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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 9451048" data-attributes="member: 6777737">#2 makes as much sense to me as anything. There has often been a tendency for DMs to complain that the game is broken, especially when (a) other people play differently than you, and (b) they're clearly having a ton of fun!I still remember how genuinely surprised I was reading 1e and seeing that 4d6 was not only recommended, but that the game said you need two 15s to have a good character!I think elven fighter/mages and fighter/mage/thieves got worse in 2e. Spellcasting in armor was legitimately nuts.However, I think every other multiclass option got much better because (a) the human-only specialty classes got nerfed (Ranger especially), (b) demihuman level limits went way up, and (c) the flexibility of Thief skills in 2e meant you could pick 2-3 and max them out fairly quickly. While I've often said that level limits are the kind of rule strictly enforced at session 1 and frequently ignored at session 30, the 2e AD&D rules increased the level limits so high that I genuinely don't think we ever encountered them anymore. Our campaigns ended before the PCs could reach them.Here's the 1e AD&D level limits:[ATTACH=full]378788[/ATTACH]These are severe level limits that you're almost certain to hit in any campaign of any length. Clerics in particular are effectively unavailable except for humans. You have Half-Elven (5) and Half-Orc (4). The exceptions are half-elven druid, the Assassin class (which IMX never saw play because poison and PVP), and (specifically) elven magic-users with very high Int. Most elven fighter/mages you'd actually roll are limited to fighter 5/mage 9.Then you look at 2e:[ATTACH=full]378791[/ATTACH]I mean, what? There's 15s and 16s all over that table even if we ignore that Thief is now capped. Like did you know half-elven ranger had a level limit? I don't know that I did until today. Ranger 16 is not really a "limit" in any real sense. Our elven fighter 5/mage 9 can suddenly be a fighter 12/mage 15. That's 13 more class levels you can earn. Are you ever playing the game to level 15? I can tell you that we did it once, and I think it only happened because we converted to 3e around level 10.Also note that 2e buries this table in the DMG, where it also provides two optional rules to bypass the limit. If your prime requisite is a 14-15, you get +1 level. 16-17 is +2, 18 is +3, and 19 is +4. Or they offer slower advancement, requiring double, triple, or quadruple XP to advance. Sure, it would suck to have 1/4 XP progression past Thief 12 on top of already being triple-classed, but it's still progression. It's not the retirement black hole that 1e offered.2e Thief could max a few abilities faster, making it better for focused and (especially) multiclass characters, but B/X Thief maxed out by level 14. It was just good enough by level 10. BECMI took the 14th level Thief and retroactively smeared it over 36 levels, while the AD&D Thief kept similar progression, and then it introduced the real bane of the 2e class: armor penalties. That's why thief/mage was so good. You didn't have armor penalties and you got the skill points meant to compensate for that. Meanwhile, attack routines for martial characters were worse in B/X, spell selection was much worse, hit points were lower for everyone across the board, and nobody else had any thieving abilities.It's not that Thief didn't suck. It always sucked in 20th century D&D. It just wasn't so far behind or out-classed in B/X.Yeah, or "balancing" with roleplaying restrictions like kits and alignment. That doesn't work, either. The thing is... Gary knew the martial/caster divide existed in 1975. That's when they published Greyhawk, which included percentile strength and (IIRC) the improved Con bonuses for warriors. But like you say, the design was only balanced if everyone got god rolls.</blockquote>

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