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I discussed earlier the fact that the weirdest thing about the M-U was that they leveled up very slowly when they were the weakest, and then suddenly accelerated to leveling faster than a thief just when they were really beginning to get powerful. I hadn't touched that yet because setting...

Personally I don't see the need to give any caster unlimited attack magic outside of a video game where how you are attacking is just color anyway, but these aren't insurmountable problems. For example, you could restrict an unlimited attack cantrip by having it require an arcane focus like a...

Since people have been asking about what I would do with Illusionists, I tacked on to the end of the original essay what I would do with Illusionists. It takes very little to describe, and I think is generally better balanced and more fun than the original class, which had wonky all over the...

Cantrips as presented in 1e AD&D are mostly color. Sure, every 100 hours of play you might find some real use for them if you kept some prepared, but for the most part they don't do enough to justify losing a valuable spell slot to do something as minor and unimpactful as what the cantrips do...

None of that makes the slightest bit of sense in the context of the rules. 1) You can't even make martial magical items until you are a 16th level M-U, so in a low magic setting there should be no magic swords (for example). The production rates for such items is lower than the rate they'd be...

Feats were deceptive. Because they were short, people assumed they were easy to design. In fact, the opposite is true. Designing a good feat is very hard. 3e's biggest problem was the absolute flood of mechanical content that flowed out of it and into it. Everyone wanted to get in on the...

Maybe, but in that case I would expect the mechanic to be "Invent a new signature spell of the appropriate level" and not "Discover the exact same spell everyone else uses." We can't all be Bigby.

I will bring up a few things no one has commented on yet: a) Level titles have changed to minimize overlap with other potential classes or to avoid suggesting things that are just not true of a generic M-U. Thaumaturgy and theurgy are more properly associated with clerical magic than with...

Generous. Under my rules if you were under the supervision of a higher level character, you could get it up to a whopping 2 XP per day. IIRC, you could get it up to 3 XP per day if you were willing to pay for superior experience (of whatever that meant for your class) with an outlay of some...

The assumption that I'm making here is the mysteriously appearing spell is connected to training, in as much as there doesn't seem to be any other explanation for it. That was always how I did it, and the time I played a M-U as a player that was the way that table played.

It's coherent as I read it if and only if you can keep a checklist of all spells which exist, which makes sense only if you have a finite list like those in the Player's Handbook. They way I read the minimum spells known rule is that once you've finished the whole checklist, you can retry on...

Well, that's just RAW per Gygax's explanation of why training gave no XP in the DMG, and why levelling up through adventuring was largely unrealistic and yet supported by the rules. My point though is that he deliberately gave no mechanics for players doing any of that. As for "a level every...

What's worse about them, and what really infuriated me at the time, is that they are incoherent. They are so punishing that no M-U should ever be manufacturing magic items for fighters, since the sacrifice of doing so is enormous. If we are to take the RAW as the explanation for where magic...

It's called "Troupe Play" and I've done it before in high level 1e AD&D (by coincidence). At high level almost by accident our above name level characters diverged into their own stories and to continue playing it out, we played many sessions with one main PC and their routine of mid-level...

I think 3e requires an hour or something trivial. But yes, 3e is very much a take on the game by people who knew the game very well in 1987 and sought to take the best ideas that were floating around and unify them into a coherent game system. Feats and skills are obviously derived from NWPs...

This is what 3e does, and once again I note that a fixed 1e AD&D is 3e and really talking about fixing 1e AD&D while retaining it's feel is just a discussion of what parts of 3e do you want to implement.

They just have to refill what they cast, but since each 4th level or higher spell requires more than an hour, casting only a couple of your higher level spell slots means a whole day of study. The problem is that it is anti-social mechanics. It's not necessarily fun for the group, nor is it...

All true. Assuming you were memorizing spells for like 12 hours a day, the Archmage could get back his spells in like 4 days. Of course, the problem with this from a DM perspective is that you are beating your own nose against a brick wall in order to try to keep the power level of a PC down...

I think we were pretty close in our thinking about what the thief needs. We had gone very much in the same direction. "As for 100 gp for a first level spell on a scroll", that's very 3e thinking. The 100 gp to make the scroll isn't what I would consider to be the hurdle you have to overcome...

One interesting question is could you port Sorcerer into 1e AD&D. But your solution misses the point that fundamentally the power level of low level M-U's is not excessive. M-U's only get to be a real problem when the 5th and 6th level spells come online, and they can start doing really game...