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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9891213" data-attributes="member: 29398">Assuming a competent DM, there's rules alright in early D&D.  That said, largely because of the game's toolbox DIY approach those rules would and did vary widely from one table to the next; which itself is fine as long as within each table's campaign there's internal consistency.  One table uses weapon type vs armour type, another doesn't because it's too fiddly - no big deal.  People adapt.If I'm a 5th-level mage I've got what, 9 or 10 spells total per day, if that?  And those spells not only need to be pre-memorized, they also need to be balanced between offensive, defensive, and utility based on what the caster (as done by its player) thinks the party's gonna need that day.If I'm a 5th-level Fighter I've got as many attacks as I want; and in post-UA 1e those attacks pack a punch.  Provided my hit points hold out, I can keep at it all day.Scoring a hit when a hit is hard to get can be very satisfying.  In its hyper-extreme form it's like the lottery: you don't get frustrated when you lose because you know (or should!) that you'll lose most of the time.  Instead, the excitement comes if-when you win.If a few dice rolls count as "putting in a real effort, having a well-reasoned plan, and giving things your all" this chat ain't going to get very far. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Frustration at a cold streak of rolling is understandable.  It's also part of the game.Frustration at being unable to overcome an in-character challenge is understandable.  It's also part of the game.A Fighter gets to attack more than once in a typical combat, too; so the analogy still holds up.What other label would you give it, then - the kind of combat where survival isn't job one and the main purpose is to let the characters show off their moves?Er, thanks for that.  I played her as well as I could.One of the Wizards was an Evoker, which was admittedly (and sadly!) the weakest subtype.  Mine was an Illusionist, with Evoking blocked, and she was pretty darn good at it.  As a player and for in-character reasons I kinda blundered into the best 3e strategy: specialize, specialize, specialize.But the Cleric (then later, the Druid) was always the party's MVP.Gygax didn't have 40-50 years of prior trial and error to fall back on.  His designs were far from perfect, no argument there; but given that to begin with he, Arneson, and the rest were breaking entirely new ground I'd say they by and large didn't do too badly.I watched a hockey game last night that, while the overall play was quite even, was almost completely determined by luck: one team got a couple of lucky goals where pucks bounced in off something, the other team had the opposite and had at least two pucks bounce off of the goalposts and stay out.  Luck turned an even game into a lopsided 4-0 scoreline.In some settings or campaigns magic items aren't made new at all any more.  In others, they only come from the deities.  In others (and I think this is the general default other than in 3e) they're made by off-screen non-adventuring NPCs.Side note: if Illusionists ever got full Wish I missed it.  They got Alter Reality, which is kinda their version of Limited Wish.Spell creation was and remains very much a by-DM-approval thing.  I'd like to see more of it, actually, but it's not popular among PCs as it takes them out of the field for quite some time.This isn't very helpful. You complain about Mages getting abilities at high level, I point out that most games (at least in 1e) didn't get anywhere near that level in large part because the game was designed that way, and you say you don't care.This might be worth its own thread."Miserly" 5.xe DMs can't really be blamed for being such, as they're really just doing what the as-designed game tells them to do.In every edition, DMs tend to use the 'official' modules as a guide to what amounts-types-etc. of treasure to give out.  This caused some headaches in 1e mostly because the official modules were loaded with treasure and DMs followed that example, yet Gygax etc. couldn't understand why PCs got so rich.  The official 5e modules I've seen give out very little treasure relative to their early-days counterparts (how 4e did treasure baffles me, but that's another issue entirely).Starting with 3e we've also had some form of (yuck!) wealth-by-level guidelines, which also skew very stingy in 5e at low-mid levels.The advantage of having an experienced DM is that said DM knows when and how to tweak the as-written system so as to produce a good playable game.</blockquote>

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