As of 3rd edition, you roll a d20, add all of your hit bonuses, and if your total is equal to or higher than your target’s AC, you hit them.
I have no idea why they ever did it any different than that. Old school game design was fucking weird.
Yeah, even if the only thing 3rd edition did was to turn all the numbers right-side-up, it would have been worth it.
But while you can turn on the option to display all the numbers in Baldur’s Gate, you don’t need to. Just let it do the math for you, and sometimes you hit and sometimes you don’t.
And saving throws were great because you had to figure out which one to use (since they didn’t mean what they seemed to mean), and then you had thief skills which were percentile based, and then the grappling rules and punching rules were a whole different combat system…
2E seemed like a bunch of different people wrote parts of the book, making up completely different and unrelated mechanical systems, without collaborating with or even talking to each other, then after each person was done they stuck them all together and sent that scrapbook mess off to be published.
And yet, it was still better than 1st edition. Remember Fighter 18 Strength percentiles?
I remember when THAC0 was first introduced (IIRC, it appeared in a 1st Edition expansion before it was made part of 2nd Edition). It was considered an improvement on looking at a goddamn table every time you rolled an attack.
I agree that it’s nice to have AI scripts when it comes to the mopping-up phase of the battle. I also agree that there are some pretty dumb AI scripts out there!
I remember not liking it when Neverwinter Nights moved to the normal AC system from the THAC0 system the Baldur’s Gate games used. Somehow having an AC of -4 was much cooler than having an AC of 23. It’s of course just what I was used to, and the new system makes a lot more sense.
The old DnD editions had some other strange things. I remember playing an early edition where Elf and Dwarf were character classes instead of races.
Percentile strength was still a thing in 2nd ed. IIRC, it was more of a thing than it was in AD&D, where it was originally introduced as a special class feature just for cavaliers. 2nd ed. made it a standard rule for all the “warrior” classes.
IIRC, in the First Edition Player’s Handbook, the to-hit table wasn’t even in the Player’s Handbook: a single page in the Dungeonmaster’s Guide had tables for every class. The tables had an underlying logic, but it was pretty opaque.
THAC0 struck me as a brilliant innovation when I finally saw it: you could write a single number on your character sheet and use it to perform a subtraction calculation with any enemy’s armor class!
I think 2Ed also got rid of the weapon-speed table and the modifier vs. specific forms of armor table. Given that these tables never ever saw use, though, that didn’t matter as much.
Weapon speed was also a 2nd ed. thing.
Effectiveness versus armor type died with the 1st edition, though.
One of the early Cecil columns that got me hooked back way back when, had this gem of a phrase:
The rule book is laden with such mystifying pronouncements as the following: “An ancient spell-using red dragon of huge size with 88 hits points has a BXPV of 1300, XP/HP total of 1408, SAXPB of 2800 (armor class plus special defense plus high intelligence plus saving throw bonus due to h.p./die), and an EAXPA of 2550 (major breath weapon plus spell use plus attack damage of 3-30/bite) — totalling 7758 h.p.” Here we have a game that combines the charm of a Pentagon briefing with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping.
I had to laugh. Partly at myself, for understanding that ridiculous excerpt perfectly :p.
Shouldn’t that be xp not hp? 
7000+ hp would have taken a party of 50 and 3 weeks to kill.
Almost certainly :). Hard to say whose typo that was, though. Those early manuals had some shit editing.
Weapon effectiveness vs. armor type was an optional rule in 2nd edition, but relevantly, it was an optional rule that was included in Baldur’s Gate (and, in fact, expanded: In the book, armors had different effectiveness vs. piercing, slashing, and bludgeoning, but the computer game added a fourth category for ranged).
I liked SOA more than the Original Baldur’s Gate I think. All the NPC storylines were nice.
Spell trigger changed that.
I think the 5E rules do a good job of balancing classes. You used to carry the wizard until he got to level 6 and before he could pull his weight. Then at some point you became his henchman. THat’s when you take the +6 sword he conjured up for you and cut off his hand, cut out his eye and kill him.
You forgot to also cut off his head…
All of those magical and physical damage protections, and what dispelled them----collectively, ‘mage chess’—were a difficult thing to memorize. Poisoned throwing daggers were a good low level way to end that foolishness, IME, as mages typically had laughable saves v Poison, poison counted as elemental damage (Stoneskin wouldn’t stop it) and the daggers were non-magical. Spam those at the annoyance, if you couldn’t Breach or Dispel his stuff, and you were usually good to go.
Insta-casting 10 spells by the enemy mage got to be really annoying. Especially if you ostensibly surprised the bugger. OTOH, who wouldn’t have Stoneskin up 24/7 if you were in a D&D world?
This game will keep me busy for a couple months:
Also, the game release is being moved forward on PC to Aug 3 so it does not have to fight with the release of Starfield.
Update: since the last time I posted in this thread, I have played (most of) Pathfinder: Kingmaker which is a pretty fun Baldur’s Gate-style game. Unfortunately, it has performance issues on the Xbox (which I’m playing it on) and the same is apparently true for Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire.
Can anyone tell me the difference between a Wizard and a Sorcerer in BG3?
Wizards are prepared casters, they have to pick which spells they can cast during each rest period. They can also learn all spells in the game through scrolls. Sorcerers are spontaneous casters, they get a set number of spells per day and can use them on any spells they know at will, but they only learn new spells at level up. This is the generic wizard/sorcerer difference, no idea if that is how it works in BG3 to be honest, but I would be very surprised if there was any significant difference.