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.
@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.
@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.
@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?