Good Rules Set for AD&D 1 or 2?

[mattcolville]

I love 4E and that's really what I use FG2 for. 4E is well adapted for VTT play.

But I cut my teeth on AD&D 1 and 2 and would like to go back to these occasionally. My one real sticking point is THAC0. All my players are in their 20s and used to modern games and while there's a lot to love about the different style of play the older editions use, I really, really, really don't want to have to teach them THAC0.

But! If there's a robust FG2 ruleset for it, then they wouldn't need to know their THAC0, they would just click on who they want to attack, roll, and FG2 tells them if they hit.

Does a ruleset like that exist?

[sehmerus]

Castles & crusades, is Basically 1eADND with thaco replaced with Bonus to hit, and AC inverted to be high=good , that sounds like what you would want to do. or you can take any 2e game and invert it yourself.. take thaco - 20 = your Bonus to hit, and take AC and - 20 to get thenew AC.. So if a fighter has Thaco of 18 and Ac of 5, his base attack would be +2 (20-18) and his Ac would be 15 (20-5)

[opusaug]

Can someone explain to me what the problem is with THAC0? The first few times I heard people complain about it, I thought they were joking. I guess in the intervening years since I stopped playing D&D, there was some kind of change to the rules to make it more complicated, but I never got the memo. Why do people hate it?

[Answulf]

THACO didn't become harder - modern AC rules became easier. One less step in calculating and a bit more intuitive.

[mattcolville]

I realize now I wasn't clear, I mean is there a FG2 ruleset for AD&D1 or 2? And does it support things like hit verification?

[leozelig]

I use OSRIC - it tells you what AC you hit when you roll. The targeting system isn't quite as robust as 3.5 or 4e. It is being updated though, so that might change.

If you are used to the more developed rulesets, OSRIC will seem very feature-lite, but it has everything you need to run an old school AD&D game.

[opusaug]

I realize now I wasn't clear, I mean is there a FG2 ruleset for AD&D1 or 2? And does it support things like hit verification?

Sorry Matt, the thac0squirrel distracted me.

Like leo said, there's the OSRIC ruleset, but also one for AD&D 2e.

[rule of three]

You can use the osric ruleset but as leozelig said, it's an old ruleset, based on the pre-JPG dd3 ruleset. No targeting features or so. I'm currently working on an update to the osric ruleset. And you remind me that I've to send the "Ad&d1e" to someone ... It fixes good values to bonus and integrate Weapon vs AC bonus/malus.

[sehmerus]

The ADND2 ruleset has all the stuff osiric does (plus it has a player combat tracker) and the character sheets have spaces for the 2e rules like kits and weapon/non weapon proficiencies and they are all Auto roll verification whether its dropping "to hit rolls" on monsters, or grab and dropping saves and NWP it will even tell you if its a success or not, the only thing it DOESNT do is auto fill in the character sheet, you have to manually put in values of all the different things. wich i like because we use it for Basic D&D so i can house rule the way we use it.

[sehmerus]

the advantage to Osiric is that it does have a MOD library files for the spell lists and the monsters. thats a big thing to a new player.