The difference between 10 and 18 was 4 points of bonus to AC (just like it is now), or 3 to ranged attacks. Except for a THIEF, who specifically got percentage bonuses to all the thief skills for a high DEX. (I don't recall them, but it varied by skill.) If your skill was 30%, and losing DEX made it drop to 15%, that wasn't just "3pt swing on a d20" (which is noticeable)... it was "only half as good as you used to be". (Same numbers, different perception, yay statistics!)
I've had some family in town lately and been putting off getting to this. Fair enough & I stand corrected on thief being even more of a mess than I remembered, no doubt one of the many reasons thief has the retrospective design reputation it does today. Although I still think that there are a couple solid reasons why the 1e example is a poor one for current d&d to justify any of its relevant design.
- Firstly is the one of time. Back in the old days of the hobby there were still a lot of norms we have today that hadn't really been settled or even considered. While today it might be totally normal and very much encouraged for a player to bring up those sorts of frustrations with the gm hoping to work out some middle ground solution or reasonable path to recovery... Back in the day "that's an option?" or "You can do that?" Would have been totally understandable reactions for someone having that talk it out suggestion told to them. The 1e dmg(?) even had a section about players hypothetically playing a dragon as a balanced class and the thief fox example someone's brought up earlier makes a good example of doing the sort of stuff it suggested
- Second is design in general. Removing the beast/monster reincarnation options in 3.x made sense at the time given the crazy doors it would open with feat/prc prerequisites and maybe trying to retroactively juggle level adjustments on a pc that may or may not have already had them. Adding the impact to magic item churn expectations on top of that could have easily made an unpredictable mess With 5e though it didn't add the entries back but did remove every single one of those past edition sticking points while ensuring beast type PC's would be a total nonissue through the moon druid.
- Finally the idea of playing an inhuman monster is not even all that far out given the reach & revenue of examples like Kumoko, Rimuru, Ainz, kaneki, Kanata, Alphonse, Eren, Clare, William , Rentt∆ and many more.
Old-school reincarnation being so weird while having so many class levels/high resource gating between it and more predictable options provided important incentive for players of low level PC's to clamp onto a town and care about being on its good side if they even thought that doing so
could grant them an in with an NPC who could do better when the chips are down.
In ad&d2e resurrection & reincarnate is a 7th level priest spell -OR- 6th level wizard spell while raise dead is only a 5th level priest spell. Resurrection has no penalties to system shock roll like raise dead & can bring back someone who died of old age explicitly denied to the others while lacking the resurrection "
no bob I don't want to cast that becauseCasting this spell makes it impossible for the priest to cast further spells or engage in combat until he has had one day of bed rest for each experience level or Hit Die of the creature brought back to life. The caster ages three years upon casting this spell.". That old age bit was actually relevant in these old editions because spells like haste restoration gate & so on aged recipients/casters
In 3.x they shed some of those mechanics & maybe for the better depending on how you look at it in the light of other changes. Unlike 5e though those loosening of teeth were offset with new & still meaningful costs. Raise dead was a 5th level spell that required a diamond worth 5000gp but had a few conditions that made it a non-option depending on how the target died & what was left of the body. Resurrection was a 7th level that required 10k & sidestepped most of those limits. true resurrection was a 9th level spell that took 25k in diamonds but sidestepped the limits. Spell compendium eventually added a 5th level
revivify spell, it sidestepped most of the restrictions other than needing a body the caster could touch & reduced the cost to 1k but only worked if cast within 1 round of death. Reincarnate was only 1k & had fewer restrictions along with the option of using some body part not present at the time of death
In 5e things went out the window with
raise dead being a 5th level spell with a 500gp component cost & no particularly meaningful conditions that would prevent its use other than old age in an edition that lacks spells where the recipient or caster is aged by it.
Resurrection &
true resurrection keep the 1k/25k costs & can revive what are usually just npcs who died long ago but there wasn't really much reason to go beyond the much cheaper raise dead outside of the players being given a macguffin they need to revive first.
Revivify drops the cost to 300gp & expands that 1 round to 10 by expanding it to within the last minute at the same time it dropped
three spell levels down to a 3rd level spell. Revivify is so cheap & effective it's totally functional in almost all cases & costs less than the average +1 weapon while every other option really only comes into play when gm fiat invalidates revivify. All of that is a loss that results in players getting a high value diamond and responding to the GM's explanation of important use by going from headscratching to "uh cool but we should sell it & buy some [magic items] in ways that would make even the most obnoxious of loot hungry 3.x munchkins blush with embarrassment.
∆spider slime undead ghoul goblin/orc/etc giant demon undead and more undead
