Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5035961" data-attributes="member: 4937">I agree with this as a mission statement. And you clearly get it.In particular, they should never get in the way of common player centric challenges.  So 1e skills should strongly avoid modifying mental activities, strongly impacting social situations, replacing dungeoneering, or problem solving and instead reflect only unusual skills that the player cannot assert he ought to have.  Skills essentially should be reserved for the sort of physical challenge resolution that the combat rules themself.  "Can I accomplish this difficult physical or technically difficult feat?"  Furthermore, they shouldn't completely overshadow attributes, because 1e basically assumes that someone with high dexterity is widely compotent at virtually everything related to gracefulness.   So the modifiers applied by skills should be small when they impact things 'anyone can do' (jumping, dancing, swimming, etc.), or else they should open up abilities we normally associate only with great skill and training.  Skills must remain minor benefits to help round out a character.  They can't be the focus of a 1e style game. That is very well thought out, and I hereby fully endorse it. I agree with the existance of the problem, but not with the proposed solution.  One of the central strengths of 1e compared to 3e is that at high levels, just as 'save or suck' is becoming common and the loss of a character disasterous, the characters are also getting better and better at avoiding effects.  I'm not convinced the solution you propose helps the real problem, and it potentially involves a lot of work that only makes the situation worse.Some amount of spell-rebalancing is probably in order.  I think your proposed changes perhaps exceed what I'm comfortable with and sound again more like a solution informed by the problems of 3e than the problems of 1e.   For example, you go off on fireball, but fireball is an intensely problimatic spell to both DMs and players.  My characters almost never memorized it because when it rocked, it rocked, but there were a huge number of situations in which it was worse than useless.  Cone of cold was much nicer than fireball simply because it was so much safer and less likely to backfire on you and kill half the party.  Some rebalancing is in order, but I don't see a need to make that the focus of the effort.I'm assuming you don't mean a wand of magic missiles.  I very much disagree.  One of the central ideas of 1e is that your wizard has limited resources that you must horde up and carefully dispense at critical moments.  I think that at low levels (below 7th) the wizard might have too few resources (at least until he gets several wands), but I don't agree with unlimited minor resources. You seem to find balancing the wizard much much more important than I do.  I never found the wizard to be particularly problimatic in play.  The main problem with Invisibility was essentially that it was permenent.  The secondary problem is that the rules regarding detecting and interacting with invisibility didn't take into account things like scent and relied to heavily on intelligence rather than perception.  The big problem with fireball was really that invalidated the existance of things like armies, castles, and wooden ships.  It wasn't that it was broken in terms of dungeoneering.  In general, you seem to find spells more of a problem than I did and I think your efforts here are misplaced.I believe I addressed this already.I believe that the rumors of 1e M-U's being overwhelming at higher levels is largely a myth.  1e M-U's were incredibly squishy.  They had almost no hit points and never really reached the point that they weren't one bad round from trouble.  They had relatively bad saving throws.  They faced SR and anti-magic fields.  Fighters were still essential to a successful high level party. I partly agree.  The rule that XP for finding money should be scaled by the relative challenge in obtaining it should be strictly enforced.  If a 1st level character takes 100 gp from kobolds, then 100 XP is in order.  If a 20th level character takes 100 gp from kobolds, then by the rules this is only worth about 5 XP.  I'm fine with 'treasure as a means of keeping score', though I would prefer to rebalance the ratio of monster XP to treasure XP so that you don't have to stuff a dungeon with excessive treasure in order to ensure proper rates of advancement.  Not every 10th level character needs to be walking around with the wealth of a whole kingdom.I'm in general agreement with you that magic should not be fungible with money, but on the other hand, that was never really a 1e problem.  That's another 3e problem that we really don't have to worry about.I disagree.  This never worked that well in practice and it wasn't in practice balanced even with itself.  The great bulk of the worlds inhabitants are assumed to be very low level.  That's all that really need be said.  Everything else is campaign specific.Sure.  But again, you are ranting against a problem not really encountered in 1st edition.  This is the game system that in a published module represented a group of warriors as 5HD monsters with 1d10 hitpoints each.  Of course the DM can do anything he wants.  You are ranting against problems introduced in 3e.  We dont' really have to worry about those except to the extent that we want to avoid recreating all of them.</blockquote>

Verification