Hriston
Dungeon Master of Middle-earth (he/him)
Honestly, I think this is a little bit backwards, mostly because of the way D&D in general presents this information as player-facing first. The 8th-level magic-user pirate is like a Chainmail wizard figure operating at such and such a level. One of the features of playing a PC magic-user, once you've gotten your character to 8th level, is having the capabilities of that type of figure. So absolutely, the 8th-level magic-user pirate should attack with THAC0 19 and have 8d4 hit points like an 8th-level magic-user and should also be subject to the armor and weapon restrictions of a magic-user. But there are other things, like ability scores, that are mostly PC only and which you can probably dispense with.Yeah, I see you kind of got to the point I did before me. I don't think anything but PCs in AD&D LITERALLY have a class as an attribute of the character and are 'classed'. Things that have stat blocks (MM entries or similar abbreviate versions) are not 'fighters' even if, in some cases, the rules will tell you to treat them as such for some specific purpose. The example of the pirate 8th level wizard NPC special figure (for example) is a bit different, they should probably just follow the Magic User rules for attacks and such? It isn't really actually very clear though! I mean, there's not anything saying exactly that they have N hit dice either, so that makes sense in terms of "I need a rule for when this character stabs someone with his dagger." OTOH can the pirate wizard wield a cutlass? Wear leather armor like other pirates? None of this is actually spelled out anywhere! But heck, this is AD&D, its not like a really coherent set of rules...