D&D General I'm a Fighter, not a Lover: Why the 1e Fighter was so Awesome

[ECMO3]

Witch: (to the holy man conducting the trial)" YOU pick it up!"

Cleric: "Er..."

Crowd: "Burn them both!"

I think the original ban against clerics using edged weapons comes from the Beayux Tapestry.

 

[Maxperson]

So we used a custom initiative which worked well with Segments. We rolled a 1d10 for initiative and then added speed factor or casting time to determine what initiative your attack or spell happened on. It made spell casters and especially spells with short casting times significantly more powerful.

We also always honored the level caps.

We used psionics, but in 20+ years of playing I can only remember 1 PC who rolled psionics. It completely broke most normal encounters. There was a lot of pages on psionics, but most of that only mattered if one psionic using creature was fighting with another psionic using creature.

We eventually used the grappling rules from Unearthed Arcana.

I think 75%-80% of the groups I played with didn't allow it. One of the groups I played with that did allow it let you roll for it, but if you failed you lost 1 point of int, wis and cha as a penalty for trying. In that group I was the only one who ever tried, and even then only if I had 1 score that qualified and it wasn't one I was using for my class, like if I happened to end up with a wise fighter or something.

I succeeded one time. Maybe twice, but I can only remember one for sure.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think 75%-80% of the groups I played with didn't allow it. One of the groups I played with that did allow it let you roll for it, but if you failed you lost 1 point of int, wis and cha as a penalty for trying. In that group I was the only one who ever tried, and even then only if I had 1 score that qualified and it wasn't one I was using for my class, like if I happened to end up with a wise fighter or something.

I succeeded one time. Maybe twice, but I can only remember one for sure.

Why didn't your DM just say they didn't like psionics and didn't want it in their game?

 

[Maxperson]

That, and it's clear Gygax never read Kurtz' Deryni books, some of which were out in the early-mid 70s. Had he done, I suspect psionics would look a lot different and there would have been a bunch of psionic-driven magic items in original 1e.

I think he did read her books. She had shields(psionic defenses), psionic attacks, psionic powers, etc. He just put them into the game in a modified fashion the same way the 1e ranger is Aragorn, yet not exactly Aragorn.

 

[Maxperson]

Why didn't your DM just say they didn't like psionics and didn't want it in their game?

I don't know. It was a looooooooooong time ago. It certainly wasn't for balance reasons. The same DM also had his own magic items tables and there was a special chart that you could reach that included all the deity weapons from the Deities and Demigods. At one point one of my PCs had a +6 spear that did 6-60 damage. Then he was killed by a death trap and both were lost.

 

[James Gasik]

Why didn't your DM just say they didn't like psionics and didn't want it in their game?

I guess they never heard of Grod's Law.

To whit: you cannot and should not balance bad mechanics by making them annoying to use.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I guess they never heard of Grod's Law.

To whit: you cannot and should not balance bad mechanics by making them annoying to use.

I was talking about the stat loss for failing the roll.

 

[Maxperson]

I guess they never heard of Grod's Law.

To whit: you cannot and should not balance bad mechanics by making them annoying to use.

To be fair, we weren't even out of high school and only really had the teachings of Gygax to follow, so make things punitive was sort of the way things were done if you didn't want the players to have it.

 

[Maxperson]

I was talking about the stat loss for failing the roll.

So was @James Gasik

 

[Micah Sweet]

So was @James Gasik

Since you don't suffer stat loss if you succeed on the psionics roll, the ability isn't annoying to use. Its annoying to acquire.