D&D 1E Common House Rules for AD&D?

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
I think he's referring to Bards here, though the plural is confusing. Maybe he wrote that before the PH was complete, or he was considering including one or two more optional ones in the DMG.
Either that, or Illusionists, Druids, Assassins, Rangers and Paladins were all originally intended as optional but then became core, and he (or the editors) forgot to tweak the bit where it implies subclasses are optional.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

PHATsakk43

Last Authlim of the True Lord of Tyranny
Either that, or Illusionists, Druids, Assassins, Rangers and Paladins were all originally intended as optional but then became core, and he (or the editors) forgot to tweak the bit where it implies subclasses are optional.
Given that 2E defined them explicitly as fighter, thief, cleric, and wizard and prior to that these had been the 4 core human classes in OD&D/basic/B/X/BECMI I had always sort of assumed that those were also the only non-optional ones in OAD&D.
 

Voadam

Legend
Given that 2E defined them explicitly as fighter, thief, cleric, and wizard and prior to that these had been the 4 core human classes in OD&D/basic/B/X/BECMI I had always sort of assumed that those were also the only non-optional ones in OAD&D.
I think you mean 1e here.

2e defined the class groups as warrior, rogue, priest and wizard with fighters, thieves, clerics, and mages being options within those class groups but paladins and rangers were warriors similar to fighters and not fighter subclasses themselves. This made it clearer what things applied to fighters alone (such as specialization in the PH) versus what applied to all warriors (percentile strength, higher con hp bonuses).

Also In OD&D there were only three classes, Fighting Man, Magic-User, and Cleric. Then Supplement I came along with the paladin option for some lawful fighters and Gygax's terrible version of the thief class.
 

PHATsakk43

Last Authlim of the True Lord of Tyranny
Nope, I didn’t mean that at all.

Paladins, Rangers, Druids, Specialty Priests, Specialist Wizards, and Bards were all explicitly optional in 2E.

While it was (I believe) the only edition to codify four basic groups of classes—technically five counting psionics—the classes themselves only had a single official instance per grouping.

The primary commonality in the grouping was THAC0, HD, and saving throws. Everything else was class dependent, including XP stuff.
 

Remove ads

Top