AD&D 1E Revised and Rebalanced Magic-User for 1e AD&D

[fuindordm]

Regarding scrolls:

To be more explicit, I do not use the DMG's incomplete recommendations for scroll creatiom. All a MU has to do is pony up the 100 gp (materials cost) and 1 day of downtime.

In my campaign, when you successfully learn a spell you also learn how to record it in your spellbook or store the magic on a scroll. It's all part of the same literary tradition.

Tangent:

How would preliterate MUs preserve their knowledge, if spells are forgotten when cast? The answer is that memorizing and casting are developed later. The first MUs may have created single use tokens, potions, or fetishes, physical manifestations of a spell that they could make copies of without destroying the original. Scrolls are just the modern form of such tokens, but crafting a single-use item is a fundamental feature of any spell.

With the advent of writing, eventually MUs learned to encode the incantations, contracts, symbols of a spell in a form that would not be consumed by casting the spell, and this also enabled more rapid progress on simplifying Or even eliminating the material focus. But scroll-making is so useful, it is still taught alomgside the spell.

Another tangent :

The rules in the DMG for researching new spells making potions are much more complete and reasonable uses of a MU's excess treasure. When you get to the scrolls it reads like Gary ran out of steam halfway through.

The DMG puts obstacles in front of magic item creation because Gary wanted his PCs out adventuring and enjoying the thrill, not staying at home making bespoke items to buff themselves and the party. Like many of the rulings in the DMG, magic item creation is one part creative writing, one part system expansion, and one part antagonistic gatekeeping to preserve what he saw as the best type of gaming.

 

[James Gasik]

Feats were deceptive. Because they were short, people assumed they were easy to design. In fact, the opposite is true. Designing a good feat is very hard.

3e's biggest problem was the absolute flood of mechanical content that flowed out of it and into it. Everyone wanted to get in on the design bandwagon. Almost no one was doing a good job of it, including the folks at WotC. The original rules were a masterpiece that just needed a bit of cleaning up. Instead, the profit motive caused WotC to focus heavily on just offering more and more stuff.



Not sure what you mean by that.



It failed by being too conservative, or at least too conservative about the wrong things. It did fix some things I think, but too much of it was arbitrary things people weren't asking for like, "No Paladins anymore." while unifying NWPs without actually figuring out what to do with them.

Ah, Feats. A wonderful bit of design. "Let's create special features that aren't tied to a character class, that you can use to customize your character." We'd seen some of this with a few NWP's like Blind Fighting, the Style Feats in Complete Fighter, and the crazy combat techniques found in the green DM reference books (The Celts book is truly mad) Sounds great, until you run into the following:

Feats that give you permission to do something. "Oh, I can't actually follow tracks? I need a Feat? I can't create magic items, I need a Feat?* I can't attract an NPC henchman, I need a Feat?"

*And not just all magic items, oh no, you need a separate Feat for each type, despite the fact that some items, like Rings or Rods, are super niche, and Wondrous Items can basically do almost anything, lol.

A subset of the above, Feats that give you permission to do something you thought you could do already, handily replicating the AD&D Thief problem- oh you thought you could perform research or find NPC's in a city? Sorry, we just made a Feat for that, with a bespoke subsystem!

Related to these are Feats that let you actually do something the game promises you can do- "Improved" Grapple, Disarm, Trip, Bull Rush, etc. etc.. "Hey, we have all these cool new things you can do in combat beside just swing a sword...but the penalties for doing them without the right Feat are so terrible that you might as well not even try."

Feats that no one would be happy taking. I'm not even talking about the "+1 to hit/+3 hit points/+1 to AC/+2 to a saving throw" nonsense- they provided very meager benefits, but at least they were largely static and didn't actively make you a worse character. No, you know the ones, that give small bonuses for extremely niche situations.

Combat Feats in general. Because the Fighter gets 11 of these over the course of their career, it was decided to create long chains of prerequisites for some Feats. If any other character threw all of their Feats at something, they could master one such chain, but because the Fighter had so many, heaven forbid they master two or more chains! Often, these prerequisites had very little to do with the Feat you were trying to reach- Combat Expertise is easy to pick on since many of the Feats it leads to are actively made worse if you were to use CE with them to lower your BAB! Sometimes it's nonsensical, like, what does CE have to do with Whirlwind Attack?

And sometimes, all the effort required gets you something that isn't even all that great. Most of the time, even if you are surrounded by foes, you're better off focusing enemies down one at a time as opposed to using Whirlwind Attack, for example. As the edition progressed, you got super long chain enders that nobody but a Fighter could hope to get, but by the time you get them, the magic system has potentially obsoleted the Fighter!

Add to this the fact that, as you pointed out, Feat design was all over the place, and of course, the inevitable power creep, and soon the game was bloated with all manner of Feats, a large percentage of which, I wonder if anyone ever used.