Celebrim
Legend
No, 1E needed a core DM focused book on item creation giving suggested recipes for core items and some tables for randoming up ingredients to any other item you might want, plus some guidelines on substitution and customizing item creation recipes to your particular campaign.
It wouldn't have hurt to have brought permenancy and enchant item down to 5th level spells, so name level wizards would have access to the system.
That at least is very much in the style of 1st edition.
It's more of a matter of how big of a problem it is percieved as. I don't percieve it as a very big problem at all. Maybe a rule for opting out of a class advancement once you've maxed in that class. Maybe moving the caps out 50% or so. That would be enough for me.
I think this is an even clearer problem with a skill like 'Jump' where the expected variation in how far you jump is actually pretty low. First edition basically says, "If you can jump, you can go this far." For my part, I write jump as a NWP in our new revised approach like this:
Jump: For the purposes of making jumps, you have a +3 bonus on your attributes.
Then we just have some standard rules for how far you can make a running jump, something like 1/2 your height + 1' point of strength and some modifiers for encumbrance.
Obviously, the approach I'm going for here is to obselete 'Acrobat' in its quasi-prestige class form. If you want a thief that is an acrobat, you take the appropriate NWP's over the course of your career.
For Swim I'd do something like:
Swim: Provided you have no more than light encumberance, you can trend water without making an attribute check and you may treat treading water as a light activity for the purpose of fatigue. You have a +3 bonus to your attributes for the purpose of overcoming swimming challenges.
Obviously, make swords.
I would say it would depend on his attributes. No version of D&D has had a really good crafting system.
I would prefer that. It's certainly implied in 1st edition that extraordinary NPC's can do that. Presumably you could have some sort of difficult ability check that would allow you to add magical value to a weapon, eventually accumulating enough value to replace the otherwise necessary spells.
Much as with the item crafting feats in 3e added very little value to a PC if you could go down to wal-mart and buy whatever magic items you wanted, so item crafting NWP will add little to a PC if mundane items are easily obtained. However, craft NWP add all the following IMO:
1) They allow for non-standard campaigns (bronze age campaign where iron making skill is rare) where crafting is more valuable than normal should a DM want them.
2) They can efectively increase player starting wealth by decreasing the cost of items. You can just assume if the PC can make something, that already made items for his own use at whatever reduced cost making an item vs. buying one provides.
3) They open up rare but interesting out of combat challenges even in a standard game - shipwrecked on desert island or other survival challenge, impress merchant/craftsman with your shared passion for an art, impress primitive with your technical skill, fix the broken mcguffin, etc.
4) They open up the possibility of the player becoming a master smith, capable of performing feats of legend, fix the broken mcguffin, forge magic items in your down time, etc.
Agreed.
It could have been though.
I disagree. The really cool thing about 1e psionics was that it was more or less completely divorsed from the class system. It was this little wierd subsystem reflecting natural talent that had fairly little to do with your level. You could be low level and a profoundly talented psionic. That had a flavor that has never been captured since, because to the extent that psionics need to be the game at all, that flavor of the 'child talent' the 'uncanny ability' is central to the mythology of the paranormal.
Agreed.
It should be noted that if this was 'fix 3e', and the topic was psionics I would say, 'Make 'em spells. If you want to play a psionic, take sorcerer and the appropriate spells." That's because one of the strengths of 3e is its flexbility and relative commitment to balance. But that approach doesn't really work for 1e IMO.
One of the things that 3e shows is how relatively well balanced the 1e spells were. Few of the 3e attempts to fix the problem really succeeded. Evocation was too strong in 1e, but they overdid the nerfing in 3e. Spells like haste, polymorph, and so forth had very important restrictions in 1e that when dropped, resulted in spells that were overly strong. Spell use was quite arguably a much bigger problem in 3e than it had been in 1e, and spellcasters at high level were more dominating in 3e than they had been in 1e.
Far more limited than you do. My central complaint about Fireball is that defensive magic is harder in D&D than it should be, and that it invalidates armies. There should be relatively common low level spells for warding and defending a location against magical attack. Some of the 3e rules for cover and evasion did alot to resolve the problem or at least gave the tools to do so.
For Invisibility, most of the problems I had with it in 1e were resolved in 3e by generalized concealment rules, the scent ability, and reduced duration of effect. The only other problem with it is that it effectively gives you infinite hide skill for a short time, but there are ways to address that problem as well.
The vast majority of all spells in 1e are fine. There are only a few famous ones that need some touch up, and in some cases that touch up is contextual (like the fact you can fireball something, but not easily create an immovable magical ward that reduces or blocks fire). Reducing the damage from fireball might be a good idea (maybe to 1d8/2 caster levels) to prevent it from being an uberspell and dominating certain forms of play (notably, martial focused campaigns), but really I think it is a pretty minor issue once you've put into place everything else.
You'll note that in my original list, I made suggestions about addressing it. I think 3e did a pretty decent job of addressing low level caster power. It's that those improvements carried over to high levels, and they did little to restrict casters at high level.
