Oh, so now we're counting house rules too are we? Where in the spell does it say that the MU needs to make any sort of check to find anything on his person? Of course, I'm sure that looking in my pocket to find something would be extremely difficult without being able to see. I can never find my keys in the dark.
Now ask your wife to do the same thing with her purse, except throw 30 sets of keys in there and ask her to pick the right one. A spell component pouch will be full of LOTS of things. Including a live spider. It's not a house rule.
Why? Why does Knock make any particular noise? How does fly make more noise than climbing a wall? Does the fly spell now come with WHOOSH sounds every time I move?
Because it requires speaking.
You've got a VERY strange definition of "most". Invisiblity is a second level spell. So is Knock. Spider Climb is first IIRC (been a while). I've still got SEVEN SPELL LEVELS that haven't even been touched yet. Never minding scrolls.
Assuming 17th level. What about 5th level or 10th?
As far as "crap AC" goes, his AC should be 2 worse than the thief's. After all, you've continuously talked about how characters in 1e don't have all sorts of magic items. So, our thief has an AC of 8 and the MU a 10.
And probably a dex bonus of some sort, but even so, that's a 10% difference. Also, I never said pcs didn't have any magic items. Armor is a pretty common item on the magic item tables. Bracers are not.
Since you brought up scrolls, I'd point out that well before the thief can read them, the MU can MAKE them, and he gets bonus XP for doing so.
And jump through hoops to do so. Here's an example requirement for a protection for petrification scroll: 1 oz giant squid sepia, 1 basilisk eye, 3 cockatrice feathers, 1 scruple of venom from a medusa's snakes, 1 large peridot, powdered, 1 medium topaz, powdered, 2 drams holy water, and pumpkin seeds.
Harvest the pumpkin in the dark of the moon and dry the seeds over a slow fire of sandalwood and horse dung. Select three perfect ones and grind them into a coarse meal, husks and all. Boil the basilisk eye and cockatrice feathers for exactly 5 minutes in a saline solution, drain, and place in a jar. Add the medusa’s snake venom and gem powders. Allow to stand for 24 hours, stirring occasionally. Pour off liquid into bottle, add sepia and holy water, mixing contents with a silver rod, stirring widdershins. Makes ink sufficient for one scroll. ONE scroll. Good luck mass producing those.
Enough with the insults. I'd put my players up against the best the hobby has to offer. Most of them have over 30 years of experience. My players tend to just play magic users who are magic users and not rogues.
I mean, good grief, why do you think that thieves had the lowest XP requirements? If a thief was equivalent to a MU, shouldn't their XP values be similar? All the other classes work like that.
Equivalent? Hardly. That's your problem. 1e classes are meant to represent an archetype first, game balance is secondary. The thief is best at what he does, a mu may be able to sub for him temporarily, but he'll always be subpar.
Look, I get that you have experience with players who are utterly incompetent when playing casters. I get that. But, believe us when we say that we have players who are not. We have players who are very, very good at taking the VAST resources that a wizard (or any other caster) gets and can make the thief look like a punk.
But I'm tired of the endless insults from you goading me into responding and then getting threadbanned for half the aggression you get away with. So I'll save us both the hassle and make the first addition I have ever made on any forum to my ignore list.
Nor, apparently, can I whisper. And, it's funny. The rules allow for casters to create scrolls. But, some DM's simply cock block the character from doing so by picking and choosing specific elements of the books. Never minding, of course, that in a land with magic users, it's probably possible to BUY most of the items on that list. But, hey, whatever works right?
