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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9253716" data-attributes="member: 4937">Not only are you right, but it's worse than you make it out to be.  The primarily difference between the two situations is "How big and important is a +1 modifier to damage."  If the expectation is blows do 10 damage, then +1 bonus is a 10% increase compared to a ~7% increase in the case of blows expected to do 15 damage.  This determines how sensitive your system is to stacking bonuses.  One of the reasons 3.X D&D got hit points closer to right than 1e AD&D is that 1e AD&D proved super vulnerable to stacking bonuses unexpectedly.  In a thread where I discuss 1e AD&D balance, one poster commented that the problem was 100th level characters and +20 swords as if the problem was simply GMs too generous with wish fulfillment, but in my experience, it wasn't hard for players to achieve the same effect simply by stacking more bonuses than the system expected and that didn't actually take Monte Haul type play.  All you needed was a little from here and a little from there, to have girdles of giant strength and a +4 sword and be double specialized in the weapon, and suddenly the game was blown wide open.  Heck, even the conversation about the relative power of a fireball is part of this.   In 1e if the level of the caster was above the HD of the monster, fireball more or less ended the fight either immediately or with just a little cleanup.   A 1e AD&D party could be expected by name level to take down more than 1 16HD creature per round because the creatures were going from taking 16 hits to take down, to each hit being worth much more than a single hit.  A fighter with just an 18/75 strength and a +4 sword is doing like 6 hits by himself every round.  Six such fighters would be doing 36 hits a round, and that's actually a rather weak example of a 10th level party yet its killing two of the toughest monsters in the game every round even without throwing into the mix how many hits a 10 dice fireball represents.Hit point inflation as provided by 3.5e was absolutely needed to deal with just the basic modifiers and spells already existing in the game and hit dice inflation was needed to provide for gameplay beyond 12th level - and that's provable just from published 1e material alone.  Which is why I'm saying 3.X got it close to right.</blockquote>

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