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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Edena_of_Neith" data-source="post: 4343314" data-attributes="member: 2020">Nice name.  Cheers!  : )    Prismatic Blade was 9th level.  And yes, there were better spells available (grins evilly.)    Yes, in 1E Chromatic Orb was restricted to the illusionist only (making a lot of wizards turn green with envy.)  Remember that it required an attack roll, and the illusionist's THAC0 was awful.    In 2E, when Chromatic Orb became available to all wizards, all wizards kept that godawful THAC0.  But ... if you are playing a fighter/wizard, in 2E, you have a fighter's THAC0, the best in the game at that time.  So now, you have the fighter's THAC0 to use the wizard's Chromatic Orb with.  In this case, 2 + 2 = 5.  At 9th level, 2 + 2 = 10.  I must admit, the 1E illusionist was shafted in spells, and I saw few people play illusionists.  Unearthed Arcana helped a lot, with Chromatic Orb and other spells, but illusionists were still rare (the gnomish fighter/illusionist was a nice class, and in this one case gnomes really shined.)  Enter 2E, and all the generalist wizards greedily helped themselves to those nifty illusionist spells, while the poor illusionist could finally cast the good stuff.    The Original Shapechange, 9th level, was a 1E spell.  In *this* case, it definitely was a case of Accept No Substitutions;  the Original Pepsi is the Best!  That was one mighty spell.  Become anything short of a demigod or singular creature type.  Two tarrasques in the world?  You can become a tarrasque.  You gained ALL the powers of the creature except magic resistance and those based on it's mind (the spell implied, adjudicate in the player's favor) and keep all your own powers in addition.  You could become a lightning bolt and literally rocket around the world at lightspeed with that spell.  And the original Timestop?  In the original version, you could plant your dagger in someone, while they were Timestopped, and leave them to face the consequences when the spell stopped.  Timestop was truly Autokill (it was meant to be truly autokill, no ifs, ands, or buts.)  All the spell goodness that came out later, just added to the helpings of the seven course meal.  : )    Quite true.  My point was, that low level wizards were so difficult to keep alive, so weak, that players would use the fighter/mage class to 'get around' this problem.  At low levels, they could fall back on the fighter class.  Then, when they reached the high levels, they got the goodies of the high level wizard.  Can you blame them?  A smart wizard, given that option, *would do just that.*  Why would she run around defenseless, when she could wear armor, wield weapons, and fight competently, up until she obtained those powerful spells?  She would choose the way that worked!  (And for single class wizards, it was - as you know - really, really, really hard to make things work.)  Had elves been barred from being fighter/mages, this would not have happened, and high level wizards would have been rare, the way Gary Gygax intended.  With high powered wizards so rare, the idea of wizards unbalancing the game would not have been nearly such an issue, people would not have taken it up as an issue, and perhaps the backlash against wizards would never have occurred.  But obviously, if you give a smart player a better way (and I would argue the 1E/2E multiclassing was a better way, in this case, despite the slower advancement)  then they will take it.  Why play a defenseless single-class low level wizard, when you can play a character with all the benefits of a wizard + all the benefits of a fighter + all the benefits of an elf - no drawbacks?    Gestalt, they say, is an optional 3E rule based upon 1E multiclassing.  Gestalt allows you to take 2 classes as 1 class.  Literally.  You are a Fighter/Wizard, and that's one class.  Or a Cleric/Rogue, and that's one class.  Or a Fighter/Bard, or Wizard/Cleric, or whatever combination you want.  You can multiclass in addition, so you can be a Fighter/Wizard / Cleric/Rogue, and that would count as 2 classes.  You have all 4 core classes, but you still advance at half the normal rate.  You gain the abilities of all the classes in question.  There was some argument over the specifics, but a reasonable extrapolation (for simplicity, if nothing else) was that you gained the fighter's BAB, the best saves of your various classes (no stacking), all the innate abilities, all the innate spells, all the granted feats, and your standard feat progression rate.  You gained the rogue's starting skill points if you started with rogue - otherwise, you gained the best skill points possible (if you had bard, say, you gained his points, and not the paltry points of the cleric or fighter.)  You gained the best hit points, of course, of your various classes.  Gestalt was a concept that would have allowed a character to be fully self-sufficient, a Jack of All Trades.  Multiclassed wizards versus Single Classed Wizards might have become an irrelevant point, since everyone was fighter/wizard/cleric/rogues (or, at least, most everyone.)  In this situation, especially if you used the 3.0 rules or better yet, the 2E spells, you really had it made.  Use the benefits of one class to offset the penalties of another, until you get to high level.  The synergy of the main classes is enormous, and now you had it all in one character.  I guess Gestalt fundamentally altered things because it basically said that the typical adventurer could become something much closer to Everything, than ever before.  Gary Gygax created classes that were not self-sufficient;  Gestalt created the idea of a fully self sufficient character.        Yes, a major problem for the wizard.  Intelligent foes did not sit around waiting to be roasted.  We did what we could to keep our wizards viable in combat.  Like with you and your groups, our efforts didn't always work.  We just did our best, and hoped it worked.  One particularly dastardly thing I saw emerge was the Rope Trick Stunt.  How did it work?  Wizard casts Rope Trick.  She climbs in.  She angles entry to extradimensional space so it faces sideways to combat, granting 90% cover (+8 AC.) (Round 1.)  Wizard casts spell, sticks finger out, Fireballs opponents, pulls finger back in. (Round 2 and onward.)  If monsters move around, Wizard closes entry to Rope Trick.  Then casts spell, opens Rope Trick (revealing herself, no bonus to AC, but it's her initiative), Fireballs opponent, hopefully kills them before they can fire back.  And variants of the above.  Such as the fighters putting Tower Shields over the entrance, physically blocking access to the entrance, and otherwise protecting the wizard.  Clerics could help out too.  Rogues could backstab or sneak attack monsters obsessed with getting at the wizard.</blockquote>

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