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Mine either. Clerics are great, but do have limitations. Not only the ones mentioned earlier (weapon restriction, to hit table, weapon profs, attacks per round), but you gotta really role-play your religion well or you lose your access to spells. Once you get past the first couple levels, the...

We literally just had a lengthy conversation about how this isn't true in this thread. 🤷‍♂️ Also, they use the attack table of the fighter class, which will always be between 5-8 max without ever getting better (depending on when they become a thief). By the time you get a few levels in bard...

This is certainly a surprising comment to make after the discussion we just had re: bards.

Sure. I agree. But that's kinda the point. The bard won't jump from level 1 thief to level 4 thief right away even though the rest of the party got 12,000 XP during that delve, because anything after 1,250 xp was not gained by the thief character. Which means that the bard character won't just...

And the party is just gonna sit around and wait weeks for that? It's already a stretch that they'd come back out of the lost ruins out in the remote wilds after every encounter or two, but that's even worse lol.

Even if that were the case, same net result: you only level once per down time.

Not RAW, as was brought up earlier and what we were talking about. RAW, once you get enough XP to level, you stop getting XP until you go back and spend the weeks and gold to train up. That doesn't happen mid-dungeon.

Oh, you're right. Can't believe I missed that. Also, it pretty clearly reaffirms that you don't get extra thief HD until you surpass your fighter level in thief. But the other point still stands. RAW, you don't just zip from level 1 bard to level 6. Anything past the initial level gain is...

This thread is turning into a "1e bards are even worse than you thought." lol

You are 100% right. So even if you don't count CON bonus at all, that changes my spreadsheet above to this:

I'm thinking the 1e bard is the Wimp Lo of AD&D 1e. "We intentionally designed it to make no sense and be bad as a joke."

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Most retroclones (mine included) mirror the tables and core rules while omitting the more complicated stuff (like initiative, spell interruptions, weapon profs, speed factors, and other stuff that favored the fighter). Basically, in many retroclones, we kinda neutered the fighter's effectiveness...

It was the loading time. If they wanted to balance it out more accurately, they should have had a minimum STR requirement for longbows and not required a weapon prof slot for a crossbow. I think those two things would have resulted in more people using crossbows like we did historically.

I think the bottom line is that 1e was much better balanced RAW than people give it credit. However, those rules were complex and very user-unfriendly, so most people didn't end up using them RAW, which let to perceived balance issues. Different issues at each table because we all house ruled...

It's almost like all these rules that favored fighters (spell interruption, initiative, speed factors, HP bonuses, leveling rules, weapon profs) were ignored or houseruled and then people complained the fighter was weak. ;)

Agreed. On all counts.