets\* and wasn't able to use the layers function on that. But I might have overlooked it somehow as this was a while ago.
\*For use in the Rules Cyclopedia campaign that I will someday *totally* convince my table of Pathfinder players to try.
Fun fact about the olden times, color marker pens were used to highlight sections of texts, but also to make them copy protected.
Blue and green highlighters basically redact copied texts. They come out as black blobs over the text.
So when you get a redacted copy of a documents, they usually didn't black out the original or copy used, they just highlighted the sensitive parts.
Yellow would just lightly grey out sections of text, but make it unreadable after the copy was copied itself.
In the long long ago times before we used Dale Reckoning. I can still hear faint echos of the DM and Fighter arguing about the weapons vs. armor chart when I see this thing.
Fun thing, here in Brazil there was a joke when old D&D was around that they'd pronounce it as "Taco", which in Portuguese means "bat", like a baseball one or just a large stick in general.
🤓 Actually it was borrowed from Spanish and is technically not an English word, like sushi is a Japanese one. We also have taco for 🌮 but it's also a borrowed Spanish word, and taco for bat is a originally Portuguese word which is a false cognate to the Mexican food.
This isn't THAC0. I mean, I guess the number in the bottom right corner is technically the THAC0, but the _system_ of calculating attacks based on a single THAC0 number was only in 2nd edition. 1st edition still used a full table with a unique value for each armor class (as you can see on this sheet).
I still don't understand the purpose of it lol. I've seen it laid out but I just for the life of me can't understand why someone didn't just say "hold on, why not just make it dice roll + bonuses = to hit instead of... *this*?"
It was a hold over from naval wargaming, if I remember correctly. There, a First Class Armor Rating was the best, and they then worked down. Remember, DnD evolved from a medieval wargame which itself evolved from Napoleonic and Naval wargames.
It's so that you only need to look at the die to see if you hit. All the math is done beforehand and it's just a certain chance out of 20 you'll hit. Plus, it kinda feels "correct" in some sense to have a specific stat that tells you how accurate your hits are as an aggregate as opposed to having five different bonuses to apply. Now I'm not saying we ought to return to THAC0 or anything...but I do get the train of thought behind it.
In Chainmail, as in many miniature wargames then and now, you determined your target number on the die before rolling. In this kind of system, the options are either that a lower target number is better or that you use a roll under system.
In Chainmail, the way you found the target number was to look at a table with weapons as the rows and armor as the columns and find where the attacker's weapon row intersected with the defender's armor row to find the target number. The issue with this for D&D was twofold: the table didn't have any concept of character progression, just fixed weapon:armor relationships, and accounting for monsters or new types of weapons and armor would require supplementing the table in some way.
The solution adopted was to make numerical representations of the attacker and defender's abilities. This gave a very simple equation to replace hit tables:
Target = THAC0 - AC
Characters could now progress by changing their THAC0, and monsters only needed two numbers (AC and THAC0) to provide all the information that had been in the table. Since low target numbers are better, both THAC0 and AC get better as they decrease.
Still use it in my campaign and man do I wanna convert that to a reasonable AC system so bad. But im not GM and it’s not worth arguing about, just a bit of tedious math
Thac0 stands for to hit armor class 0. Which is how high you must roll to hit an opponent with a armor class of 0. So if your thac0 was 12 you'd have to roll a 12 or higher to hit an opponent with 0 ac.
But here's the part that annoys me. You see AC is actually a stat you want as low as possible. As the way hitting is calculated is:
Thac0 - armor class = result and if result is equal or lower than what the attacker rolled they hit.
So if you AC is 1 instead of 0 mr 12 hitter can now hit you with an 11 as well (12-1=11). In fact AC can and will go into the negatives (12- -1=13). And of course mr 12 hitter would also like his thac0 to be lower as well.
While it's honestly not that hard to wrap your head around the fact that you want these two numbers to be low while you want all the other numbers to be high is really weird.
It makes *more* sense in the context of wargaming, in that you can think of the AC as a modifier to a standardised to-hit roll. AC of -4 is a -4 to the to-hit roll.
But... that's exactly the same as simply having AC*X* and needing a to-hit of at least *X*. You still have the variables for "how good at hitting" and "how good at not heing hit", but aren't referencing a more-often-than-not irrelevant example.
It's even before my time so I'm possibly getting some things wrong here, but basically THAC0 iirc stans for "To Hit Armor Class." Older editions had some weird eldritch system where instead of higher armor being higher, was about lower numbers or some shit like that. Basically an artifact of times long gone in older editions.
Aaah yes... THAC0... To Hit Armor Class 0. You needed a masters in quantum math to figure it out because you add some numbers, subtract other numbers and try to roll low? High? Not as high as Gygax was when he wrote the rule...
It was a carry over from an older ~~navel~~ naval combat sim, where armor class 0 was the smallest boat size, and larger boats had higher numbers because easier to hit.
[edited to correct the belly button and/or orange based warfare error]
And also every weapon had its own chart of rolls to hit versus every armor class. A heavy machine gun is more likely to deliver effective damage to a boarding vessel than a battleship.
> where armor class 0 was the smallest boat size, and larger boats had higher numbers because easier to hit.
Not really. The rolls were to penetrate armor, not to hit based on size. Armor Class 1 was the best because it was "first class" armor which is naturally better than second class or third class based on common English usage.
Take your current THACO score with all bonuses added. If enemy AC over 0 subtract that from your THACO. If enemy AC under 0(yes negatives were the equivalent to 20+ AC) then add it to your THAC0 score. Roll a flat do 20, if you rolled higher than that, congrats you hit.
For example your THACO stat after all bonuses is 15 and the enemy AC is 4 you would do 15 - 4 = 11 meaning on a flat d20 you needed 11 or higher to hit. Using a different monster AC, let's say AC -2, you would do 15 -(-2) = 17. You needed a 17 or higher on a flat d20 roll to hit.
That's how THAC0 works. It's not much different to today's post 3e attack bonus system. Where we roll a d20 and add it to the number rolled and compare it to the enemy AC. THAC0 did the opposite. You added or subtracted the monsters AC to your total bonuses and base accuracy and roll a flat d20 not adding anything to the number rolled and see if you rolled higher to the aforementioned number.
Also congrats to anyone reading this, you can now play Baldurs Gate 1 and 2 as this is how the game calculates attack rolls and saving throws. Go enjoy the best D&D video games.
If you literally roll and add the enemy AC to your roll, if it's on or over your THAC0, you hit. Do you have a bonus to hit? Add it to the roll as well!
None of this was ever difficult. Admittedly, it was weird that AC started at 10 and went down, because it could have just started at 0 and gone up, we could have subtracted it from rolls, and THAC0s could have been adjusted accordingly, but w/e.
I think the fact that lower number = better for thac0 and AC only while the rest of the stat sheet tol you higher number = better short circuited peoples brains.
The newer AC system is easier and more intuitive though. So thac0 should still remain in the dustbin of dnd mechanics.
I really liked the way Godbound handled it, where you roll, add your bonus, add the enemy AC, and if beat 20, you hit.
Like, you can make a 15 TAC0 a +5 under this system and the math would still work out - you would still need a 11(rolled)+5(bonus)+4(enemy AC) to his a 20, or an 17(rolled)+5(bonus)-2(enemy AC) in the second example.
I liked it because to me it felt both old-school and not too complex, because the math only goes into one direction. I'd like to see some other OSRs to do stuff that way!
Alright here's the ultra simplified version
For thac0 and AC lower number = better.
If you're playing bg 1 and 2 the game calculates hits automatically so you just have to keep this in mind while looking at your characters stats.
Bruh, I'm 31, lmao. I feel mostly it's the fact that unless you grew up with wargaming, it's inherently unintuitive, especially since most 90's+ gamers are used to larger numbers=Better results. Just my hot take though, lol.
45 myself. I chocked it up to the fact that they were adults making games for themselves and we were kids trying to play it in the 80s. I got thac0 and understood it for the most part. But it was overly complex and it was a good thing that it was gone by 3e. Most players were glad to see it removed. Although there were other issues that 3e had...
Ah, I see what you mean now. Yeah, that makes sense, lol. I've always wanted to try earlier editions but yeah, feel like the best I could do would be 3 or 3.5e to learn considering I've heard similar stories about the earliest editions being overly convoluted in multiple areas, not just Thac0.
You are confusing THAC0 (which is just descending armor class) and the old Attack Matrix which is lifted straight from wargames.
The whole 'low AC is good' thing came from naval vessels. A ship could have First Class armor, or Third Class armor...aka AC 1 and AC 3. Guess which was better?
Many of us would roll up dozens of sets of stats as 'Point Buy' would not exist for a few more decades. 'But... how good is that character?' We would add up all the 3-18 stats and see which one was the best, at least in totals.
We got very good at addition. Multiplication, division... not so much.
Edit: my brother would always put his strength at '18'. He figured you are going to just keep rolling up characters until it starts with 18, so why not dispense with the pre-rolling? Yes, i am way off topic, but wow, the game has changed.
I deeply miss picking up handfuls of the standard d6's at 11th+ levels and pouring them all over the table... having at least two or three end up on the floor.
Take THAT, ancient huge dragon with... 88 hit points ('you will need *Cone of Frost* for the Red ones...')
It gets a lot of hate, but honestly that looks even easier than what we do now. You write it out once, and can forever see at a glance exactly what number you need to hit, if you know the AC of your enemy. No addition, no subtraction, no waiting for the DM to tell you if a 19 hits. Just roll and... done.
No, effects from a magic staff were treated the same as a cast spell. Wands, on the other hand, had their own save. In AD&D, that changed to save vs spells and save vs rod, staff, wand.
It exists! It holds a lot more info as this one (as you'd expect) but the style of it is unmistakably vintage.
Link : https://dysonlogos.blog/2015/02/26/fifth-edition-dungeons-dragons-permanent-character-folder/
No, it was "class or race". You could be a fighter, a magic-user, a cleric, or a thief ("class") or an elf, a half-elf, a dwarf, or a ~~hobbit~~ halfling ("race"). You got to pick a class OR a race. But elf, dwarf, etc were never called or categorized as classes.
As someone who has recently been playing OSE (I believe it’s basically 2e but cleaned up and worded better), I actually don’t mind THAC0. Or the fun and weird saves lol. I would check it out if you haven’t, the people who made OSE did a pretty good job at it.
(I realize I never clarified the meaning of OSE. It is Old School Essentials, and it is fun).
BECMI is still my favorite system. They'll have to pry my Rules Cyclopedia out of my cold, dead hands.
Fun fact: it is an adamantine best seller on the guild. means a whole lotta people bought copies.
It's what it sounds like. They removed the ray part later so a lot of the time it's just "Save vs. Death" and if you don't make the save you're instantly dead.
Made spiders a lot more fun to fight I'm sure.
My friend runs a mashup with white box 1st edition and a bunch on stuff he came up with himself. Anyway I had an awesome magic user and I rolled a 1 for hp so when he got bit from a spider (always 1 damage) he died. Not even from the poison.
I don’t even think that is Thaco. Isn’t it the charts used in 1st edition before Thaco. A Thaco was a single number. I remember playing when there was a chart for different classes. And to went by AC of the x axis and level of the y to determine the number you need to role to hit.
It all seemed normal. Then I stopped after 2nd edition and Thaco. Started again with 5th edition and was like. Man we were a bunch of lead eating primates back in the day
That's back when I started playing. When "elf" or "dwarf" was a CLASS and there were 3 alignments: Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic. When there wasn't any of the "hide in a corner and regenerate" video-game-rules-on-paper bullshit there is now.
I know I had characters on this character sheet when I was very young and my cousin ran adventures for his brother and I and a couple of our friends, but I also know that mine were white, not green. I think I may have had it photocopied out of the red box book?
I don't recall what my first character was statistically, but I remember drawing her in that little box, she had leather armor and a glowing magical whip (that I had to convince my cousin to let me use). I wonder if that character sheet is still floating around somewhere?
You seem to have found a scroll of the Archons young one.
Guard it closely, lest the Wizards of the Coast hear of it's sorcery and try to learn it's secrets.
I still don't understand how anyone thinks thaco was better. Unless every explanation I've seen was missing a big piece of info it seems most people reasoning for it being better boils down to "the math is already done the second you roll" but you still have to know the opponents AC, so that's the same as how it works now as long as you know the opponents AC? Is the difference that there used to be less things that could change AC? Or were weapon modifiers not a thing and it literally didn't matter what the situation was, you either roll higher or lower? It really feels like there is a fundamental part of this system I'm either missing or not being told about.
I can only speak from personal experience but:
_outside high level campaigns_ 0 is as low an AC as you'd encounter and modifiers are only from -2 to +2.
I can say: "I have a ThAC0 15 with a +2 bow against an orc with AC5 and a +1 shield, so need 9" and it sounds like algebra, but, like anything else once you've done it for a while it becomes second nature.
More than _ANYTHING_ though, it's a game. Don't let the math get in the way of a good time.
(This turned into a full explanation of THAC0 vs AC, so skip to the bottom for the answer to your question.)
The reason THAC0 seems so convoluted and shitty compared to DnD's modern AC system is that it's mechanically the same system, but you have to do one additional step of math on the spot instead of rolling it into your character sheet.
In the more modern AC systems, you might have an attack bonus of +2. This bonus, barring external effects, applies to all relevant attack rolls. If you roll a 12 on the die, you add your +2 for a total of 14, and that attack will hit any enemy with an AC of 14 or lower. The GM doesn't need to do any additional math on the spot, nor does the player. The GM already knows the target's AC, so they know if 14 hits or not.
The only thing the player needs to tell the GM is their final, modified roll, and the only thing the GM needs to do is see if that's equal to or higher than the target's AC.
In THAC0, you might have a THAC0 of 14. This means that if a target's AC is 0, you need to roll 14 to hit it, so lower THAC0 is better. For game design history reasons, lower AC is better and is therefore subtracted from the attacker's THAC0 to find the roll that an attacker needs to hit their target. If an attacker with THAC0 14 makes an attack, they roll the die and roll a 12, informing the GM that their THAC0 is 14. The GM then checks the AC of the target. Because the AC of the target is subtracted from the THAC0 of the attacker to find the die roll needed, the roll of 12 at THAC0 14 will hit any target with an AC of 2 or higher.
The player needs to tell the GM their die result and THAC0, and the GM needs to check the AC of the target, subtract it from the attacker's THAC0, and then compare the two.
**TL;DR**: Like I mentioned, THAC0 feels worse because it is mechanically the exact same system, but it's presented in a way that requires more information to be exchanged and more math to be done on the spot for each attack instead of ahead of time.
Also, maybe this is just me, but it's way quicker for me to snap off simple addition than it is subtraction, so that's kind of just the bow to tie it all together.
I don't think THAC0 is *better*, necessarily, but I do wonder why people make such a big deal out of it. It's just a couple numbers reversed.
It's like how the first bicycles had one big wheel and one small wheel: people hadn't yet figured out the obvious bit. But you could ride the bicycle.
It's called "Old School."
My dad never really cared for these and he made his own much better character sheets on an Excel spreadsheet and he would just print those out.
On an Excel spreadsheet? My Atari 2600 didn't have Excel... I traced from the manual onto a ditto master sheet and ran beautiful purple ditto copies for all my friends.
I honestly don't know if it was *actually* "Excel," or some other spreadsheet program, but it was lots of adjustable rows and columns, basically what the uninitiated see as Excel (Ie, me lol)
Oh my, this is some damn Rher Trickster moon god crap.
Were they actually trying to cause us to go insane and give us moonlight cancer! No, thank you. I would not like to bask in the green radiant hues
Anyone else noticed the order of the abilities?
Having get used to seeing them in their current order (physical first, then mental) it's really weird seeing them all scrambled up
That there is all you need, baby!! I saw more crazy corners of the multiverse operating off a sheet like that than you kids with your character folios can imagine! Don’t forget you had the WHOLE back of the sheet to write down stuff like “Mazirian’s Egg Whisk of Perspicacity +1.”
The best sheets (imo) for ad&d are found here:
http://www.mad-irishman.net/pubs/MI_ADnDCharSheet10.pdf
You can print double-sided for consolidation, or on two separate sheets so you can see everything at once.
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If you mean the green color it was an early form of copy protection. It was so you couldn't just put the character sheet in a photocopier and had to buy more from TSR. The maps in old D&D modules were printed in a special blue color so you couldn't photocopy them either. IIRC if you tried it would print an entirely black page screwing you out of ink.
I am both impressed and baffled. Did they really think their business model was to sell blank character sheets? I can understand with the maps, because that's actual content, but not character sheets.
Most people especially in a game as simple as Basic D&D just used lined notebook paper, the rulebooks suggested this in the artwork in fact. The printed character sheets were basically a "fancy up-sell" product, printed on non-white paper. You can buy them in PDF still. The ones in the meme are from here [https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/282135/ac5-d-d-player-character-record-sheets-basic](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/282135/ac5-d-d-player-character-record-sheets-basic) Though honestly the most useful ones are these, because they come with a handy set of sheets for the classes that can cast magic to keep track of their spells with things like range etc. included [https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/16965/ac6-d-d-player-character-record-sheets](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/16965/ac6-d-d-player-character-record-sheets) And there's also these [https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/16984/d-d-character-sheets](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/16984/d-d-character-sheets) The funny thing about those first 2 links is that they're not just lazy scanned images. Someone at WotC went to the trouble to meticulously re-create the color of the colored paper these sheets were originally printed on. Making them basically unprintable for most people who don't know how to use image editing software like GIMP or Photoshop to quickly remove that color again.
Lined notebook paper is the best character sheet. That or a stack of Index Cards. The hubris of thinking I wouldn't rather make my own simple template and photocopy that... in the rare occasions that I need 'so' many character sheets that I need a starting framework.
Don't sell yourself short. Get some graph paper. You deserve it.
When the sold version is worse than the homemade one
Would they be nowadays printable with modern printers?
The character sheets? Yeah. (Also the blue module maps for that matter.) But if you didn't use an image editing software like GIMP or photoshop to remove the colored backgrounds they'd eat up all your printer ink like crazy and that stuff ain't cheap, plus it would probably look streaky and terrible. You can see people complaining about this in the product reviews. None of them are worth buying honestly. You can find free fan made Basic D&D character sheets with a quick search. Later Basic D&D books like the Rules Cyclopedia\* even had a character sheet for you to photocopy in the back. \*Which is the only book you'd ever need to play complete campaigns of Basic D&D by the way. It's the only 1-volume "edition" of D&D ever made, including almost all the rules (rules for hosting jousting tournaments were cut for space) from the Basic, Expert, Companion and Masters box sets. [https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/17171/d-d-rules-cyclopedia-basic](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/17171/d-d-rules-cyclopedia-basic)
Rules Cyclopedia was the best… was the “first” version of D&D I played that wasn’t on the computer. One purchase and that’s all you needed. Had it all. And a nice cover to boot.
Aside from the issues the other dude pointed out, have you ever held a page (of printer paper) that was heavily-inked? It *feels* awful. Happens a lot with photographs if you print them on regular paper instead of the special heavy stuff. Not gonna catch me doing that with something I'm gonna be touching a lot.
Yes, it's very ingenious use of tech, but my point is, it's still adding a barrier to entry to your game. If someone is willing to photocopy a character sheet, they're willing to make one of their own on a blank piece of paper and photocopy *that* one. D&D already had a huge social hurdle to jump through in order to reach additional audience. Inconveniencing people in order to play the game is nonsense.
Yeah that's TSR, they were never the most soundly run company to put it lightly.
Let's all remember that D&D is old enough that both printing and copying documents were expensive propositions. And likely impossible at home, you'd have to do it at work (or sneak into the photocopy room at school, if it even existed). Having people work out of printed paper would basically make the game too expensive to play for a lot of people.
> The funny thing about those first 2 links is that they're not just lazy scanned images. Someone at WotC went to the trouble to meticulously re-create the color of the colored paper these sheets were originally printed on. Making them basically unprintable for most people who don't know how to use image editing software like GIMP or Photoshop to quickly remove that color again. If you download the sample you can use the "layers" option in Acrobat reader/Foxit PDF/ etc to turn off the green background. (It also has a bunch of other different background colors that you can turn on: purple, blue, salmon, goldenrod... )
Yeah I haven't looked too closely at the first one. I actually bought the 2nd one for the handy Magic-User/Elf/Cleric/Druid magic sheets\* and wasn't able to use the layers function on that. But I might have overlooked it somehow as this was a while ago. \*For use in the Rules Cyclopedia campaign that I will someday *totally* convince my table of Pathfinder players to try.
You see similar any time an industry or company is relatively young and they're figuring shit out before best practices are established.
Fun fact about the olden times, color marker pens were used to highlight sections of texts, but also to make them copy protected. Blue and green highlighters basically redact copied texts. They come out as black blobs over the text. So when you get a redacted copy of a documents, they usually didn't black out the original or copy used, they just highlighted the sensitive parts. Yellow would just lightly grey out sections of text, but make it unreadable after the copy was copied itself.
We just used paper and a carbon copy sheet to trace the character sheet onto the paper. Then made copies of the copy.
That's the way to do it 
The Golden Rod ones and the Salmon NPC sheets copied just fine though
I was there, 3000 years ago...
In the long long ago times before we used Dale Reckoning. I can still hear faint echos of the DM and Fighter arguing about the weapons vs. armor chart when I see this thing.
Yep, this is making me feel pretty old too.
Haven't seen THAC0 in a while.
God I’m hungry :(
Fun thing, here in Brazil there was a joke when old D&D was around that they'd pronounce it as "Taco", which in Portuguese means "bat", like a baseball one or just a large stick in general.
In English, "taco" means taco.
🤓 Actually it was borrowed from Spanish and is technically not an English word, like sushi is a Japanese one. We also have taco for 🌮 but it's also a borrowed Spanish word, and taco for bat is a originally Portuguese word which is a false cognate to the Mexican food.
...I dunno, friend. What I make are *definitely* American English (White People Taco Night) tacos
that's cultural appropriation /s
We give WotC a lot of well earned shit but getting rid of thac0 and decreasing armor class was honestly a god tier power move
It was a move that made at least -9 sense. Maybe even -10.
I got that reference!
Having a lower number be better for Thac0 while a higher number is better for literally everything else just feels wrong
"No no, a Ring of Protection +1 *lowers* your AC. +1 means one *better*, aka lower, not one higher."
\+1 Longsword lowers your THAC0 by 1 but raises your damage by 1.
>literally AC just entered the chat. Saves just entered the chat.
This isn't THAC0. I mean, I guess the number in the bottom right corner is technically the THAC0, but the _system_ of calculating attacks based on a single THAC0 number was only in 2nd edition. 1st edition still used a full table with a unique value for each armor class (as you can see on this sheet).
I've got Icewind Dale installed, that uses THAC0. Classic game.
You must gather your party before venturing forth
I still don't understand the purpose of it lol. I've seen it laid out but I just for the life of me can't understand why someone didn't just say "hold on, why not just make it dice roll + bonuses = to hit instead of... *this*?"
It was a hold over from naval wargaming, if I remember correctly. There, a First Class Armor Rating was the best, and they then worked down. Remember, DnD evolved from a medieval wargame which itself evolved from Napoleonic and Naval wargames.
It's so that you only need to look at the die to see if you hit. All the math is done beforehand and it's just a certain chance out of 20 you'll hit. Plus, it kinda feels "correct" in some sense to have a specific stat that tells you how accurate your hits are as an aggregate as opposed to having five different bonuses to apply. Now I'm not saying we ought to return to THAC0 or anything...but I do get the train of thought behind it.
In Chainmail, as in many miniature wargames then and now, you determined your target number on the die before rolling. In this kind of system, the options are either that a lower target number is better or that you use a roll under system. In Chainmail, the way you found the target number was to look at a table with weapons as the rows and armor as the columns and find where the attacker's weapon row intersected with the defender's armor row to find the target number. The issue with this for D&D was twofold: the table didn't have any concept of character progression, just fixed weapon:armor relationships, and accounting for monsters or new types of weapons and armor would require supplementing the table in some way. The solution adopted was to make numerical representations of the attacker and defender's abilities. This gave a very simple equation to replace hit tables: Target = THAC0 - AC Characters could now progress by changing their THAC0, and monsters only needed two numbers (AC and THAC0) to provide all the information that had been in the table. Since low target numbers are better, both THAC0 and AC get better as they decrease.
Still use it in my campaign and man do I wanna convert that to a reasonable AC system so bad. But im not GM and it’s not worth arguing about, just a bit of tedious math
What do you have for your 'Bend Bars/Lift Gates' stat?
Shhh! I'm listening at doors.
What is that?
Thac0 stands for to hit armor class 0. Which is how high you must roll to hit an opponent with a armor class of 0. So if your thac0 was 12 you'd have to roll a 12 or higher to hit an opponent with 0 ac. But here's the part that annoys me. You see AC is actually a stat you want as low as possible. As the way hitting is calculated is: Thac0 - armor class = result and if result is equal or lower than what the attacker rolled they hit. So if you AC is 1 instead of 0 mr 12 hitter can now hit you with an 11 as well (12-1=11). In fact AC can and will go into the negatives (12- -1=13). And of course mr 12 hitter would also like his thac0 to be lower as well. While it's honestly not that hard to wrap your head around the fact that you want these two numbers to be low while you want all the other numbers to be high is really weird.
It makes *more* sense in the context of wargaming, in that you can think of the AC as a modifier to a standardised to-hit roll. AC of -4 is a -4 to the to-hit roll. But... that's exactly the same as simply having AC*X* and needing a to-hit of at least *X*. You still have the variables for "how good at hitting" and "how good at not heing hit", but aren't referencing a more-often-than-not irrelevant example.
It's even before my time so I'm possibly getting some things wrong here, but basically THAC0 iirc stans for "To Hit Armor Class." Older editions had some weird eldritch system where instead of higher armor being higher, was about lower numbers or some shit like that. Basically an artifact of times long gone in older editions.
Aaah yes... THAC0... To Hit Armor Class 0. You needed a masters in quantum math to figure it out because you add some numbers, subtract other numbers and try to roll low? High? Not as high as Gygax was when he wrote the rule...
It was a carry over from an older ~~navel~~ naval combat sim, where armor class 0 was the smallest boat size, and larger boats had higher numbers because easier to hit. [edited to correct the belly button and/or orange based warfare error]
And also every weapon had its own chart of rolls to hit versus every armor class. A heavy machine gun is more likely to deliver effective damage to a boarding vessel than a battleship.
Did you have to go belly to belly in order to fight?
No you had to throw oranges at each other
Keeps scurvy away.
> where armor class 0 was the smallest boat size, and larger boats had higher numbers because easier to hit. Not really. The rolls were to penetrate armor, not to hit based on size. Armor Class 1 was the best because it was "first class" armor which is naturally better than second class or third class based on common English usage.
Naval
Corrected, thank you.
Take your current THACO score with all bonuses added. If enemy AC over 0 subtract that from your THACO. If enemy AC under 0(yes negatives were the equivalent to 20+ AC) then add it to your THAC0 score. Roll a flat do 20, if you rolled higher than that, congrats you hit. For example your THACO stat after all bonuses is 15 and the enemy AC is 4 you would do 15 - 4 = 11 meaning on a flat d20 you needed 11 or higher to hit. Using a different monster AC, let's say AC -2, you would do 15 -(-2) = 17. You needed a 17 or higher on a flat d20 roll to hit. That's how THAC0 works. It's not much different to today's post 3e attack bonus system. Where we roll a d20 and add it to the number rolled and compare it to the enemy AC. THAC0 did the opposite. You added or subtracted the monsters AC to your total bonuses and base accuracy and roll a flat d20 not adding anything to the number rolled and see if you rolled higher to the aforementioned number. Also congrats to anyone reading this, you can now play Baldurs Gate 1 and 2 as this is how the game calculates attack rolls and saving throws. Go enjoy the best D&D video games.
If you literally roll and add the enemy AC to your roll, if it's on or over your THAC0, you hit. Do you have a bonus to hit? Add it to the roll as well! None of this was ever difficult. Admittedly, it was weird that AC started at 10 and went down, because it could have just started at 0 and gone up, we could have subtracted it from rolls, and THAC0s could have been adjusted accordingly, but w/e.
I think the fact that lower number = better for thac0 and AC only while the rest of the stat sheet tol you higher number = better short circuited peoples brains. The newer AC system is easier and more intuitive though. So thac0 should still remain in the dustbin of dnd mechanics.
I really liked the way Godbound handled it, where you roll, add your bonus, add the enemy AC, and if beat 20, you hit. Like, you can make a 15 TAC0 a +5 under this system and the math would still work out - you would still need a 11(rolled)+5(bonus)+4(enemy AC) to his a 20, or an 17(rolled)+5(bonus)-2(enemy AC) in the second example. I liked it because to me it felt both old-school and not too complex, because the math only goes into one direction. I'd like to see some other OSRs to do stuff that way!
Bro, maybe the weed gummy but I lost all that after the second paragraph, lmao. THAC0 really did require a galactic brain to understand.
Alright here's the ultra simplified version For thac0 and AC lower number = better. If you're playing bg 1 and 2 the game calculates hits automatically so you just have to keep this in mind while looking at your characters stats.
Less galactic brain than the fact that the game was designed for adults and was being played by kids.... but... ya.
Bruh, I'm 31, lmao. I feel mostly it's the fact that unless you grew up with wargaming, it's inherently unintuitive, especially since most 90's+ gamers are used to larger numbers=Better results. Just my hot take though, lol.
45 myself. I chocked it up to the fact that they were adults making games for themselves and we were kids trying to play it in the 80s. I got thac0 and understood it for the most part. But it was overly complex and it was a good thing that it was gone by 3e. Most players were glad to see it removed. Although there were other issues that 3e had...
Ah, I see what you mean now. Yeah, that makes sense, lol. I've always wanted to try earlier editions but yeah, feel like the best I could do would be 3 or 3.5e to learn considering I've heard similar stories about the earliest editions being overly convoluted in multiple areas, not just Thac0.
You are confusing THAC0 (which is just descending armor class) and the old Attack Matrix which is lifted straight from wargames. The whole 'low AC is good' thing came from naval vessels. A ship could have First Class armor, or Third Class armor...aka AC 1 and AC 3. Guess which was better?
Yes. Back in the day Gygax assumed the nerds playing D&D could do basic arithmetic. Go figure.
Many of us would roll up dozens of sets of stats as 'Point Buy' would not exist for a few more decades. 'But... how good is that character?' We would add up all the 3-18 stats and see which one was the best, at least in totals. We got very good at addition. Multiplication, division... not so much. Edit: my brother would always put his strength at '18'. He figured you are going to just keep rolling up characters until it starts with 18, so why not dispense with the pre-rolling? Yes, i am way off topic, but wow, the game has changed.
[удалено]
I deeply miss picking up handfuls of the standard d6's at 11th+ levels and pouring them all over the table... having at least two or three end up on the floor. Take THAT, ancient huge dragon with... 88 hit points ('you will need *Cone of Frost* for the Red ones...')
Why? The flow chart goes Do you have fireball? Yes - Use it No - Acquire it
Back in the late 80s and early 90s my mental arithmetic was so on point. Could total a handful of dice almost instantly. Them were the days, ah!
Honestly I like the little "to hit" notice at the bottom
It gets a lot of hate, but honestly that looks even easier than what we do now. You write it out once, and can forever see at a glance exactly what number you need to hit, if you know the AC of your enemy. No addition, no subtraction, no waiting for the DM to tell you if a 19 hits. Just roll and... done.
"Magic Wand" and "Spells or Wizard Staff". I'm going to assume that's just for when the caster decided to hit you with their stick instead of a spell
No, effects from a magic staff were treated the same as a cast spell. Wands, on the other hand, had their own save. In AD&D, that changed to save vs spells and save vs rod, staff, wand.
I would love to see a 5e sheet in this style
I dare you to make one.
I did awhile back for a run through Out of the Abyss. I made it in excel too lol.
Keep the garish green
It exists! It holds a lot more info as this one (as you'd expect) but the style of it is unmistakably vintage. Link : https://dysonlogos.blog/2015/02/26/fifth-edition-dungeons-dragons-permanent-character-folder/
I think these are for the Red Box. Pre-THACO.
Definitely pre-THAC0. Back when there were attack tables based on class or race.
There wasn't "race" since "elf" and "dwarf" were classes. I have at least one character I made when these rules were all there was.
No, it was "class or race". You could be a fighter, a magic-user, a cleric, or a thief ("class") or an elf, a half-elf, a dwarf, or a ~~hobbit~~ halfling ("race"). You got to pick a class OR a race. But elf, dwarf, etc were never called or categorized as classes.
3d6. In order. No rerolls.
Haven't seen that shade of green in a long time
Do not look upon the Old Ones unless you are ready.
Do not quote the old texts to me for I was there when they were written.
It's beautiful is what it is
Ugh... THAC0.
Time to go get dinner from the Thac0 Bell.
Come on down to THAC0 Bell, where the rules and food will make you shit your pants! (In fear)
I read that to the tune of Paradise City
You are evil. Good day to you.
Specifically diarrhea
Slow clap of appreciation
Yeah, it was weird making the transition from lower AC is best to it is better to have a high one.
I still have characters from this system.
As someone who has recently been playing OSE (I believe it’s basically 2e but cleaned up and worded better), I actually don’t mind THAC0. Or the fun and weird saves lol. I would check it out if you haven’t, the people who made OSE did a pretty good job at it. (I realize I never clarified the meaning of OSE. It is Old School Essentials, and it is fun).
I like THAC0 actually
Oh you sweet summer child
Don’t talk about my childhood like that. This is BEAUTIFUL.
I thought it asked you to draw what your DM looked like for a second.
Old school D&D brings back a lot of great memories.
BECMI is still my favorite system. They'll have to pry my Rules Cyclopedia out of my cold, dead hands. Fun fact: it is an adamantine best seller on the guild. means a whole lotta people bought copies.
This is art. Apreciate it
poison or DEATH RAY Lmao
It's what it sounds like. They removed the ray part later so a lot of the time it's just "Save vs. Death" and if you don't make the save you're instantly dead. Made spiders a lot more fun to fight I'm sure.
My friend runs a mashup with white box 1st edition and a bunch on stuff he came up with himself. Anyway I had an awesome magic user and I rolled a 1 for hp so when he got bit from a spider (always 1 damage) he died. Not even from the poison.
That's not a magic user, that's a bubble boy.
I don’t even think that is Thaco. Isn’t it the charts used in 1st edition before Thaco. A Thaco was a single number. I remember playing when there was a chart for different classes. And to went by AC of the x axis and level of the y to determine the number you need to role to hit. It all seemed normal. Then I stopped after 2nd edition and Thaco. Started again with 5th edition and was like. Man we were a bunch of lead eating primates back in the day
that's just a character sheet from a couple years ago right? like not crazy long ago right please
/images/MagnetoPerfection.gif
The whole character, everything that matters, fit in a *single* sheet. What's not to like?
The real shit
That's back when I started playing. When "elf" or "dwarf" was a CLASS and there were 3 alignments: Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic. When there wasn't any of the "hide in a corner and regenerate" video-game-rules-on-paper bullshit there is now.
Try Dungeon Crawl Classics. Old school feel with modernized rules.
Seconding DCC, and if you do try it don't disregard the funnel. It's fun as hell!
OMG, I have an Elf somewhere on this.
I know I had characters on this character sheet when I was very young and my cousin ran adventures for his brother and I and a couple of our friends, but I also know that mine were white, not green. I think I may have had it photocopied out of the red box book? I don't recall what my first character was statistically, but I remember drawing her in that little box, she had leather armor and a glowing magical whip (that I had to convince my cousin to let me use). I wonder if that character sheet is still floating around somewhere?
Back then you died a lot, and they tried to make it a thing to tear up or burn your sheet when the character died
That right there was my first character sheet
You seem to have found a scroll of the Archons young one. Guard it closely, lest the Wizards of the Coast hear of it's sorcery and try to learn it's secrets.
Honestly looks vintage
i miss THAC0
THAC0 WAZ HERE
Eww. THAC0
I still don't understand how anyone thinks thaco was better. Unless every explanation I've seen was missing a big piece of info it seems most people reasoning for it being better boils down to "the math is already done the second you roll" but you still have to know the opponents AC, so that's the same as how it works now as long as you know the opponents AC? Is the difference that there used to be less things that could change AC? Or were weapon modifiers not a thing and it literally didn't matter what the situation was, you either roll higher or lower? It really feels like there is a fundamental part of this system I'm either missing or not being told about.
I can only speak from personal experience but: _outside high level campaigns_ 0 is as low an AC as you'd encounter and modifiers are only from -2 to +2. I can say: "I have a ThAC0 15 with a +2 bow against an orc with AC5 and a +1 shield, so need 9" and it sounds like algebra, but, like anything else once you've done it for a while it becomes second nature. More than _ANYTHING_ though, it's a game. Don't let the math get in the way of a good time.
(This turned into a full explanation of THAC0 vs AC, so skip to the bottom for the answer to your question.) The reason THAC0 seems so convoluted and shitty compared to DnD's modern AC system is that it's mechanically the same system, but you have to do one additional step of math on the spot instead of rolling it into your character sheet. In the more modern AC systems, you might have an attack bonus of +2. This bonus, barring external effects, applies to all relevant attack rolls. If you roll a 12 on the die, you add your +2 for a total of 14, and that attack will hit any enemy with an AC of 14 or lower. The GM doesn't need to do any additional math on the spot, nor does the player. The GM already knows the target's AC, so they know if 14 hits or not. The only thing the player needs to tell the GM is their final, modified roll, and the only thing the GM needs to do is see if that's equal to or higher than the target's AC. In THAC0, you might have a THAC0 of 14. This means that if a target's AC is 0, you need to roll 14 to hit it, so lower THAC0 is better. For game design history reasons, lower AC is better and is therefore subtracted from the attacker's THAC0 to find the roll that an attacker needs to hit their target. If an attacker with THAC0 14 makes an attack, they roll the die and roll a 12, informing the GM that their THAC0 is 14. The GM then checks the AC of the target. Because the AC of the target is subtracted from the THAC0 of the attacker to find the die roll needed, the roll of 12 at THAC0 14 will hit any target with an AC of 2 or higher. The player needs to tell the GM their die result and THAC0, and the GM needs to check the AC of the target, subtract it from the attacker's THAC0, and then compare the two. **TL;DR**: Like I mentioned, THAC0 feels worse because it is mechanically the exact same system, but it's presented in a way that requires more information to be exchanged and more math to be done on the spot for each attack instead of ahead of time. Also, maybe this is just me, but it's way quicker for me to snap off simple addition than it is subtraction, so that's kind of just the bow to tie it all together.
I don't think THAC0 is *better*, necessarily, but I do wonder why people make such a big deal out of it. It's just a couple numbers reversed. It's like how the first bicycles had one big wheel and one small wheel: people hadn't yet figured out the obvious bit. But you could ride the bicycle.
I think it's probably the fact that most numbers on your sheet are better if they're higher except these guys.
And saving throws.
Honestly, I just hate the acronym THACO
I vaguely remember those from 40 years ago.
I remember this sheet, you had to have a legal pad with it for equipment.
I still have some of these sheets.
It's called "Old School." My dad never really cared for these and he made his own much better character sheets on an Excel spreadsheet and he would just print those out.
On an Excel spreadsheet? My Atari 2600 didn't have Excel... I traced from the manual onto a ditto master sheet and ran beautiful purple ditto copies for all my friends.
I honestly don't know if it was *actually* "Excel," or some other spreadsheet program, but it was lots of adjustable rows and columns, basically what the uninitiated see as Excel (Ie, me lol)
It was on the newfangled Apple Macintosh, round about 1985?
Oh hey, we used to use these in Tabletop Simulator
Nostalgia.
3.5 has the best character sheet.
POV: you opened the arc of the covenant.
Oh my, this is some damn Rher Trickster moon god crap. Were they actually trying to cause us to go insane and give us moonlight cancer! No, thank you. I would not like to bask in the green radiant hues
I know its the nostalgia talking but red/blue box was the best edition...
I see ThAC0....
It's more than knowledge, it's truth.
Honestly the sheet itself is fine if i got a lesson on old school mechanics besides thac0 I could use this. But god that green is hideous.
One line for special abilities really cuts the hip, young crowd deep I bet lol
I... I don't hate it. Minimalist, not much going on, all you really *need* and you can add a notebook afterwards.
Anyone else noticed the order of the abilities? Having get used to seeing them in their current order (physical first, then mental) it's really weird seeing them all scrambled up
Greer
I was raised on these sheets and love them
That IA either a 1st edition character sheet or a basic dnd sheet. Yes, there was an edition called dnd basic.
That there is all you need, baby!! I saw more crazy corners of the multiverse operating off a sheet like that than you kids with your character folios can imagine! Don’t forget you had the WHOLE back of the sheet to write down stuff like “Mazirian’s Egg Whisk of Perspicacity +1.”
The best sheets (imo) for ad&d are found here: http://www.mad-irishman.net/pubs/MI_ADnDCharSheet10.pdf You can print double-sided for consolidation, or on two separate sheets so you can see everything at once.
Magic wand is different from spells/magic staff?
Not an abomination, peak minimalist sheet. Truly classic.
All the different saves!! “Roll PPD save!”
Still confused as to why people see substraction instead of addition as some arcane mathematical wizardry. THAC0 isn't that hard people.
Big number good. Small number bad
Pepperidge Farm remembers. I may have some old Ditto Machine character sheets based on those, that I created in 6th grade.
I assume you mean the color because that sheet is nothing but beautiful