overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
We saw that ruling, looked at the proper grappling rules, and went with the non-stupid version, i.e. make a normal attack roll and describe what’s happening.
D&D 1E Favorite Obscure Rules from TSR-era D&D
- Thread starter Snarf Zagyg
- Start date
Professor Murder
Hero
Oh yeah. The whole concept of different rates of advancement dependent on class was such a mess. Not only the actual amounts to level varying, but that some classes had an easier time earning bonus XP than others.
overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
Fair. But it sure was a lot easier to adjust XP for level than class efficacy. Not that the same XP across the classes was ever balanced.
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
It's a thing the game struggles with to this very day, to try and say Class X of level Y is equal in power to Class Z of level Y, when both classes might be doing very different things.
The only thing modern designers seem to agree upon is that everyone is going to engaging in lots and lots of combat.
The only thing modern designers seem to agree upon is that everyone is going to engaging in lots and lots of combat.
overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
It's one of the few ways they can actually balance things. If the designers are even interested in trying to balance things.
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
WARNING: This gets really OT as, per usual, I end up rambling and going off in the weeds somewhere. So I'm spoilering the whole thing in case you want to skip my diatribe, lol.
is one of those funny concepts in gaming. Generally, you want each player to have an equal amount of enjoyment from a game, but there's no metric for "fun". You can try to make sure everyone has equal "spotlight" time, but that may or may not be what every player wants.
The more wildly characters diverge in ability, the more lopsided things can become (see Shadowrun's "Decker Problem" where you have a character who underperforms most of the time, then basically dominates large chunks of play when their "moment" comes up, because nobody else can do what they do).
XP advancement was intended to be a balancing factor, but it never really worked- 2 Thief levels are not equal to 1 Fighter or Cleric level, and while they may be worth quite a bit more than one Wizard level at low levels, at higher levels the Wizard gets increasingly more per level (in the form of spell slots) and has the rate of progression completely shift, further muddying things.
But outside of the largely useless at low level Wizard, you could squint at most characters played at the levels most people tend to play at (1-7) and say "yeah, these guys are roughly equal to one another", and that was good enough for the time.
Homogenization of xp tables unfortunately aggravated things because now a level in a class really should equal a level in another class, but there's no way to make that happen without also having homogenization of character classes, which some people really dislike. Many people want a unique play experience (and presumably, one that doesn't suck), and a lot of pressure is put on the DM to provide that.
Which ends up with an Avengers problem pretty quickly- a highly-trained super-soldier from WW2, an actual thousands of years old God armed with artifacts, a highly-trained super spy, a guy who turns into an unstoppable rage monster, a dude with trick arrows who never seems to miss, and a super-wealthy hyper-intelligent Artificer with bad impulse control who the DM has given up on trying to set limits for and so they can have any upgrade or gadget they feel like- having an adventure that gives everyone equal spotlight time might be difficult at best.
You could make sure that over the course of a campaign consisting of many adventures, is to make sure that everyone has equal spotlight time, which might be easier, but it might mean that long stretches of play might have a player feeling left out.
It doesn't help when games are a bit lop-sided with regards to how much combat/exploration/lorefinding/NPC befriending is actually going on either.
A lot of this speaks to the kinds of campaigns that were played in the early years- characters adventuring in different places at different times, rarely forming permanent bands of heroes, with lots of NPC hirelings and henchman filling critical support roles. Sometimes it's one guy playing D&D by himself, other times it's a small army of adventurers taking on a dungeon- or even competing groups!
Especially with high character turnover, you could easily have new characters teaming up with a local legend, the only 11th level Fighter in the entire campaign! Or a group realizing they need a specialist and asking if they can team up with another player's 14th-level Thief/M-U!
When I was young, I engaged in a lot of that "Wild West" kind of gaming, and "balance" wasn't really a thing. Some characters were just better than others- they had better stats, better levels, better magic items- but it generally kind of balanced out somehow.
Now I'm older, time is more valuable, we only meet to game for a mere 10 hours a month, there's only one DM, one adventuring party, and any imbalance between characters becomes really noticeable and undesirable.
The more wildly characters diverge in ability, the more lopsided things can become (see Shadowrun's "Decker Problem" where you have a character who underperforms most of the time, then basically dominates large chunks of play when their "moment" comes up, because nobody else can do what they do).
XP advancement was intended to be a balancing factor, but it never really worked- 2 Thief levels are not equal to 1 Fighter or Cleric level, and while they may be worth quite a bit more than one Wizard level at low levels, at higher levels the Wizard gets increasingly more per level (in the form of spell slots) and has the rate of progression completely shift, further muddying things.
But outside of the largely useless at low level Wizard, you could squint at most characters played at the levels most people tend to play at (1-7) and say "yeah, these guys are roughly equal to one another", and that was good enough for the time.
Homogenization of xp tables unfortunately aggravated things because now a level in a class really should equal a level in another class, but there's no way to make that happen without also having homogenization of character classes, which some people really dislike. Many people want a unique play experience (and presumably, one that doesn't suck), and a lot of pressure is put on the DM to provide that.
Which ends up with an Avengers problem pretty quickly- a highly-trained super-soldier from WW2, an actual thousands of years old God armed with artifacts, a highly-trained super spy, a guy who turns into an unstoppable rage monster, a dude with trick arrows who never seems to miss, and a super-wealthy hyper-intelligent Artificer with bad impulse control who the DM has given up on trying to set limits for and so they can have any upgrade or gadget they feel like- having an adventure that gives everyone equal spotlight time might be difficult at best.
You could make sure that over the course of a campaign consisting of many adventures, is to make sure that everyone has equal spotlight time, which might be easier, but it might mean that long stretches of play might have a player feeling left out.
It doesn't help when games are a bit lop-sided with regards to how much combat/exploration/lorefinding/NPC befriending is actually going on either.
A lot of this speaks to the kinds of campaigns that were played in the early years- characters adventuring in different places at different times, rarely forming permanent bands of heroes, with lots of NPC hirelings and henchman filling critical support roles. Sometimes it's one guy playing D&D by himself, other times it's a small army of adventurers taking on a dungeon- or even competing groups!
Especially with high character turnover, you could easily have new characters teaming up with a local legend, the only 11th level Fighter in the entire campaign! Or a group realizing they need a specialist and asking if they can team up with another player's 14th-level Thief/M-U!
When I was young, I engaged in a lot of that "Wild West" kind of gaming, and "balance" wasn't really a thing. Some characters were just better than others- they had better stats, better levels, better magic items- but it generally kind of balanced out somehow.
Now I'm older, time is more valuable, we only meet to game for a mere 10 hours a month, there's only one DM, one adventuring party, and any imbalance between characters becomes really noticeable and undesirable.
the Jester
Legend
The real effect was on class selection. If you didn't have high enough scores you couldn't play some (many) classes, with the paladin's "let's start with a 17 Cha and add a few more tough requirements" being the hardest to qualify for.
Quickleaf
Legend
Been playing OSE and the differing XP advancements haven't been disruptive like I thought they might be. PCs leveling at different times actually fed into the whole feel of the game (for me), and it seemed to be one of the balancing mechanisms for magic-users having magic that "just worked."
I'm not 100% convinced that's necessary, but it does make sense within that game system.
Definitely the further a game moves from that idea of magic "just working" then differential XP is not going to make sense.
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Starfox
Hero
And then there were groups that used benchmark leveling. And everyone was the same level, even the cleric and rogue. I never played with benchmark leveling back in the day, but we has campaigns where "everyone starts at level X" which was benchmark leveling, but only before the game actually started.
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Professor Murder
Hero
Totally can grok how it's just what some are looking for. But for me, it's just more bookkeeping on my end as GM. The juice aint worth the squeezing, but ymmv.
