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  1. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

    It sounds like you'd do well surviving my games. When playing a PC, the thing you should be asking is, "How is this character going to die?" and be mitigating against that. For example, it should cross your head in chargen, "What happens to this character if they fall into deep water?" If...
  2. Celebrim

    AD&D 2E Al-Qadim campaign setting

    I never ran it, but it fits in neatly as a part of the world in my heavily animistic psuedo-European default setting. I love a world haunted by spirits, and the genie are just another variety of species of spirit. In fact, in my setting they are explicitly the rulers of the elemental fairies...
  3. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

    Creative and surprisingly good considering. I think after playing around with it that you'd have to also have a rule like "Reroll your 1's once." as well, because it generates sub-6 rolls almost as often as 3d6. UPDATE: Yeah, that's actually really sweet if you let a certain number of 1's be...
  4. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

    The idea is creative and it deserves credit for that, but it has the same general problem that the BECMI idea of subtracting from your stats to add to a different stat has. The totals aren't generated linearly so if you modify them linearly, it's a very large modification. An 18 is 1/3rd as...
  5. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

    If you were reading in the other thread you'll see that I recommended something like this as a possible "solution" to what the system was demanding of the attributes, except I recommended 1d6+12. However, you'll see I don't put that among my final recommendations and the reason for that is...
  6. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Three Things that can't be Fixed in 1e AD&D

    You can see how I'm dealing with these problems in my little project here, where I'm reducing the requirements to get into the inherently powerful classes, and I'm giving every class a little Cavalier like ability to train up its Prime Requisite so that if you "only" had a 16 or 17 in your PR to...
  7. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Three Things that can't be Fixed in 1e AD&D

    It's amazing how often the PCs manage to not find the stuff you thought would be easy to find, and then randomly detect magic in an area that you didn't expect them to and find something you thought really hard to find. So, they'll like miss the bag of holding and the three potions of cure...
  8. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

    The problem with this is that AD&D (and I'd presume BECMI) has so much single attribute dependency that it's pretty much always a good idea. For most classes only your prime requisite and your constitution matter, and intelligence is basically a dump stat for all characters that aren't M-Us...
  9. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

    I think method III is definitely my favorite, though it might not be great for optimizers because fighter classes really shine with an 18 to play with, and can almost ignore anything outside of Strength and Constitution as long as they have at least 9's or so elsewhere. The bad thing is that...
  10. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

    Arrangeable 17, 16 allows for perfectly viable clerics and M-Us so he must have wanted something more broken than that, likely Cavelier or Barbarian or something that just goes nuts with multiple 18s. Equally, 17, 16 and nothing low can always make a decent though not OP Ranger. But I know the...
  11. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E What is the best way to generate ability scores for 1e AD&D?

    Back in the day I used 4D6 take the best three in order as my means of producing ability scores. This was never wholly satisfying. By 1990 I had moved to 4d6 take the best three in order, but you could choose 5d6 take the best three for one ability score of your choosing at any point when...
  12. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Three Things that can't be Fixed in 1e AD&D

    Even back in the day, one of the things I found myself doing with respect to published modules was removing what I felt were "excess" magic items. I think the one that really jumps out in my head is that in I believe I3 Pyramid there is a room that just has 3 maces +3 laying unguarded on the floor.
  13. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Revised and Rebalanced Magic-User for 1e AD&D

    I don't think anyone in 1989 would consider a fix to then known problems to have been a backport of ideas from 5e, which I wouldn't even suggest as a fix to known problems of 3e - even though Monte, the games designer, foreshadowed what you are talking about in his variant of 3e in the Arcana...
  14. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Revised and Rebalanced Magic-User for 1e AD&D

    Seeing as this whole project started with just a limited goal of revising the thief so that it fared well in comparison to the other core classes, I don't think that's a significant concern if we are speaking of the revised thief of the same project. RAW, then not only does the thief not get a...
  15. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Revised and Rebalanced Magic-User for 1e AD&D

    Your gut feelings involve taking 5th roots of things? You're gut feelings are a lot more exacting than mine. :D I see where you are going with that, but if you are going to change so much then I don't think the classic numbers for level 2 are that important, nor is the idea of doubling every...
  16. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Revised and Rebalanced Magic-User for 1e AD&D

    Well, the answer to that is probably "Yes", in as much as for example the thief - especially the RAW one not revised by me - is gaining almost nothing by leveling and has true slow linear progression of power, so you'd expect his XP requirements to be more linearly increasing than quadratically...
  17. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Revised and Rebalanced Magic-User for 1e AD&D

    One thing that I'm trying to get away from that I feel is very 1e in feel but very poor in design is making lists. The problem with lists is that while they are very flexible, very flavorful, and can be balanced quite easily, they also are inimical to any expansion of the game with new content...
  18. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Revised and Rebalanced Magic-User for 1e AD&D

    If that was actually the modality going on, it would be easy. Instead, Gygax has a much more complicated pattern going on than that, and while his choices with the Wizard are understandable, they also result in him being forced - if he is to stick to the general pattern - to have a few levels...
  19. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Revised and Rebalanced Magic-User for 1e AD&D

    I don't believe it is the case in 3e that wands can only replicate spells. Rather, only wands that replicate spells have standard pricing (and thus full control over their cost and design by a PC). Extraordinary wands that have effects that do not replicate spells have to have their price and...
  20. Celebrim

    AD&D 1E Three Things that can't be Fixed in 1e AD&D

    I think that's our point exactly. I wouldn't say that it made it easy or fast except in the cases of the most trivial sorts of items. I would say that it didn't have a fully balanced system for judging the cost of the items and that PCs naturally exploited loopholes in the rules, but magic...
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