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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6348799" data-attributes="member: 4937">Definitely with, since my longest stint as a player and at the higher levels of play was with, and I was able to see it first hand then.  Without I'm less confident in affirming, because I suspect it depends much more strongly on magic item availability at that point and that gets to be complex in play because certainly M-U's also need magic items to survive.Yes, but who did?  I tended to enforce as a DM 4d6 arrange to taste.  I did so because I found that it was basically impossible to enforce anything less.  If you tried to enforce 3d6 in order, what happened is you were forcing players to play characters that they didn't want to play.  In practice, that didn't work.  The logical extreme of that was falling on your sword 10 times in a row until the player got a character he wanted.  It also tended to lead to party discontent, as that one guy who got the lucky 18 or other lucky roll had a character that radically outclassed everyone else's character.  The table's in 1e tended to go: nothing, nothing, nothing, HUGE AMAZING ADVANTAGE.   Clerics and wizards without 17+ in their prime requisite were no less weakened as spellcasters than fighters without at least 1 big number in constitution, dexterity, or strength.  Perhaps indeed more so.  The logical extreme of that was that everyone was cheating because they felt ill used by the system.  Well, that is probably true, but I have to respectfully disagree with the Colonel.  He justifies this move with the typical weak argument of imagining a duel between an M-U and a fighter, and gives pretty weak analysis to boot.  The central problem here is that a solo M-U PC does no better under his scenarios, and probably does worse.  At least the PC fighter can survive the NPC's lightning bolt or fireball.  The PC M-U has a pretty decent chance of dying even if they pass their saving throw, to say nothing of surviving the second such attack.  And a PC M-U is not really more likely to save versus 7 simultaneous Charm Person attacks than the PC fighter is, an example that reveals more about the weakness of the design of charm person than it does the design of fighter's or M-U's.  Fundamentally the test of usefulness isn't, "Who in theory would win this one on one fight?", which honestly isn't clear to me in 1e starting the clock at zero for both characters and depends heavily on things like distance the engagement starts at and how much risk the M-U has of being disrupted.  Once the fighter gets into melee range, in 1e the fight is very strongly in his favor.The real test is, "How useful is the character in typical situations of play?"  The army was irrelevant except as a DM device for changing the narrative focus of play.  It was mostly something you had to protect, not something that protected you.   It increased the fighter's importance to the campaign maybe, but not his potency as an adventurer.</blockquote>

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