My char. have -8 armor and when some monster or NPC attack me their roll looks like X+Y=Z . If im right X is roll of 20 , but shouldnt y be my armor class ?? So why it is usualty -2, -1 or max -4 if i have -8 armor ?. why ?. why .?

nooooo.....

y shouldnt be your armor class...

y is extra bonus/penalty that is not displayed by your thaco.

For example
Your thaco is 12 (strength bonus included)
you are wielding the sword +1 +3 versus shapeshifters.
So your display thaco is 11 (12 and -1 from the sword)
If you attack a gibberling you get y=0
But if you attack a doppler then y=2 (the extra thaco against dopplers)

Similarly if you wear the amulet of thaco +4 vs ogres then it will not change your thaco but when attacking ogres y will be 4.

AFAIK y would also include penalties from fatigue, intoxication, bonus/penalties from some spells and so on.... anything that is not included in the original thaco.

but y will not include bonuses from strength, or weapons and items that directly change your thaco.

But i ment their attack against me .

[ 02-22-2005, 10:12 AM: Message edited by: romeck ]

Their attack against you works same way...

Since its extremely unlikely they wield some spcial item which does extra thaco specifically against you, are intoxicated or fatigued, that' why in case of monster rolls against you y is almost always equal to 0.

EDIT:
the reason it is -2 or -4 is if you have something which improves AC for particular type of damage only like girdle of piercing. Again this does not change your AC but is shown as a penalty in y for monsters attacking you with piercing weapon.

[ 02-22-2005, 10:55 AM: Message edited by: ZFR ]

In addition to ZFR's point about items like the girdle of piercing, certain armors give bonuses against particular types of weapons. At least that's what the handbook says, I never checked to see if it actually gets implemented. But this is maybe what you're seeing the in "y" values the computer gives to the monsters attacking your character.

Then what da hell is armor for ?? if it dont affect mosnter attack against me then what is the sens of having as low armor as posible?? I dont understand. Moster has 15 thaco. so that monster has the same chance to hit me when i have -8 armor as i would have -1 ?????????????? i thought that i work that way :my ac =-4; x-y=z ; so lets say that base roll of 20 when monster (who has thaco 15)atack me, is 12 so x=12 , then my ac=-4 so y =-4(i assume that there is no other things that affect monster like fatigue or intoxci.) so y=-4 then 12-(-4)= 16 so 16>15(monsters thaco)=> monster dont hit me . Now lets say that i have -1 AC so x=12 y=-1 x-y=12+1=13 < 15 thaco monster hit me. ==> that is what i fought, if it is not like that(and it must wrong couse there will be y=-8 like it shoud be couse i have -8AC) then please explain me how AC works. THQ

OK here goes

X+Y=Z

X is the roll on a d20 dice.
Y is a sum of bonus/penalties to attackers thaco or defenders AC as expalined above
Z is simply the sum of these numbers

Now the above roll tells you absolutely nothing about the attacker's thaco or defender's AC so it's not possible to determine based on the roll only whther a hit has been made or no.

Then the rule is:

if
Z is greater or equal [(attackers thaco) - (defenders AC)]
then hit

if
Z is smaller [(attackers thaco) - (defenders AC)]
then miss

"Sorry, we do not permit the following HTML tag or attribute: Parenthesis in HTML tag" i want to edit my last post but it occurs . what da hell that means?

Now i understand.
But "Z is greater or equal [(attackers thaco) - (defenders AC)]" - i thought that i ve read insturction and play a lot BG series and dont know that . hmmmm am i blind or there were no such a good expalnation as yours in insturction , which leads to the point : how player , who dont know how it exaclty works , can know such a thing which are rather (what am i saying, its very) important for the game.

ANYWAY BIG THANKS FOR ENLIGHT ME !!

The html message happens sometimes when you use the "greater than" or "smaller than" sign together with the brackets in one post. it gets implemented as html tags with parantheses which is not allowed.

Back to the roll, one more thing: of course it would be possible to implemenet it like you said and bring defender's AC to the left side of inequality.
So
"Z is greater or equal [(attackers thaco) - (defenders AC)]"
is equivalent to
"[Z + (defenders AC)] is greater or equal (attackers thaco)"

The reason I think it was implemented the first way is so than only the roll Z is displayed.
If we had both the roll and the AC displayed (the second way), then it would be possible to know the AC of the monster simply by looking at any roll we make, which would not be very fair.

The way it is, to find the AC (or thaco) of the monster many rolls have to be observed and analyzing which miss and which hit.