the true measure of whether someone's old enough to have played AD&D is not their take on the word "race" and whether those player character options include newer groups like tieflings or dragonborn. It's whether they can rattle off different types of polearm.
@Canageek @Nentuaby and there's *not* that much difference for a lot of these. Like a fauchard looks like a glaive with an opposite cutting edge. Like... if I broke down "dagger" into "baselard, rondel, cinquidea, katar" it'd actually be an easier to see difference, and it'd be a completely needless rules distinction, just Gygax didn't have a thing for daggers and he did for polearms.
@Leucrotta @Nentuaby Oh I remember his diagrams.
The reason was swords didn't actually determine nearly as many battles in the periods of military history Gygax liked. Whereas the Swiss and German units he was a big fan of were polearm troops.
@Leucrotta Glave, Guisarm, Guisarm-glave, Bec-de-corbin, miltary fork, billaxe, fachard fork.....
@GraySpots THACO was 2e though and honestly I was all for that change, it was an easier way to get what you needed to hit than carefully going through tables. You can tell the guy who came up with that one was an actuary.
@Leucrotta I remember having a little chart for my THAC0 that I made, one for each weapon and a bunch of common buffs with the party... that was my Dark Sun elf... I thought that was AD&D... shit, am I old?
@GraySpots It was! AD&D was introduced after D&D came out, and quickly became *the* system TSR really hyped. Old Skool Dark Sun would be 2e AD&D. It's kinda a semantic weird thing referring to 1e and 2e D&D, since of course neither of them actually were the system actually called D&D at that time. Even weirder is how people *don't* label basic D&D revisions numerically (eg Holmes D&D).
@GraySpots yeah. I don’t remember how 2e handled the various polearms, but 1e was obsessive about it and as mentioned by someone else the 1e Unearthed Arcana book had this silhouette chart of the different types.
Is "sweet fuck I had better things to do with my gaming time than to select from sixty permutations of 'glaive' 'arm' 'pole' and 'guis'" an acceptable answer?
also yeah "race" sure is the word we used back then and it sure has not aged well in the ensuing forty years
@anthracite the really aggravating thing is that it's a short, succinct word, it's very hard for me to swap out for "heritage" or "ancestry" - anything's a better alternative.
yyyyep
"line" maybe? there's gotta be a single-syllable word that works to sum up this stuff
I worked on one game that used "Nature" and "Nurture", but apparently those terms aren't in the public discourse any more?
@Leucrotta Just old enough to know that the glaive, the guisarme, and the glaive guisarme are separate lines in a table, just young enough to be very, very glad I didn't actually wind up having to memorize that table.