My reason for removing Strength is simplicity. All attacks get your dex bonus to the to hit roll. Simple. No questions. Damage is affect by Strength unless it is obvious that the user's strength is not involved: crossbows, guns, catapults, cannons, etc.
Understood. I'd still prefer Strength to deal with offense and Dex. to deal with defense (in your original summation, no ability affects AC or physical defenses e.g. dodging); in other words, simple but in a different way.
Undead turning is a sore spot with me. I'd probably do something simple like d8 per level of damage to one specific undead creature, once per creature. Or 1d6 per level of damage to a group of undead, hitting the lowest level undead creature first and carrying damage over to the next lowest undead creature until used up. This makes it formidable against a serious undead threat and against underling undead as it always was.
Why does it have to be damage-based at all? The idea of undead turning is to make them run away - they don't take damage from it, except if the turning Cleric is really successful the undead are destroyed outright. The fun part of the run-away turning is that you know they're going to come back - all you've done is give yourself time to prepare.
I think you misunderstood. There would be only a set number of charts 5, maybe 6. And each class and multiclass combo would refer to one of the charts: Cleric = B, Fighter = B, Mage = D, Thief = A, Cl/thf = C, Cl/ftr = D, ftr/thf = C, ftr/mu = E, etc. So you still have variable progression rates. They just aren't as arbitrary as 1e originally was.
Yes, I think I did misunderstand, and I still don't get it. Also, how does this handle (if at all) someone who wants flexibility in how their classes advance? For example, if I'm playing a Fighter-Thief and want it to be mostly Fighter with just a bit of Thieving on the side (e.g. about a 75-25%ExP division), can your idea do this? Leaving the classes' ExP charts independent allows for this...
Messy? I can understand not like effects based damage. But calling an effect that changes by level messy means you don't want 1e. Second, most people focus on 1e being a class system and ignore that it is a class and level system. I want level to have more meaning in my 1e. And weapon damage by class AND LEVEL is a great place to get it. A 7th level fighter is more formidable with ALL weapons than a 1st level fighter not only because he hits more often but because his hits are more dangerous.
I call anything messy that makes the player do more bookkeeping at level-up, because in my own experience even the simplest of bookkeeping gets regularly missed, forgotten, or screwed up. Add to this that you're thinking of a 36-level game (as noted below), meaning characters are probably bumping on a relatively frequent basis, and you're staring down the barrel of a bookkeeping nightmare.
That said, I'd prefer very infrequent level bumps but each being significant. I don't at all mind the idea of a 1-10 or 1-15 game design; and while I like the idea of a 10th being much more powerful than a 1st I also want to see a system where a lucky 1st *can* seriously threaten a 10th. My example here is and always has been Merry, Eohyl, and the Ringwraith: you've got a somewhat-experienced Fighter and a nobody bringing down one of the most feared and powerful foes in the world. Any game of mine absolutely has to allow for this to happen, somehow.
My experience with 1e never stopped at 10th-12th level. In fact, we usually started at 20,000 xp (around 4th-5th level depending on class/multiclass combo) and stopped in the teens. Adventuring with 6th-8th level spells in play is a lot of fun that I continue to be surprised by how many people avoided it when reading threads about 1e here and elsewhere on the net.
I've found the game tends to break down badly around name level; many years of tweaks and changes have extended the playable range to (maybe) 12th-14th here, but that's it, I think.
For the record, I would have there be levels 1-36 like in BECMI and move name level to 15th level. The details would be in the spells and monsters and I'm not going to go too deeply into that. (Name level: This is of course the spot where owning castles comes into play as an option in the DMG. I always hated that stuff being in the PHB.)
I never used the BECMI system as written (though I've poached many an adventure from it), but having read some of the high-level adventures for it I really have to wonder how well it plays after about the 12th-15th range.
Clerics are annoying on so many levels. I can imagine a whole pantheon of bureaucratic deities that will not lift a finger to help their clerics if the forget to bow at precisely a 37 degree angle when casting a spell and as such clerics of that religion carry around prayer books so that they don't make even the slightest error when casting a prayer. I can also imagine a deity with only one 5th level cleric who will show up at the drop of a hat to do anything to keep that cleric alive. Between these extremes there are many kinds of deities and many levels of strictness to their requirements for clerics to cast spells. I picked the most restrictive method because it mirrors the wizard's method of prepping spells and is therefore somewhat more balanced. That makes it a great default. DMs are free to lift these restrictions however they like.
Where I'd just go with the simplest, with the balancing mechanism being how many (or few) they can cast in a day.
Lanefan
