Which gets to the idea of how you managed to get a melee fighter to high level without a CON bonus to speak of, and apparently not a lot of clerics. You mentioned early DM fudging, but I'm wondering even more about the mix of challenges involved. You're clearly not trying to face anything like the G series with its loads of giants trying to squish you flat, or anything like DL with its save or die dragon breath weapons.
IIRC that particular character played through (on top of many homebrewed adventures) T1, the Slaver series, S3, S4 and WG4, and the GDQ series, probably not in that specific order. The massive giants encounter routed us, but we (mostly) survived and came back for more with better planning, though I can't remember what we did exactly.
The real sort of fudging that I think is going on here is more like what I talked about with making a character useful through campaign and encounter design.
Maybe- but this was back in the day when you'd play the same pc under multiple DMs, one adventure at a time. Less of a campaign and more of a series of adventures, with loose bits of continuity here and there.
Then again, this is apparently a game where despite not throwing a lot of difficult combat challenges at the party - few 16HD hydras or yagnodaemons for example - the DMs feel perfectly free to hit the whole party with regular save or die gas traps...
The gas trap was an example; mass save or die effects were pretty common in early D&D, even if not that particular version. See also: gaze attacks from petrifying monsters or death gaze creatures (bodaks, boalisks, catoblepas, etc), the rooms full of radiation that force a save or die from everyone in S3, things like gas spores or yellow mold, etc.
I think you're presuming a lot about the kinds of challenges we faced.
We had tons of henchmen. In fact, it was possible on a game night where most of the group wasn't showing up, to do ensemble or troupe play where one or two PC's went off on their own and any player that showed up who didn't have a main PC available could play one of the henchmen. Henchmen were essential for providing valuable skills like healing, magic, tanking when key PC's weren't around or were down or out of resources or whatever.
We would just add more pcs, including potentially multiple pcs per player if needed.
Anyway, we're still stuck on my assertion of 'viable', despite my lengthy attempt to explain it and despite the fact that you don't dispute my analysis of the rules.
What I'm not sure of from my end of the conversation is why you think a statement like "There is more to D&D than your ability scores" or "I had fun playing a thief and saw others have fun playing a thief." is a refutation.
I think the refutation is aimed at your perception of what was viable. Were I to accept the premise that your character has to hit some or all of your bullet points from earlier, I'd be with you, but that simply wasn't my experience. I found all kinds of characters with relatively low arrays of stats to be viable. In fact, my first couple of years, we played 3d6 in order with 2-for-1 swaps (or 3-for-1, for certain stats) as outlined in... Mentzer(?) Basic, I believe. Characters were still fun to play and the game was still awesome. To me, that says that those characters were viable.
I don't have a problem with the assertion that a character with high stats is better, on the whole, than one with low stats. But I don't always think that means that character is
more fun. And to me, what makes a character viable is a combination of two things: 1. Is it fun to play? and 2. Is it fun to play alongside?
A character who straight up can't contribute to the group's fun is not viable. A character who is not fun to play is not viable. But those characters could have high stats. I agree that it's more likely, for most players, that a low-stat pc will be less fun; but that needn't always be true, and it certainly doesn't make a low stat pc not fun.
There may be more to D&D than ability scores, but the structure of AD&D and to a lesser but still large extent BECMI weighted all the viability of a character to having one or more scores of 16 or higher because it was only at that point that you got advantages in play and those advantages while they seem small were in fact enormous when you start doing the math.
That's not true, though- or at least, it's only true for Strength. A 15 Con gave you +1 to your hit points; a 15 Dex gave you +1 AC. And you are noticeably better as a spellcaster with a 13 Int or Wis than a 9. Then there are things like carrying capacity, system shock, reaction adjustment... You got, maybe not bonuses, but a better chance of many things going your way long before you hit 16.
Also, I may be mis-remembering, but I think in the Basic version I had, you got a 5% xp bonus for having a prime requisite of about 14.
My numbers don't go away just because we both agree you could have fun despite them, nor do they go away just because we both agree that skillful play (by the player) and the attitude of the group could overcome bad design. My point is, even so, "despite" and "bad design".
This is in contrast to say 3e which had advantages start at 12 and linearly increase and had well defined advantages for all ability scores that applied to all classes, so that while pure optimization still might go for Jack One Big Hammer, a broad range of comparatively low scores (12's and 14's) was still plenty viable.
In the context of the "OSR Gripes" what I'm essentially asking is, "Why would you try to have fidelity to older editions exponential and very top loaded ability scores and not utilize the obvious improvements of 3e's ability score bonuses"? I mean, yes I can agree we all had fun in the '80s, but do we not all agree that there were bad design elements? Why are we building games that sell themselves as faithfully recreating the bad design elements?
Speaking of different play experiences, I found that not having a high stat in 3e was far harder to deal with than in earlier editions.
I do agree that early editions have some design elements that the years have improved. And I do agree that stat bonuses and the way they work are one of them. But they throw a lot of other stuff out of whack in an early edition game, most especially the flavor of the game. In 1e, you really don't expect a to hit bonus of +4 or +5 until you're pretty high level. It's just a different feel when a monster hits you for 1d4 points of damage and it's significant and meaningful.
