Hi - I didn't realize how old that thread was...I was just browsing through the forum (blindly clicking NEXT) late at night and that thread caught my eye.

The wargamer roots of Dungeons & Dragons are pretty obvious in the way combat was conducted - it's basically a combat results table where you cross reference "attack strength" with "defending strength" to get a "to kill" number; the differentiation of units (characters) into distinctive categories (classes) which in some iterations had their own separate attack tables may also be due to D & D's wargame ancestry...or maybe I'm reading too much into this.

Argh - clicked the wrong button...