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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6348769" data-attributes="member: 4937">All basically true, although as the DM I tended to not enjoy a situation where the PC's had 12 NPC's tagging along with them at all times and tended to punish it from an XP perspective, treating hirelings (even dogs) as henchmen in terms of sucking up XP from defeating monsters even if they couldn't level, and having hirelings demanding shares of loot beyond their pay (again sucking up XP).  My preference as a DM was for each player to start 2 PC's and then play the one that survived (or to choose 1 if both survived).  However, while your strategy is viable in practice I didn't see it work much.  The problem was not first level.  The strategy of using NPC meat shields on the front line to distribute the damage would typically work at level 1-2 to keep the fighters alive and they'd bring the other PCs along with them.   The problem was that eventually you'd get passed the point where a 0th level man-at-arms even well decked out was useful as a meat shield.  That point certainly occurs when you start facing foes with magical abilities - young dragons, gorgons, medusa, basilisks, hellhounds, NPC wizards, ghosts, etc.  Anything more dangerous than a demi-human would tend to render your strategy that you'd been following since 1st level obsolete.  But even before that you'd get to the point where the men-at-arms were facing things that would buckle their morale.   You could try carefully nurturing henchmen up who could do a better job of holding the line than hirelings, but that was hard too.   Eventually you'd reach the point where you'd get hit unexpectedly and all that careful work just be worthless.  It was around 4th or 5th level that I typically saw the deaths occur, because really by that point you still only had like 10-12 hit points.It was far easier to just play an elf Thief/M-U so you at least could wear armor, use more weapons and had an extra half a hit point per level, as well as some occasionally useful thief skills.   Or if your DM didn't enforce the demi human level limits strongly, you could go Fighter/M-U for a bigger boost.   Or if you had the lucky rolls to do it, play a human and spend the first 4-5 levels of your career as a fighter (or thief if you lacked patience) until you got enough hit points to survive and then let the party power level you back to 4th level as a M-U during the time they were gaining level 5 or 6.  You couldn't contribute much during that level as you were just a low level M-U, but ideally the party had picked up a few wands and defensive magic items during that time, and at least you had 20 or so hit points (about the same as if you were an 8th level wizard).  Once you finished your trick, the party had a M-U of decent level going forward and your early career as a fighter would barely slow down your advancement at all.  After UA, you could even pull a double specialized in staff (or dart!) trick to give your wizard some relatively healthy combat skills in emergencies.LOL.  Got me in one.  Yes, that's pretty much me.  Did you manage that out of just the clues in this thread or have you been following me for a while?  Actually, it's worse than that.  I never really adopted 3.5 at all, and I saw 3.0 entirely through the lens of playing 1e for 15 years or so.   Even more so, because by that time I was playing a heavily house ruled 1e that was well on its way to 3e reforms anyway.  So while I was in awe of the 3e PH because it was such a clean unified design, I was like, "Harummph.  This version of Polymorph Self is broooken!", the first time I read the description and mentally compared it to 1e Polymorph Self (which was darn useful as it was, just for the mobility and disguise).    When 3.5 came along mostly I saw it as making the balance problems (other than Haste and Harm) over all worse, so I pretty much decided at that point I was going to fork off.  I play something that is more like 3.25, but I've never stopped DMing like I would for 1e.   My impression of the 3e DMG was quite literally, "Well, this is a good effort, but its not as useful as the 1e DMG."  I never actually bought the 3e version, and house ruled the XP and magical item creation system (which I felt was priced incorrectly).   I'm literally playing off the 3e PH, 3e MM, and 1e DMG, although by this point I have basically my own version of the PH, a 600 page house rule document that replaces all 3.X published chargen/advancement rules.  By elevating skills and to a certain extent feats (though I think 5e is likely to provoke me going another step down that route), while weakening spells (and a few other tweaks), and boosting weaker classes directly, I think I've got stronger balance between the classes.  I certainly have more flexible base classes.   It's not perfect, but for what I want from D&D, I've never been happier with the rules.   In theory, I could apply the OSRIC clean up to my 1e house rule concepts to achieve the same thing, but I've no pressing need to and the results would look a lot like 3e anyway.   Likewise, I think I could get 5e on a footing I'd enjoy, but I'm in an ongoing campaign and don't have time to really think hard about a new system.   Even more likely though, I'd probably do a Celebrim's House Rules version 1.5 where I cleaned up and simplified some rules using inspiration from Pathfinder's combat maneuver language and 5e's advantage mechanic.</blockquote>

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