I'm playing a computer RPG, Planescape: Torment, and am enjoying it. Torment is obviously using RPG rules to determine how big of a hit I'll take, or how much damage I'll do with every swing of my battle axe or whatever, but when the game says that my THAC0 has increased or my armor class has decreased, it means nothing to me since I have never played D&D. I don't know the terminology. A manual would help, but I don't have one. Is there a primer somewhere? What game is this based on exactly, and how can I learn more about it?
[RPG] Can you help me understand the RPG rules behind Planescape:Torment
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If your timing is right, and your terminology close, then what you might have seen is an Everway sourcebook. Everway was a card-based roleplaying game released by Wizards of the Coast concerning people known as spherewalkers who can journey from world to world. It could easily be mistaken for a Magic: the Gathering RPG.
To be clear, however: no official Magic RPG exists, or has existed. However, Dungeons & Dragons 5e has bridged the gap between MtG and D&D. Here's an official writeup of Zendikar as a D&D setting, straight from Wizards of the Coast. Here's one of Innistrad. But the biggest change has been the release of the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, which brings one of MtG's signature worlds into D&D5E.
Ryan S. Dancey has, on Reddit, posted what can be seen as a comprehensive supplement to this answer.
Hi! I was the brand manager for Dungeons & Dragons and the VP of Tabletop RPGs at Wizards of the Coast from 1998 to 2000. I can answer this question.
There were plans to do a Magic RPG and several iterations of such a game were developed at various times. After Wizards of the Coast bought TSR, there were discussions about making a Magic campaign setting for D&D.
After the release of 3rd edition, we had planned to do a Monstrous Compendium for Magic monsters which would have been a tentative cross-over product to see what the interest level was for such a book.
In the end, the company made the decision to keep the brands totally separate. Here's the logic.
D&D and Magic have fundamentally incompatible brand strategies. This is was once expressed as "asses, monsters & friends".
- D&D is the game where you and your friends kick the asses of monsters.
- Magic is the game where you kick your friends' asses with monsters.
- (Pokemon, btw, was the game where the monsters, who were your friends, kicked each-other's asses.)
There was no good reason to believe that a D&D/Magic crossover book would sell demonstrably more than a comparable non crossover book. And such a book should be priced higher than a generic D&D book - in the way that Forgotten Realms books cost more than generic D&D books (that's the price premium for the brand). There's a fear in sales that the higher the price, the less volume you sell.
The brand team for Magic didn't want to dilute the very honed brand positioning for Magic as a competitive brand, and the brand team for D&D didn't want to try and make some kind of competitive game extension for D&D.
In the end, I think the company was well served by this decision. It eliminated a lot of distraction and inter-team squabbling at a time when neither team had the resources to fight those battles.
Today you might argue there's a different reason. The #1 hobby CCG doesn't want to be entangled with the problems within the D&D brand.
Other Wizards of the Coast employees chime in on his Facebook page.
Rules as written is first-and-foremost an approach to understanding the rules text of a system. As an interpretation of the text, it has the following goals:
Accessibility. A rules-as-written interpretation should be one that anyone reading the rules can come to, and so is based solely in the published rules, without injecting any external knowledge that may be unavailable. Examples of external knowledge that are eschewed include developer commentary (unless that commentary is given official rules-status, as in errata), historical precedence (unless that precedence is found within the rules), narrative concerns, balance concerns, or anyone’s idea of “common sense.”
Universality. A rules-as-written interpretation should be one that everyone who reads the rules text and rigorously applies the literal interpretation of that text (even up to or beyond any limits of absurdity) comes to. If the text is irreconcilably ambiguous, then the RAW interpretation would then be a list various possible interpretations based on different interpretations of any ambiguities.
Officiality. A rules-as-written interpretation should endeavor to incorporate the entirety of the “official rules,” as defined by the game’s publisher, with the exception of those tied explicitly to adjudication by any player or players (e.g. a Game Master).
Thus, the ideal RAW understanding of the rules is one which everyone reading the rules will come to, without needing to know anything outside the rules, and that this understanding is, say, “official-compatible.” This ideal is, of course, rarely achieved. Rules text is often ambiguous, some contextual understanding is simply required to understand any language (and English arguably more so than most), and the official rules may explicitly contradict some of the other goals (i.e. Rule 0, enshrining developer commentary as official, and so on).
The purpose of this exercise is not necessarily for play; while someone could blindly adopt RAW interpretations as the rules they will actually use for a game, and thus RAW could be called a “playstyle,” this is really a twisting of the term. For one thing, it tells us nothing about what the style of play will actually be like, which is the sort of thing that a “playstyle” would ordinarily indicate, and for another, in many cases it’s not actually possible (if for no other reason than that RAW is an ideal to pursue rather than a goal to achieve in many cases).
Rather, the purpose is to facilitate communication about the rules. Historically, rules-as-written approaches to understanding the rules became far more prominent with the rise of the Internet, and that is no coincidence. While RAW interpretations are prone to many, many flaws when it comes to actually playing the game, ideally RAW provides a foundational basis of the rules that everyone can at least agree on. This is important when you are talking with people with whom you have never played, and who bring entirely different assumptions, history, and preferences to the discussion, and there is no one with a DM’s authority to decide things between you. That’s when RAW becomes useful. Online, we can’t make any assumptions about how someone else’s DM will rule, so in a sense, RAW is intended as a way of minimizing assumptions that may not be true (and, when the rules are well-written, it serves this function well—but RAW tends to only get a lot of attention when the rules are not well-written and the RAW is surprising).
Compare this to actually sitting at a table, particularly with a stable group that has played together for a long time. Within individual groups, such a drive for “objective” understanding is unnecessary; the goal within a group is to play a fun game, not necessarily to come to some perfect understanding of the rules text. And when the rules as written offer results that are counterintuitive, imbalanced, or just nonfunctional, you have a DM there to adjudicate things.
The language of the rules, interpreted literally, also becomes a vehicle for changing the rules and communicating those changes—in short, RAW provides a way to understand what the rules are and a language for indicating what your houserules are as well. By using the language of RAW to change the rules of the game (particularly those places where the rules of the game are unsatisfactory as written), the goal is to add clarity to one’s game, and avoid miscommunication and the resulting social fallout that can come with it (arguments about what someone said and what that meant, disappointment or frustration when things don’t work as expected, etc.).
Best Answer
Planescape: Torment is based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition from the 1990s. THAC0, for example, only exists in that edition and a couple contemporary D&D editions (very late AD&D 1e and Basic supplements) - it's not a term found in other games. Armor Class doesn't work the same across D&D editions, let alone other tabletop RPGs. They explain most of these terms and mechanics on the Torment Wiki, however, especially the game terminology page (omits THAC0 for some reason, but it's a character's needed roll on d20 to hit armor class zero).
AD&D Second Edition has recently been reprinted by Wizards of the Coast, in case you want to obtain a physical copy. It is not, however, open licensed, so you can't (legally) obtain the rules for free on the Interwebs.