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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9677024" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Remember that this is a Holmes thread, and Holmes omits morale rules (despite mentioning morale in the Bless spell description and in the Hobgoblin entry).Apart from that, this is all true, though to some extent it's become OSR dogma and isn't necessarily representative of how people generally played back in the day.  OD&D also had no Morale rules for monsters, and I knew a ton of people who didn't use them in AD&D. In the modules a lot of encounters and monsters were described as automatically attacking/automatically hostile, so the precedent was set for a lot of tables that reaction rolls weren't always used.I agree that the above is generally how it should be played, and absolutely makes low levels more survivable and prevents them being a monotonous meatgrinder.One interesting thing a couple folks have observed is that the core three original classes each have a way of mitigating certain dangerous/numerous foes, but each has different criteria.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Clerics Turn Undead</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">M-Us can Sleep groups of non-undead foes, or a single nasty individual up to the power of an Ogre, (they also get access to Web as a 2nd level and Fireball as a 3rd level spell, so their ability to deal with groups continues to scale up)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Fighters get their "<a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/sweep-attacks-in-classic-d-d.689835/" target="_blank">sweep</a>" ability to make one attack per level against groups of 1HD or less creatures (nerfed to only creatures under 1HD in 1E)</li> </ul>The narrative reason I heard instead was that this allowed for worldbuilding where common village priests could be treated as Clerics but not actually have healing or other spells.  Higher level Clerics were therefore more special and their magic not as commonplace.The mechanical reason does seem like a balance thing.  As Voadam said, they were the original combo fighter/caster class ("Clerics gain some of the advantages from both of the other two classes (Fighting Men and Magic-Users)" - first sentence of the class description from Book I of OD&D), so they got a little more limited in their spells.  Turning Undead was still powerful at 1st level, though.  At first level a Cleric in Holmes almost strictly superior to a Fighter, mechanically.</blockquote>

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