Necromunda: on THAC0 and transitions
Billy Joel once said “the good old days weren’t always good… tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems” and he was right. We tend to wear rose colored glasses when we think of the past, remembering how much fun we had with a game rather than our frustration at learning it, remembering how little we paid rather than how much money that was at the time.
The best example I can think of in this fondness is actually from D&D. How many people remember the old THAC0 system?
Now… i started gaming at six years old, when my older brother and i pooled our money to buy the old D&D red box. He DMed, and i made a few characters to go through his attempts, and we got better with time. By middle school, i was firmly anchored in geek territory -- reading Dragonlance, watching whatever 80s fantasy movies i could find, with a long history of playing Star Wars or sword-and-sorcery games in the woods with friends, and running my first D&D game for friends at the lunch table in 6th grade. When i was in 9th, 40k 2nd edition was released, but i wouldn’t know much about the game for years afterward. By that point, i’d been playing tabletop RPGs for nearly a decade, and their systems were learned so far back that I just knew how the game played. I'll remember how fun it was, and forget all the hassles.
Even with experience, THAC0 could be an annoyance at more complicated levels. It stood for “to hit armor class zero” and was a measure of attack skill. You would roll a d20, factor in all bonuses and penalties, and compare to the THACO to determine what armor class you hit -- if your THAC0 was a 16, a roll of 14 with a +1 dex bonus means that you would have a 185... or one worse, meaning that you would hit AC 1 or above. Simple when simple, but an exciting moment could grind to a halt if you were trying to brain-check your math. It was a system that was an accurate determiner of a specific result, but it was also only easy if you thought a certain way. great for people who do fast on-the-fly arithmetic, bad for people who showed up for the beer and improv. I suspect that this is how dungeon crawl games were delineated -- people who were less entertained with the old "kill the monster take its stuff" model would spend much more of their time focused on the improv acting and character development end of the game, and then the difference grew between relishing a combat-heavy tunnel slog, and taking part in the epic hero narrative.
Even with my experience with the idea, THAC0 was a drag. And it was unpopular enough and it was difficult enough that 3rd edition and past has never gone back, including a repackaged mechanic that was more useful and less mathematical. I get it -- in the 3-year campaign i was in during college, i made a notecard for my thief that had each weapon and style and updated the numbers whenever i got a level boost or a new weapon. Sure, the +2 master-smithed god-blessed wakizashi was cool, but if i used that in my main hand and the armor-piercing mithril dagger in the other, i had to worry about the off-hand penalties... and i might just concentrate on getting better hits... and what if i lost my main weapon? it was easier to have the info in hand and just roll the die. In other words, it was easier to have what 3rd onward created, and black box the actual system in such a way that the average player doesn’t need to grapple with interior mechanics, but older players like me still wistfully pine for the days when the mechanic we had learned how to use was still relevant. After all, I know how to just set up a notecard to make it easier.
WIth painting, i also see the same. My first WHF army was Ogres, and i had to learn how to paint rust before there were technical or foundation paints -- meaning that rust was a multistep process (prime black, basecolor overbrush scorched brown, targeted overbrush/drybrushing of shades of orange, maybe a diluted/altered chestnut ink in between, edge drybrush of boltgun metal, and a highlight of mythril) that can be replicated with a single pot.
What are the values of skills that are no longer applicable?
I know in WHF’s move to 8th, many older players found that their ability to estimate distances -- a necessity for artillery -- was suddenly replaced by a die mechanic. Meaning that someone who got good at this niche visual skill as a result of game after game was suddenly annoyed that something they had put work into was irrelevant. They bear the same epitaph as THAC0, the slide rule, the Four Humors, the TRS-80 (and its producer, Radio Shack), and betamax repairmen.
Because THAC0 was a great system for people who liked systems, but not so great for the next tier of people who were introduced to it. Distance guessing was an advantage that some people could never truly learn, and uncertain distances made for some of the most common arguments in a game. Now, you can premeasure and agree on the distance before the roll, and then you just worry about the result.
Which brings us to GW…
With this shift, there is a rejection of the needlessly-complicated. Shifts toward trying to breach that gap of culture. new players want the learning to be easy. they don't want to have to make THAC0 notecards. They want unit or model cards. They want warscrolls. It might be more convenient for some to actually use the USR section in the core rules as a simple repository to thumb to when needed, but
Say what you want about Age of Sigmar, it has shown that an approach that embraces the new can even work for the company that created the genre. and while some people genuinely just do not like it (I want my rank and flank; I don't like skirmish scale nearly as much), others have come to embrace its newness. Gone are a lot of the holdovers from older generations of the game, gone are a lot of the larger-scale tactical structures. in with the skirmish-style tactics on the individual scale. But... how much of the old WHF rules were THAC0-style kludges, and how much were just a fundamentally different game? That depends on who you ask. Just because the market has trended toward skirmish games does not mean that that’s the recipe for success, but it does bear consideration. Those who were hoping for a WHF 9th edition were hamstrung by their expectations, seeing something so different in so many ways being paraded as its successor. But there are some strong (and some weak, and some non) parallels to the old game -- enough to open up that new factor.
What next?
With the specialist games potentially coming back (i’ll believe it when i see it), there needs to be a meeting between the old and the new. We have seen that new works can stand on their own while still throwing treats and easter eggs to their longtime fans -- both the Marvel and DC media has done wonders with (most of) their new products. That’s the current expectation level to beat -- can GW take a product like Mordheim or Necromunda and appeal to both the old and the new? Fury Road has brought back the Mad Max aesthetic, but nothing has quite touched on replicating The Warriors, and i’ve always seen Necromunda as living where those two meet, with a crazy “skinny puppy covers motley crue” soundtrack.
It’s not about marketing. It’s about getting rid of the THAC0-style burden on the game in such a way that it does not feel like a loss to the people who used to play. It’s perhaps the big failure of AoS, that for too many people it was too drastic a change for them adapt to -- too many mechanisms were discarded or replaced in the name of simplicity. That’s a loss for a new game, and one it took GW a bit to recover from. The new specialist games will be considered a failure by the company if they start off like that, and these options for amazing new ideas will fizzle out before they get started. Meaning that bones need to be tossed to the old fans. It can’t just be a “let’s add some genestealers” or a “let’s hide a card in the box” (how many people keep the boxes long enough for that to not be a kick in the pants when you discover you threw it out?) kind of flashy gimmicks.
It has to be able to succeed, to last.
What does it offer, aside from scale, that 40k does not? What does it do that isn’t done by Warmachine, or WWX, or Gates of Antares? Finding that, and capturing the aesthetic, and having solid gameplay will win the day.
