D&D General Nerfing Wizards the Old Fashioned Way: Magic User in 1e

[Helldritch]

Honest question - how many times have you had a player hit the level cap on a demihuman character and then keep happily playing along with no possible chance to advance or gain hp? Because I find this scenario really, really hard to wrap my head around.

I have plenty of firsthand experiences of playing demihumans in various 1E games. Generally, the level limits were rarely an issue because, as we almost always started at 1st level, most games were done well before anyone came to a level restriction.

In the handful of cases where this actually happened (I.e. hit the level cap), tge level cap rule was always house ruled away to maintain peace at the table.

More often than you'd imagine. That is why a lot of demi-humans were taking thief as one of the component of their multiclass. Then when max level was reached in a class, the demi-human would often use a wish to wave the limit by one at a time! It was as simple as that. All you needed was the following:
1) The spell magic jar so that the M-U casting the spell would do so from your body. And thus it would be your body that would age.
2) A ring of regeneration in case the age effect would kill you. Regenerating would keep you from dying from the system shock.
3) A high enough mage willing to cast that spell for you.
4) A DM fair enough to allow this.

It was a great money sinker, an excellent reason to keep adventuring and an easy plot advancement to keep the players going.

 

[Lanefan]

@Man in a Funny Hat made a number of excellent points, but, I'd also like to address the XP thing as well. Yes, at 1st to, IIRC, 4th or maybe 5th, MU's needed a lot of XP. Then ZOOM, they just rocket up levels. To the point where they are generally one level ahead of fighters until 14th level. It was a wonky progression.

But, I'm frankly baffled why all these MU's get into melee combat. Didn't you guys plug up the front line with a couple of fighters and a cleric? Poof, no one can reach the MU and you cannot fire through melee easily. It was ridiculously easy, most of the time, for the MU to stay out of combat.

In confined spaces, absolutely. In open-field situations, or anytime the party finds itself surounded or ambushed, not so much.

And, of course, I notice that this discussion has completely ignored magic items. Let's not forget our 100 charge wands of fireballs or magic missile. Those can't be interupted. If we're talking a double digit level MU, he's likely picked up half a dozen wands, a staff and possibly a rod or two. It's not like anyone else in the group can use them. And with the gobs of charges that AD&D wands had, it's not like you'd ever run out either.

Who else in the group did you give the Bracers of Defense to? And the ring of protection? We drilled our MU's AC into the stratosphere as fast as we could. Which also tended to mean that the MU had insane bonuses to saving throws as well - effectively saving on 2's and 3's by the time we hit double digit play.

Yes, MUs can build crazy AC numbers, parcitularly if they've got some Dex to throw in as well.

The biggest risk with blast wands is that if you do fail a save vs AoE, those wands suddenly become potential bombs. (the lowest hit point total I've ever seen a character reach - and yes, dammit, it was one of my own PCs - came when a wand of lightning broke and released all remaining charges in a very confined space. What a mess.)

And, this also ignores the fact that a lot of AD&D spells had insane durations. Charm person could last for WEEKS. Protection from Evil BLOCKED all physical attacks from extra-planar creatures. Stoneskin (Unearthed Arcana) lasted until you had taken X number of attacks and blocked all physical damage until then.

Stoneskin, like quite a few Unearthed Arcana spells, was rather broken as written. That said...

It's not like MU's were helpless here. Let's not oversell things.

...you're right - they weren't helpless once they got past the first few levels. But they were still highly vulnerable to any sort of AoE damage even on a made save, as they simply didn't have the starch.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

When I ran 1e a few years back, I found my greater experience made it much easier to adjudicate illusions than back in the day. The class could be incredibly versatile, but I don't think that PC particularly outranked any other class in that campaign.

Illusions were deadly in the hands of the right players. If the DM was "fair" as you imply, the illusionnist was simply and purely deadly. The only real weakness of the illusionnist were undead, mind affected immune monsters (which were not that many) and constructs. But the illusionnist could use any items that the wizard could so a good illusionnist would take wands and staves as needed to be able to act when facing illusion immune monsters.

 

[Lanefan]

The trick to balancing 1st edition was that nothing was remotely balanced at all!

But it's not useful to say "spell interruption would be better than concentration in 5e" unless you address how it could be made to work in 5e. Interruption made it through three editions, but it was eventually dropped to simplify timing. If you wanted to bring it back you would probably need to also bring back segments, casting time, weapon speed factors, overlapping turns, etc.

Speaking as someone who actually played a lot of 1st edition, casting times and speed factors where something we quickly dropped as making combat too slow and complicated, and as a result interruption rarely happened.

We dropped weapon speed factors but kept casting times, and always will. It's trivially easy for a player to track - you start casting on your initiative, you flip the die to show when you'll resolve, and during that time you just have to remember you're in mid-spell if something attacks or disturbs you. Hard to imagine a player not being able to handle that degree of complexity.

It works quite well in Baldur's Gate, but that is because the computer is keeping track of all the timings. You might come up with some "hybrid" D&D system, using a computer to keep track of the timings, but otherwise I think there is a need to go back to the drawing board to come up with an interrupt system that actually works and is fun.

It's easy to say "this is how it worked in 1e", but the reality was, it didn't work, and it wasn't fun.

Well, from here I can say that it works just fine. As for fun, if simply tracking one's casting time as noted above is enough to spoil the fun there's probably a bigger issue at play.

 

[Lanefan]

Here's my experience with these examples:

Weapon v. AC. = We used about half the time. The reason we dropped it was because we kept having to equate monster weapons to "weapon-types". It made a lot of sense, but wasn't worth the hassle and didn't really impact very much. It's greatest impact was it made sense to have weapons very heavy armor vs. no armor, etc., which was very much the case historically IME.

Elves cannot be raised or resurrected (except one exception, because reasons). = Yep. We always enforced this. Reincarnate (take your chances), wish, or nothing.

We dropped both of these, but we also toned down Elvish benefits considerably.

Constitution score is the max times for raise/resurrection, and a failed role is perma death. = Yep. Always used this role as well, including losing a point of CON when you were brought back.

We've kept the Con loss. As for failing a revival roll, we (of course!) designed a table of reasons why the failure occurred. Many of these reasons e.g. you're already an undead or your spirit has been destroyed mean guaranteed perma-death, but some others e.g. temporary divine interference mean you might be able to try revival again at a later date...and there's one reason for failure - that you've somehow already been revived elsewhere - which can get very interesting indeed.

Even friendly castings of polymorph require system shock. = Yep. Even if you know it is coming, it is quite a shock.

I just rule there's no such thing as a friendly casting, and that any intelligent being who realizes what spell is being cast on them will see it as attempted murder and react accordingly. (this to specifically avoid 'friendly polymorphs' which can quickly get broken otherwise)

Casting certain spells (such as haste, or wish) that ages you requires a system shock check (that's an oldie but a goodie). = Hmm.. I remember the aging, but I don't recall it requiring a SS check?

Wish costs the caster a Con point in some circumstances but I don't remember any SSS roll; and there's never been one required for Haste that I know of. Are you thinking of a house rule maybe?

Items have saving throws (that's the "Dragon melts your magic items" rule). = Oh, YEAH! As a DM I LOVED this one... you failed your save, then all your items must make a save as well. LOL, so many times Disintegrate and Dragon breath meltings... ah, fond DM memories here.

The best ones are cascading meltdowns, where the melting items themselves go >boom< and-or release charges and the resulting damage prompts another round of saves...

 

[Lanefan]

Illusions were deadly in the hands of the right players. If the DM was "fair" as you imply, the illusionnist was simply and purely deadly. The only real weakness of the illusionnist were undead, mind affected immune monsters (which were not that many) and constructs. But the illusionnist could use any items that the wizard could so a good illusionnist would take wands and staves as needed to be able to act when facing illusion immune monsters.

Illusionists are excellent against dumb or low-level opponents. From about 2nd to 6th level when common opponents are Orcs, Ogres, Trolls, Giants and the like, they flat-out rock.

But at higher level when the opponents tend to become more resistant and, often, much smarter, Illusionists tend to become little more than hangers-on.

And yes, they're kinda pointless against undead or constructs.

 

[Helldritch]

One rule that helped a lot of illusions was that the player had to had a good reason to disbelieve it. Just saying I check if it is not an illusion could imply a penalty to the save. Disbelieving something was always a risky business. If it was real, the monster or whatever you hit you fairly easily. If you failed the save, the illusion would hit you anyway and illusionnary damage could be enough to kill anyways. A few rounds of interacting were usually necessary to get the notion that something was wrong.

And then, the damn illusionnist would cast demi-shadow monster/magic and the illusion would still do damage to you, reinforcing others into believing it to be fully real. Yep, adjudicating these was not an easy task.

 

[Alzrius]

As long as we're on the subject, don't forget that beings with exceptional Intelligence scores were also immune to illusion spells of a certain level, while those with exceptional Wisdom scores were immune to a lot of mind-affecting effects (as per Deities & Demigods):

 

[Ancalagon]

in 2nd ed, if your con was high enough you started regenerating... was it like that in 1e too?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

in 2nd ed, if your con was high enough you started regenerating... was it like that in 1e too?

I think the extended CON table with regeneration for 19+ first appeared in Deities and Demigods. Which was 1st edition, but not core rules.