Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6925509" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's worth noting that the basic 1e AD&D classes are not balanced even factoring in the different rates of leveling.  MitFH appropriately called out Wizards XP progression as not matching the actual utility of the levels, but that's just one instance.   Suppose we take the two most core classes - Fighters and M-U - as being balanced, possibly after tweaking the rate of leveling.  This still leaves us with all the following problems.a) Level caps on demi-humans are appropriate, but generally too restrictive.  This resulted in kludging by the time of Unearthed Arcana of new PC races with much more reasonable level caps. b) Thieves are still vastly underpowered even taking into account their slightly faster level advancement.   Assassins are oddballs, with a power that seems more suited to offscreen play, and Acrobats are basically as useless as thieves or more so.  The higher level you go, the worse it gets.  The more mature the 1e system gets, the worse this gets, as every other class gets laden with yet more and more powerful abilities (weapon specialization, NWP's, better and wider spell selection), but the thief gets basically nothing.c) As frequently pointed on it Dragon magazine articles at the time, monks are a mess.  Some solutions were published in Dragon.d) Barbarians are overpowered at 1st level, but are gimped at high levels by their exceptionally slow rates of advancement.e) Rangers are overpowered at 1st level.  e) Cavaliers and Paladin/Cavaliers especially are plain overpowered, and almost impossible to fix.  If they are retained, almost every other non-spellcasting class needs additional boosts.f) Weapon specialization is probably overpowered unless Cavaliers are allowed.g) Bards as a prestige class are insanely powerful if you ever qualify for it.In general, you should compare your class to an equal level fighter, and decide whether it is weaker or stronger.</blockquote>

Verification