Did magic-users use weapons more often in older editions?

[pemerton]

You certainly couldn't count on acquiring a wand for low-level MUs to use in battle.

war dogs were a prized addition to most low level 1e groups I was in as well. We didn't use them as backup though -- the were front-line!

This all fits with my experiences!

 

[David Howery]

back in 1E days, the one and only wizard who wasn't dual classed and actually survived up to high levels that I ran used weapons a heck of a lot... IIRC, I had him take throwing daggers. Basically, most adventures went "magic user casts Magic Missile, then throws daggers until we had a chance to rest and relearn the spell". I always figured that if it came down to it, he could used the dagger hand to hand (with whopping big penalties). Fortunately, it never came down to that...

 

[Victim]

It depends on critical fumble rules. With potentially harsh fumble results, spamming thrown dagger or dart attacks can often be more of a liability than an asset (especially with a lowish hit chance). And I didn't see too many people playing older editions without some sort of critical hit/fumble rule...

 

[pemerton]

Well, when I played AD&D it was (as best I could make sense of it at the time) rules as written, including weapon vs armour, speed factors etc.

So no critical fumbles for us - just 3 darts per round, with (from memory) reasonable weaopn vs armour numbers for unarmoured, padded and leather - which is a good chunk of low-level humanoids.

 

[David Howery]

It depends on critical fumble rules. With potentially harsh fumble results, spamming thrown dagger or dart attacks can often be more of a liability than an asset (especially with a lowish hit chance). And I didn't see too many people playing older editions without some sort of critical hit/fumble rule...

from what I recall from those 1E days, we didn't use any fumble rules... and also didn't bother with the 'weapon vs. armor type' rules either. A low level mage still had a dismal chance to hit anything with a throwing dagger, but OTOH, he was able to buy a LOT of them with his starting cash, so he had a lot of chances to inflict some kind of damage...

 

[JoeGKushner]

Darts. They would love to use darts. and man, rumors of a darts of the hornets nest would lead them onto adventures. At least until the minotaur fighters wanted to start using darts and I had to limit the strength bonus of damage to the maximum damage the weapon could inflic on thrown weapons.

On the other hand, the mages were virtually ineffective with these weapons and struck the party members almost as much as they struck the enemy so actual effecitveness didn't seem to go up that much.

 

[Cactot]

The whole point of playing an elven spellcaster was to be able to use longbows (and if you are lucky get a + to hit because of the dex bonus). Until lvl 5 or so it seems like MOST of my caster's actions were "shoot it with my bow". Save the spells for the big bad boss =D