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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9882650" data-attributes="member: 4937">The Cavalier was clearly a bit overpowered, but I never hated it.  I felt it was a really cool idea that wasn’t quite executed well.  But, I also disliked the published attempts to revise it more than I hated the original.  The Cavalier had two main problems, which was that it was almost entirely (but not quite) a strictly better fighter, and like the Barbarian it shared a write up which if taken literally was not conducive to group play.   While it did buff the Paladin into an uber-class that was less of a worry for me at the time because Specialization had made the Fighter into an S tier class that almost required the Paladin to get a buff.  When I revised the thief, I wasn’t intending to revise any other class.  But I ended up revising Assassin because someone asked how the changes would impact that class, and then Barbarian came up in the discussion, and that brought up the idea of revising the Ranger, but I’ve now realized I can’t revise the Ranger without first revising the Cavalier. And I’m going to revise the Cavalier in a bit of an unexpected direction, as I’m now looking at changing Cavalier and Ranger as being classes you go into when all your ability scores are pretty good, to classes that you can go into without having any great ability scores but will reward you for being across the board pretty OK score and still have a great end game that will compete with the end games of players who rolled one or more early 18’s.  This lets me avoid the problem of having to alter the way 1e AD&D handles ability scores, which would be too profound of a rewrite for these purposes in that I’m not actually trying to recreate 3e (which is where you end up if you fix, revise, and simplify almost everything). I’m not at all sure if I like the whole rigidly defined list of followers thing, and I vastly prefer followers to be established by the logical course of roleplay, but it is a very 1e AD&D thing, so I retained at least the core of it.This is a much narrower write up than I would do for a 3e style class, which would have a lot less cultural baggage and a lot more flexibility with the same concept.  That isn’t very 1e in style though, and so one may presume that for non-lawful types with non-aristocratic backgrounds there exists classes like Gladiator and Berserker that offer similar benefits but with slightly different flavor and mechanics.</blockquote>

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