Embarking on Dangerous Journeys

Today I want to spend some time exploring a game made by the father of role-playing games, Gary Gygax. The game is of course Dangerous Journeys.

For those of you who don't know, the history of the game is perhaps just as interesting as its mechanics.

In The Beginning...

You see, in the mid to late 1970's a man by the name of Gary Gygax helped co-create the world's first RPG, Dungeons & Dragons. He helped design the mechanics, write the rulebook, advertise and manage sales. He was the CEO of the company that published the product, TSR.

But then something interesting happened in the mid 1980s. Gary Gygax was ousted from his CEO position and forced to leave TSR forever. Here's a man who spent a decade nurturing a product that was near and dear to him, and now it was no longer his. Worse yet, the company he helped found; voted him off the board effectively making TSR a competitor. Mr. Gygax was exiled and forced to say goodbye to D&D for good.

Can you imagine the heart break he must have felt? After pouring your heart and soul into something like that, and now it belonged to someone else.

The Second Age

But, Gygax being a gamer by heart, did what any intrepid adventurer would do. He picked himself up, mended his wounds, and marched on.

To me, this is where the story of Gygax gets interesting. People tend to only focus on Gygax's first creation, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition (or derivatives such as Basic Dungeons & Dragons). But what kind of game would the new Gygax 2.0 create? With a new team, and nearly 15 years of experience in the industry, he had the opportunity to start completely anew.

Haunted By The Past

Except, no matter how willing Gygax was to moving on, it seemed the past was not willing to let go of him. TSR, now under new management, was determined to defend their golden goose through copyright protection. Partially because of this, Gygax had to go to great lengths to distance his new game from that of D&D. He came up with new terms (such as "Heroic Personae" instead of "Character") to insure it was a bona-fide standalone game.

Yet, alas, Gygax did not prevail. When TSR sued the company that published his new game (Dangerous Journeys), the company eventually gave in and transferred the rights to TSR, where it was promptly mothballed.

Today I want to talk about this hidden gem that was tragically killed off all too soon.

The Game

Game Basics

But now that we've talked about history, let's get into the game itself. The name of it was "Dangerous Journeys". The concept was a stark departure from that of D&D. In Dungeons & Dragons, the game focuses solely on a fantasy genre with class-based character creation (fighters, wizards, thieves, etc.). DJ, on the other hand, was supposed to be a class-less, universal system that could fit many genres (had it been allowed to continue).

Under the Dangerous Journeys umbrella was the "Mythus" fantasy roleplaying setting/game. A hybrid fantasy world, mixed with fantasy-specific mechanics.

As someone who cut their teeth on GURPS, to me all of this sounds pretty awesome! A universal system, made by Mr. Gygax? Wow! The man sure had changed since the 1970s.

How Does It Work?

Vocabulary

Well, first off, as I stated earlier; there are a lot of propriety terms. These terms are, in my opinion, un-needed in modern times, and end up detracting from the overall experience due to the confusion they cause to the reader. For example, "Personaes", or "Heroic Personaes" (HP for short) refer to what most players understand as "Characters". The fact that the acronym "HP", which commonly stands for "Hit Points" or "Health Points" is used to describe characters, is in my opinion inappropriate.

Other examples include the "Socio-Economic Class" (SEC), TRAITS, Vocation, and, oh yes, the "Knowledge/Skill" (K/S) and STEEP points. It's all very heavy jargon for a game, in my opinion. So, to spare you dear reader from a head ache, I'm going to translate these terms to more acceptable vocabulary.

Character Creation

Enough talk, let's get into creating a character! Character creation is divided into "Basic" and "Advanced" forms. Which is nice if you're a fan of "Basic Dungeons & Dragons" and "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons". Except here the two forms are in one book. Nice!

Step 1 involves determining where your character belongs in the world. More specifically, their social class. Are they a peasant? Perhaps a "freeman", or even an aristocrat. You determine this by rolling 1D6+1 (the +1 seem unnecessary. I'm sure there's a more eloquent way to have handled that, but I digress).

Make your roll and refer to the list below:

This step is somewhat important because the level you rolled (see the image above) will determine what type of class you can play later on in the creation process.

Step 2 covers the character's basic attributes, known here at "TRAITS" (with all caps, apparently). This is a percentile-based game where there are only three main stats: Mental, Physical and Spiritual. These traits are filled out by dividing 120 points between the three attributes. You decide how many points each stat has, but no stat can have less than 21 points nor more than 60 (to start).

The game goes on to state that a score of 60 is the human-maximum when it comes to abilities, whereas a 21 is a "very low average".

As with previous Gygax games, it seems Gary wanted your "Heroic Personae" (character) to be somewhat extraordinary; a cut above the crowd. For this reason, the 120 points can be equally divided into three groups of 40 (which is listed as "above average"). The advanced version of the game starts characters with twice as many points (252 pts), reiterating this "super human" focus.

Step 3 Next, we're off to choose our class...sort of. In Mythus classes are called "Vocations" and act more like a bundle of skill-sets that a character specializes in. The basic version of the game offers seven vocations, with the advanced version (found at the back of the book) offering as many as 45. The seven starting classes are: Alchemist, Astrologer, Cavalier, Mercenary/Solider, Mountebank, Thief and Wisewoman/Wiseman.

Clearly Gygax had designed an easy framework by using skill bundles that merely required the re-organization of which skills a class started with, rather than fine-tuning each "vocation" to stand out from the crowd.

The image above showcases the basic classes to choose from, along with what basic attribute they focus on, and the minimum social class you must have rolled during step 1 to be eligible to take this class. For example, a Cavalier requires your character be a "freeman, gentleman" or higher, and will focus mostly on physical skills.

Step 4 Next we'll chose our skills, known in Mythus as "Knowledge/Skill" or "K/S". Mythus makes a distinction between K/S and another term, known as "STEEP", which essentially are "skill points". Skills (e.g. lock pick, sneak, swim, etc.) are given skill points (STEEP) which represent how well your character can perform in a certain field of study. Again, a score of 20 or below is considered poor while a score of 60 or above is impressive.

As I mentioned earlier, classes in Mythus aren't necessarily fine-tuned snowflakes, each with unique characteristics. Instead, they pretty much only represent a bundle of skills. This makes sense for the type of game it is, since Gygax deliberately chose three broad abilities to define a character, and he wanted the game to be both percentile-based and universal.

The "Skill List"

So how do skills work? Well, first let's take a look at the alchemist class as an example.

What we find is that the class has a list of skills (as mentioned before), along with what basic attribute (physical, mental or spiritual) the skills are based off. In the far-right column we also see the starting skill points (STEEP) that the character gets for each skill. These skill points are added to one-half (1/2) of the character's basic attribute. For example, an alchemist with a mental score of 30 would add one-half of that (15) to their mathematics score of 20 (for a total of 35).

Why one-half of the basic score? I have no clue. I suppose Gygax didn't want the numbers to climb to 100 too fast. However, I feel like the same goal could be achieved by simply reducing the number of starting skill points; or starting with less points for the basic attributes.

Additionally, there are three "universal" skills all players get: native tongue, perception and riding.

We're not done with skills just yet. Gygax decided to allow the players to customize their character further by choosing "bonus skills". The way bonus skills work depends on which of your basic attributes (physical, mental, spiritual) has the highest score, which has the lowest and which is in the middle. You choose a number of bonus skills equal to 3, 2 or 1 (for your highest, second-highest and lowest basic attribute, respectively). For example, if your character's spiritual score was the highest of the three, you choose three bonus spiritual skills (e.g. magnetism, metaphysics and street-wise). You'd do the same for your two other basic attributes (with one progressively less skill for each).

You might be asking how many skill points each of these bonus skills starts with, and the answer is 10 points.

Step 5 which is, oddly enough, called "Step 6" in the rulebook (it seems step 5 is missing), involves determining the starting money for your PC. However, it's not a simple matter of rolling 3D6 to determine how many coins are in your pocket. In Mythus, you have "Net Worth", "Bank Accounts", "Cash on Hand" and "Disposable Monthly Income". The currency is called the "Base Unit Coin (BUC)". How's that for generic?

To start, you determine your PC's social economic class (found in step 1) then roll a certain number of dice for each money category (as shown in the table below) based off their social class level:

Step 6 The final step involves finding some miscellaneous information about your character. Specifically, their physical attractiveness.




Roll a 1D20 and pray you roll above a 7.

For the basic version of the game, that concludes the character creation process. The rest of the book goes into "performing actions", "heka" (which is their proprietary name for magic/mana), "combat", "leveling up", "how to play your character" (and example play sessions), the advanced version of the game, "game master rules", two sample adventures and "magic items" (along with an appendix). All of these topics I'll have to save for another post.

In Conclusion

Deep down, the mechanics of this game aren't bad. If you're into percentile-based RPGs, there's a good balance between the luck-of-the-draw and customizing your character the way you want.

The Good The game had massive potential, on paper. It was a universal system, it used D100 percentile rolls, and the basic version was intentionally left generic. This allowed players (and GMs) to tailor the setting to almost any genre (though the game was flavored towards fantasy). A "wiseman" could become a "jedi" or a "cavalier" could become a Captain America of sorts.

I also liked the tie-ins between a character's starting social status and the options they had available later in the creation process. Once the system is understood, the mechanics are fairly easy to follow and transparent in intention.

The Bad At times the game feels too generic. The BUC is a good example of where one-size-fits-all doesn't always "feel" right in certain settings. Species apparently aren't an option to choose between during character creation. There also wasn't enough differentiation between the classes (but this is more of a gripe I have towards skill-based systems as a whole).

The skills also felt a little confusing (e.g. "Phaeree Folk & Culture", "Apotropaism"). They also came off as a tad bit random since some seemed far more useful in a day-to-day play session than others (e.g. "combat, missile" will always be better than "agriculture").

Instead, I think Gygax should have let players make up their own skills, and assign them to the most logical basic attributes with a generic number of starting skill points.

The Ugly Obviously the TSR lawsuit sunk this ship; but even if TSR allowed the game to publish and thrive, there were still some major rough edges that needed grinding down. To start, the cryptic nomenclature is almost laughable. Referring to things as "K/S", "STEEP", "Heroic Persona" and "SEC" isn't my idea of a fun Friday night. While I appreciate the great lengths Gygax went to to avoid a lawsuit (which ultimately happened anyway), the vocabulary needs some major cleaning up. If a "retroclone" of this game ever gets made, it's the first thing that has to go. Use normal, industry standard terms that everyone knows and loves.

Secondly, the wall of text. Each page is jammed packed with small-sized font that talks about every facet of every mechanic (and doesn't always do a great job of it, either). Many concepts and ideas could be explained in far-less verbage, and allow for more white space.

The Science of Badassery

The more I play RPGs, and the more I design them, the more I find myself asking the same question over and over:

"What truly is a role-playing game?"

I don't think I'll ever have one, ubiquitous, empyrean answer because I don't believe that there is just one answer. In this week's post I want to delve into the meaning behind RPGs, specifically how it relates to character creation, the science behind making a good character, and hopefully throw out a few ideas to help make our characters more badass.

No, not that kind of badass!

Exhibit A

To begin, let's do a thought experiment. I want you to look at the pictures below, which are a sample of the different unit types from the video game Starcraft 2.

For many readers, I imagine that this is the type or style of character you are dreaming of when you begin your character creation process. Your adventurer is decked out in gear, looking like they've fought in a few warzones, and are relatively skilled or otherwise intelligent in their trade. If this is the intended result, then we must ask ourselves two questions:

1. Do the current RPGs of today actually produce a character of our desired caliber?
2. If not, what must we do to create such a character in our collective minds?

For the first question, I would argue that no, most modern (and old-school) games do not in fact give us characters like the above examples, for two primary reasons. Let's discuss.

1. Stories, not Numbers, are Badass

If we take Dungeons & Dragons as an example, especially the older varieties, what is the first step we're asked to perform (as players creating a new character)? Roll dice. That's right, roll 3d6 six different times to formulate a bunch of numbers for an array of basic "attributes".

Does that sound badass to you? Does a stat of 15 sound like something memorable, or make you want to make a movie out of, or hang a poster of on your wall? Probably not. Because numbers are just that: factual data that requires us to tap into a whole different region of our brain from that of the more emotional side that rejoices in badassery.

This is where we have to define our definition of role-playing games, because I believe that at their core an RPG is an interactive story which requires two parts; interaction (which is governed by rules, mechanics and dice) but also story. We need equal parts game and equal parts role-playing. If we ignore role-playing, or the story/setting of an adventure for the rules of a game, we might as well play a board or card game instead. If we ignore character personality, background, talents, relationships, etc. for attribute scores; we're doing ourselves a disservice. Therefore, factors, such as the numerical value of a stat, should be kept in the background--especially during character creation--when we're trying to define who, truly, our character is going to be.

If we really want to rally behind the adventurer we're creating, we need to begin by telling the story of him or her. Who are they? Where did they come from? Was their family rich or poor? What profession did they take up? What motivates them? There seems to be 1,001 different facets to cover; which brings us to the second reason why modern RPGs don't create badass characters for us:

2. We, the Players, Suck at Being Badass

Rather, we're not very good at coming up with badass ideas for our characters. It's not that surprising, really. Most of us, especially the average tabletop player of today, are not full-time dedicated fiction writers. We're bakers, accountants, tradesmen, researchers and so on. Creating an in-depth, well thought out character is difficult! Especially if you're trying to design something "cool" on the fly with little to no inspiration to draw from.

This is why it's so important that game designers encourage players to tap into their creative side of thinking when designing a new adventurer. We can do this by offering tons and tons of inspiration. Ask the big questions about their characters. Get the players thinking of not only who their character is now, but who were they in the past, and how did they get to where they are today? You see, there's a treasure trove of information to build on in a character's background.

Character Creation Redefined

Sadly, most RPGs treat backgrounds as a footnote. It's one of the last steps that we pay lip service to by saying something to the effect of "Create an awesome background! You can make it be annnyytthiinngg!" and end there. Gee, thanks game designer, you really inspired my inner badass (sarcasm)!

Let's re-build character creation from the ground up. I believe Traveller had it right, in that the focus should be on the character's past stories, and how those stories have created the character they are now. Don't just assign scores, give each of those scores a story. How did your buff warrior become so strong? Why did they take up warriorship? What campfire tales do they have to share?

The more answers we have to the questions about who our character is, the more of a badass they become. Suddenly your elf is not just an elf, they're an elf who's city was lost to a great flood, was forced to endure hardships until she settled in a distant city of mankind. She's naturally proficient in magic not "just because", but because she was trained by her grandfather (before the flood) then later was a protege to a minotarian mage before devoting herself to a deity and converting to become a templar for the local order. 

"Not only do I look badass, I am badass!"

Breaking it Down

There is an unspoken agreement that the majority of adventurers begin their adventuring career at a young (but not too-young) age. Young of course is relative, since various demihumans live to be quite old in human standards (e.g. hundreds of years in age). But I'd say that most adventurers become young adults at the first 1/5 of their lifespan. If 80 years is the lifespan of a human, this is about the age of 16. The years before this are the adolescent or childhood years, and the second 20% of their lifespan (17 through 32 years for humans) is when they become true adults and take on a trade, profession, class or job. In otherwords, they become experts in a subject and excel at their career.

Yet all of these formative years are glossed over, or worse yet, completely ignored, when it comes to character creation. Most games are only interested in where a character is now, after all that growing, learning, exploring and career-building.

But doesn't all of that seem important? Take Batman for example. In his youth, his parents were murdered during a mugging and Bruce Wayne had to face his phobia of bats. This, in turn, guided his motives in life to end the crime spree in Gotham. In "the Dark Knight Rises", half of the movie is dedicated to this story. We see Bruce Wayne's ninja training, his going rogue from his master teacher, the formation of the batcave, batmobile and other technology, as well as his early career as a crime fighter. All of this is compelling, entertaining and establishes Batman as--you guessed it--a badass.

Example Badass

Let's say we want to make a special operations soldier. We'll use the Starcraft portrait on the top row, third from the left (a "terrain ghost" for those who play the game). Well, what does that look like? Again, I don't care about the numbers. What makes our character so good at what they do? We could say that he grew up on a border town, not far from the front lines of the humans versus the evil aliens. He joined the local law enforcement, and, for a number of years, worked as a SWAT-type marksman (let's give him a high WIS to reflect this), but then changed gears and was the chief instructor of a select cadre that taught self defense and martial arts to other enforcers. From there, he was drafted into the war and was a soldier for a numbers of years, serving as a sniper. Finally, he joined the elite "Raiders" squad that is tasked with sabotage and assault behind enemy lines.

Quite the background, don't you think? I haven't even used a single number or ability score, either, and we can already tell that this is a character that shouldn't be messed with, and probably excels with firearms and other ranged weaponry.

Conclusion

I hope future game designers will not only stop ignoring character backgrounds, but embrace them. I mentioned earlier that players are not good with coming up with compelling character backgrounds; that we all need a little help with our writing. As game designers, it's up to us to help inspire players. Offer them options to choose from, or plot ideas. Have the players answer some key questions regarding their character's past, personality and motivations.

Take a look at Ash's Guide to backgrounds and personalities for player characters. I'm sure you'll find it in-depth with a lot of ideas to think about. By the time you've filled out all the information listed there, you'll have a pretty deep character, which is turn allows you to roleplay him or her better, and affords your friends to play off your character badassery.

Dungeons & Dragons Ability Scores Are Pointless

When the original D&D designers were creating the game; they wanted a means to differentiate one "type" of character from another. So they came up with the six core stats (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution and charisma) that they felt would best encapsulate the parts of the character's body and mind needed during an adventure. Next they needed a way to quantify how powerful each stat would be. They chose to give each "ability score" a numerical value. Since the twenty-sided die (d20) was new and shiny back in the day; they wanted to use it in parts of their game.

A d20 allows for a random number to be rolled between one (1) and 20. Therefore, each number has a 5% chance of being rolled. I believe the original designers figured an "average" humanoid character in D&D would have a stat number somewhere in the middle of all this, and thus declared an ten as the average stat number. At first glance it seems to make sense, too: we humans have ten fingers and ten toes, we use a decimal system, and when rolling a d20 there is a 50% chance of rolling 10 or less and a 50% chance of rolling 11 or higher. All perfect, right? Not quite; that's when everything begins to unravel.

To better understand what is inherently wrong with this logic; let me ask you a question: on a day-to-day basis, how often do you consider yourself failing at things? Let's imagine you're carrying some heavy boxes up some stairs. You have to move 16 boxes up a flight of stairs; how many of the boxes are you typically going to drop and helplessly watch tumble down to the bottom? Probably none; if you're careful. But with the logic of D&D; an average character should fail at 50% of everything they do. What a bummer!

Ten is a Terrible Number

Worse yet, ten is just a terrible number. Our decimal system is not one (1) through ten (10), it's zero (0) through nine (9). Yup, nine is the limit. Starting at ten is starting over the maximum of our single-digit decimal system; not in the middle. The number ten is like that awkward period in our lives when we're going through puberty and our bodies are all gangly and disproportionated as we're growing into our true potential.

The number ten, it turns out, is too big for some things and too small for others. Imagine your PC has a constitution of 10; what does that get you? Does that mean you can start with 10 HP? Nope; that'd be too much HP to start, according to old school D&D. Okay, maybe if you had a dexterity of 10; that denotes how many spaces you can move per turn. Wrong again. What if we said an intelligence of 10 was the number of spells we could cast or the number of languages we knew? All too many. 10 is just too big of a number for these kinds of things.

The original designers of D&D decided that rolling 3d6 was a good way for you to randomly generate an ability score for your character which would have a statistical bias toward the number ten, as seen here. Except--wait a minute--there's a problem, isn't there? 3d6 doesn't center on the number 10, it centers on the number 10.5. If you have OCD tendencies like me, that 0.5% imbalance will make your eye twitch. It's almost as if the designers of D&D either didn't know their dice probabilities or simply shrugged it off, grabbed a beer and said "good enough". This means you're just as likely to roll an 11 as you are a ten. They easily could have used a plethora of other methods, such as roll 4d4, but decided to use an imperfect dice mechanic.

Ability Modifiers Are A Hack

But none of this solves our original problem with ten. You see, the founders of D&D knew ten was imperfect, which is why they had to come up with a hack to fix it. Thus, Ability Modifies were born. The idea was that the more of an extreme you rolled over or under this fabled ten, the more +1, +2 or +3 modifiers you would gain for various tasks. In later editions of D&D these modifiers would be expanded up to +4 and +5 and sometimes even beyond).



It was these numbers that the designers truly wanted to work with. These numbers were smaller, more manageable and more applicable. They allowed characters to dictate a number of feats:

• Melee Combat -- Increased the chances a character would hit their target.
• Increase Weapon Damage -- Melee and thrown weapons would deal more damage with a high strength modifier.
• Force Open Doors -- Could be used to increase the "Open Doors" roll.
• Languages -- Dictates the number of languages a character knows.
• Save Throws vs Spells -- Applied to the save throw roll to increase a character's odds of saving themselves from damage or magical effects.
• Armor Class -- Effectively increased the defense of a character who had a high dexterity modifier.
• Extra Hit Points Per Level -- Added a number of extra HP equal to the constitution modifier.
• Reactions & Number of Retainers -- The charisma modifier added to reaction rolls and dictated the number of hirelings a character could hire.

As you can tell, these modifiers are an important part of what makes a character capable in an adventure. It was as if the ability scores, and their average stat of ten, were only there to create the ability modifiers then fade into the background.

How It Should Have Been

A more proper design would have focused on these smaller numbers from the start. For example, instead of centering on ten (or, technically, 10.5) D&D characters should have had about half that value (for an average of 5). With a smaller number like five you can assign values that matter in the game with the number as-is.

For example, with a CON 5, you could say your character starts with 5 HP. If you wanted to retain that 50/50 success-to-failure ratio, simply roll a 1d10 for any and all ability rolls; then add your character's number to that roll. If the total is equal to or greater than ten, the character would be successful in whatever they were attempting to accomplish. It's such a simple, easy to play and easy to remember mechanic; it makes one wonder why the designers used such a roundabout system, instead.

The Naming Conventions of D&D Don't Make Sense

I don't want to fault the founding fathers of what are now known as role-playing games. They were pioneers who had no idea what they were doing because frankly, they were creating a new paradigm of game and it had never been done before. One of the many, many mistakes they made along the way was to use non self-descriptive nomenclature within the rules. In short, they took something relatively easy to describe and made it much more difficult to understand. Worse yet, many of us are still using these asinine titles as if they were the inspired word of some divine force.

Take Armor Class for example. Put yourself in the position of someone who has only played common games like "Monopoly", "Chutes & Ladders" and "Life". If someone asked you "What's your character's armor class?", how would you respond? The term doesn't tell us much about what it is, or what purpose it serves. Sure, it has the word "armor" in it; which is about as good of a clue as we are afforded. But "class"? Who came up with "class"? When I think of a class, I imagine a schoolroom with desks, chairs and students with a teacher.

A far better term would be "Armor Grade", "Armor Quality", "Armor Level", or "Armor Rating"...even "Armor Points" would have been better. When people talk about a "class", such as a class of people or items, they're rarely referring to a numerical value. Worse yet; to make things even more unfriendly to prospective or new gamers, we shorten the term to an acronym of "AC". So instead of asking "What's your Armor Class?" we lay on our fellow novices the cryptic question "What's your AC?" to which anyone in their right mind would respond with "Huh?".

The worst part of it all, of course, is that it isn't even about armor. A character in an RPG who has not a lick of armor on their body still has an "AC" of 10. Don't pretend that "no armor" is a type of armor; because we know that halflings get -2 AC when defending against attacking creatures who are larger than man-sized (Rules Cyclopedia). Many other extemporaneous factors can influence a characters armor class, as well; all of which have nothing to do with what your character is wearing.

So really, the very word "Armor" doesn't even apply. It should have been "Defense Rating". How about simply "Defense"? And why in the world is having a -2 AC a good thing (a topic worthy of a rant for another time)?

THAC0

If you think AC is a badly botched term, let's touch on the infamous "THAC0". No ladies and gentlemen; that's not an "O" at the end; it's the number 0. If that doesn't give you any indication of what a terrible idea this term was, I don't know what will.

Normally I'd say that the original writers of D&D took a total of 30 seconds to come up with these terms before moving on (without a second more devoted to peer-review or player feedback); but THAC0 is special. It's special in the fact that it's such a backwards, ill conceived algebraic problem; it's as if a mathematician who flunked out of college came up with this and actually thought it'd be fun.

For those who don't know what THAC0 is or how it works; allow me to explain: First, THAC0 stands for "To-Hit Armor Class 0 (Zero)". I do have to give credit where it is due: the designer at least tried to make this dozy self-explanatory...and promptly failed. Ask yourself; now that you know what it stands for, does it reveal to you what purpose it serves? I didn't think so.

So what does THAC0 do? Allow "Rules Cyclopedia" to explain it to you:

"If someone needs to roll a 7 [on a 1d20]--not counting any of his individual bonuses--to hit armor class of 0, we say that he has a THAC0 of 7...When a target's AC is worse than 0 (i.e. 1, 2, 3, etc.), you subtract that AC from his THAC0. Likewise, when a target's AC is better than 0 (i.e. -1, -2, etc.), you subtract the AC from the THAC0 score--but remember that subtracting negative numbers is the same as adding positive numbers."

Wow...just, wow.

Rules Cyclopedia goes on to explain that to use THAC0 in an easier-to-understand manner, you must use the table below:

That's right folks; the bread-and-butter of dungeon crawling (attacking in combat) requires a friggin chart! And wow, what a chart it is! First you have to find your character's class, then their experience level, then the attacker's THAC0 value and cross-reference that to the number rolled on the 1d20, which is then compared to the defender's armor class.

So, so many bad terms...

I'm going to stop bashing on THAC0 because, quite simply, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. It's a joke. Let me say it again: THAC0 is an absolute, unmitigated disaster, and you know it. Its very name is super-nerdy; and its definition is a bigger mess than Pizza the Hutt.

This is Pizza the Hutt

How any of this got past quality assurance boggles my mind. The fact of the matter is, early versions of D&D are littered with terrible, obscure terms. Here's a few more, for nostalgia's sake:

• Alignment -- What does this have to do with morality, philosophy and ethics?
•  Constitution -- A term not often used in the english language over, say, "health", "vitality" or "life force".
• Hit Dice / Hit points -- Am I suppose to punch the dice? It doesn't measure how many times something can get hit since weapons deal variable points of damage, and characters can die in many other ways then simply being "hit", so why is it called that?
•  Magic User -- Really? You couldn't come up with "magician", "wizard", "sorcerer" or any of the other two dozen terms for someone who wields magical powers?
• Prime Requisite -- Not self descriptive at all, and so many better terms could have been used like "Primary Trait" or "Character Class Trait".
• Mystic -- Literally nobody calls "Monk" character classes a "Mystic" anymore, and for good reason.
• Saving Throws -- Am I suppose to toss something at my fellow players? At the very least this should be called "Saving Roll". 
• Gold Piece -- Because apparently "gold coin" or any other known form of monetary trade was too difficult, they had to use "pieces" instead of actual in-game money.
• Coin Weight -- The "official" unit of weight measurement that is in multiples of gold pieces. Yep, gold pieces are apparently in coin weight.

Part of the problem with D&D and other OSR games is that it's very difficult for new players to join. The games come off as cryptic and mysterious in part because of these unnecessarily confusing terms. It leaves many players feeling that they need to know somebody who already knows how to play; just to play the game themselves.

It's embarrassing when game designers--even today--propagate these cryptonyms and carry on the status quo. You're hurting the RPG community by continuing these confusing descriptors in the name of nostalgia. Please, don't be afraid to re-think game design. Question everything, and ask yourself if there's a better more efficient way to accomplish the same task. I'm certain you'll find one.