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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7849281" data-attributes="member: 18">Re: specialists, that's one of the "other methods" I was referring to. It rarely had much impact in my experience. Re: a new spell at each level, wasn't that random off a chart, though? Which is a completely different situation to "You have leveled up, now pick the most powerful couple of spells at this spell level (or keep picking from old levels if this level sucks!)" of 3.XE, which lead directly to caster supremacy, by giving them the ability to min-max (well, max, at least) on a whole new axis.I literally can't remember a 2E campaign where the PCs weren't like, either perma-dead or level 16 or so within about 3-5 years (or much less) of game time. Some pre-gen campaigns had you going like 1-15 in a matter of months (there may have been some dubious rule designed to counteract it but I don't think it was routinely enforced or even known about, esp. given official stuff like Dragon Mountain clearly ignoring it if it existed). The only time aging came into play was ghosts, those bastards. This may have been different in 1E.And yeah, in 2E, only Warrior classes (Fighter, Paladin, Ranger, and some other later ones like Gladiator) had percentile strength and the top CON bonuses, which, combined with armour (including plate) generally taking your full DEX bonus, meant a fighter with high physical stats (from rolling well) was really, really well-positioned to kill a lot of people very quickly whilst not taking much damage.Sure, you could put Gauntlets of Ogre power or the like on the Rogue or Cleric. Great, now what? Watch as they make their (often single) attack and miss because of their worse THAC0 and still do less damage than the Fighter because they don't have specialization? Not that it didn't happen! The moment a Belt of Giant Strength or similar appeared, or the Fighter read a book to jump his STR from 18/XX to 19, the Gauntlets got tossed to Cleric or Rogue. I once saw a very bad NPC absolutely get his head pounded in with some lucky rolls on a Cleric with said Gauntlets and a +4 mace of some kind.Of course the absolute meanest 2E character I ever saw was actually a Fighter/Speciality Priest with a Kit that let him take weapon specialization (which MCs normally could not). It was a miracle of exception-based design exploitation. The Kit was for Fighter/Clerics, but the Speciality Priest in question specifically said that they could take any kit legal for Clerics or Fighter/Clerics, and said that they could multi-class with Fighter (when MC'ing was usually illegal for SPs). As this was a pre-internet age and my player had somehow read the several obscure books enough to actually work this all out, I was more impressed than horrified. There were some other brutal exception-based things going on as well, as I recall.</blockquote>

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