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

[Celebrim]

So another example of 3e catching up to where we already were (we've had the 8-hour limit since about 1987). Love it!

I think 3e requires an hour or something trivial. But yes, 3e is very much a take on the game by people who knew the game very well in 1987 and sought to take the best ideas that were floating around and unify them into a coherent game system. Feats and skills are obviously derived from NWPs but cleaned up to be made functional. Everything gets rewritten so that you can use a consistent "roll high" mechanic. The Monks class feature of taking no damage on a successful save gets generalized as "Evasion" and so on and so forth. It's why I fell in love with 3e the first time I saw it, because it was so much the game I was trying to make circa 1990 but didn't have the maturity and experience to create on my own.

I still, as these threads show, have nostalgic feelings for the text and baroque complexity of 1e AD&D, but there is no denying that much of its complexity is ill thought out and bad for the game. There are parts of its complexity that I think 3e D&D misses a bit and some mistakes made in the 3e design (notably around saving throws) but overall 3e is just fixed 1e AD&D.

 

[cbwjm]

This is what 3e does, and once again I note that a fixed 1e AD&D is 3e and really talking about fixing 1e AD&D while retaining it's feel is just a discussion of what parts of 3e do you want to implement.

It was also a rule in BECMI (so, presumably also early BX), spell memorisation only took an hour so it could also be a case of looking back at older editions.

 

[Celebrim]

I will bring up a few things no one has commented on yet:

a) Level titles have changed to minimize overlap with other potential classes or to avoid suggesting things that are just not true of a generic M-U. Thaumaturgy and theurgy are more properly associated with clerical magic than with wizards, and necromancer is type of magic in D&D and not a general mastery of it. I'd do away with "Evoker", "Conjurer" and "Sorcerer" if I could think of good titles, and probably "Witch" as well.

b) Maybe most subtly of all I've slightly reworked the very baroque spell progression. But notice for example that I've moved a 2nd level spell you would acquire at 9th level to 7th level. That's because Gygax does have something like a pattern but he keeps breaking it. The pattern at first is that you gain N-1 new spell levels at each level past the first. So 1 new spell level and 2nd level, then 2 new spell levels at 3rd, then 3 new spell levels and so forth. The delayed 2nd level spell until 9th breaks this pattern which my revision follows all the way up to 12th level. After that the regularity breaks to delay the game breaking 6th level spells a bit, but I tend to continue this revision of moving ahead delayed spells to smooth the progression which is bumpier and more uneven in the original. I doubt anyone noticed, but the pattern is prettier to me in my version than in Gygax's. He also settles on a pattern of increasing your count of spells by 1 every three levels, where my pattern settles on increasing the count of spells by 1 every four levels, which I find superior even if it doesn't really matter.

c) No one has commented on the fact that I didn't fix the wonkiness of the XP progression of the class. The class starts out slower in progression than a fighter but then rapidly speeds up until it is faster than a fighter through the mid-levels, before slowing down to be appropriately much slower than a fighter at higher levels. But as the only class that is really gaining anything important after 18th level, I'm inclined to have it start out leveling faster than a fighter but then go slower and slower through the mid-levels since this accurately reflects its power level. There is no reason to be punishing up to 5th level and then suddenly at 6th level when the class is really taking off in power, make it level up faster until 11th level before slowing down again. I can't imagine what the thinking is. There is a period where it actually catches up to thief, which is ridiculous, or at least I think it is. Does this bother anyone else, or is it just me?

 

[cbwjm]

2e doesn't really use level titles so I've never really been up on the play with them.

I did look at your spell slot table but I wasn't able to quickly tell if anything much had changed. I think I checked level 12 to see if you'd altered it, I missed that 1st-level spell slots had 5 instead of 4 slots though.

There's a lot of wonkiness in regard to the xp tables of ADnD, wizards end up hit level 12 before the cleric and fighter who then start to level faster again (cleric catches up to the wizard at 13th level and fighter at 14th level). I remember that druids became the basis for specialty priests in 2e and that they kept the extreme amount of xp druids needed at higher levels until maybe the 3rd forgotten realms deity supplement which corrected it.

 

[James Gasik]

I will bring up a few things no one has commented on yet:

a) Level titles have changed to minimize overlap with other potential classes or to avoid suggesting things that are just not true of a generic M-U. Thaumaturgy and theurgy are more properly associated with clerical magic than with wizards, and necromancer is type of magic in D&D and not a general mastery of it. I'd do away with "Evoker", "Conjurer" and "Sorcerer" if I could think of good titles, and probably "Witch" as well.

b) Maybe most subtly of all I've slightly reworked the very baroque spell progression. But notice for example that I've moved a 2nd level spell you would acquire at 9th level to 7th level. That's because Gygax does have something like a pattern but he keeps breaking it. The pattern at first is that you gain N-1 new spell levels at each level past the first. So 1 new spell level and 2nd level, then 2 new spell levels at 3rd, then 3 new spell levels and so forth. The delayed 2nd level spell until 9th breaks this pattern which my revision follows all the way up to 12th level. After that the regularity breaks to delay the game breaking 6th level spells a bit, but I tend to continue this revision of moving ahead delayed spells to smooth the progression which is bumpier and more uneven in the original. I doubt anyone noticed, but the pattern is prettier to me in my version than in Gygax's. He also settles on a pattern of increasing your count of spells by 1 every three levels, where my pattern settles on increasing the count of spells by 1 every four levels, which I find superior even if it doesn't really matter.

c) No one has commented on the fact that I didn't fix the wonkiness of the XP progression of the class. The class starts out slower in progression than a fighter but then rapidly speeds up until it is faster than a fighter through the mid-levels, before slowing down to be appropriately much slower than a fighter at higher levels. But as the only class that is really gaining anything important after 18th level, I'm inclined to have it start out leveling faster than a fighter but then go slower and slower through the mid-levels since this accurately reflects its power level. There is no reason to be punishing up to 5th level and then suddenly at 6th level when the class is really taking off in power, make it level up faster until 11th level before slowing down again. I can't imagine what the thinking is. There is a period where it actually catches up to thief, which is ridiculous, or at least I think it is. Does this bother anyone else, or is it just me?

AD&D xp charts are just mind-boggling. I remember the 2e DMG attempted to explain how they were derived, with it's class creation rules, but then immediately pointed out you cannot create the existing classes using them! The numbers seem completely arbitrary to me, and stray from their pattern at equally arbitrary intervals- maybe someone understands it, but I sure never did.

It also doesn't help that there is no rhyme or reason to the source of xp. The xp value of monsters has many, many examples where someone just decided on a number and called it a day. Treasure values are random, and there are many effects that can raise or lower one's level or xp total out of thin air.

How quickly a given character advances in level is entirely dependent on the campaign and often pure luck, and that's without even getting into the madness of training subsystems that function as a limiter on advancement (and additional limiters like Druids, Monks, and Assassins duking it out for the privilege of advancing to a new level of experience).

I made a comment previously about lowering the xp requirements for Illusionists, but I don't know that it would make much of an impact. I've had more than one DM who, tiring of the bookkeeping of calculating xp, would just arbitrarily advance characters in level across the board when they deemed fit, radicalizing the imbalance between classes- imagine a game where the Fighter, Thief, and Magic-User are always the same level as one another!

 

[cbwjm]

I made a comment previously about lowering the xp requirements for Illusionists, but I don't know that it would make much of an impact. I've had more than one DM who, tiring of the bookkeeping of calculating xp, would just arbitrarily advance characters in level across the board when they deemed fit, radicalizing the imbalance between classes- imagine a game where the Fighter, Thief, and Magic-User are always the same level as one another!

I wouldn't like that in TSR editions, once they standardised the xp across the board I think I became less likely to care about xp.

If I was going to use milestone levelling in 2e, I'd probably use the fighter xp chart and hand out the xp needed for a fighter to hit the next level. At least that way the different xp charts and multiclass characters would balance out somewhat.

 

[Lanefan]

I think 3e requires an hour or something trivial. But yes, 3e is very much a take on the game by people who knew the game very well in 1987 and sought to take the best ideas that were floating around and unify them into a coherent game system. Feats and skills are obviously derived from NWPs but cleaned up to be made functional.

Well, we could argue as to just how (dis)functional 3e skills are/were.

Feats were a nightmare.

Everything gets rewritten so that you can use a consistent "roll high" mechanic. The Monks class feature of taking no damage on a successful save gets generalized as "Evasion" and so on and so forth. It's why I fell in love with 3e the first time I saw it, because it was so much the game I was trying to make circa 1990 but didn't have the maturity and experience to create on my own.

3e had some good ideas here and there but overall wasn't a great system IMO (and 4e wasn't any better). The design direction of pushing more game-mechanical work over to the players never sat well.

I still, as these threads show, have nostalgic feelings for the text and baroque complexity of 1e AD&D, but there is no denying that much of its complexity is ill thought out and bad for the game. There are parts of its complexity that I think 3e D&D misses a bit and some mistakes made in the 3e design (notably around saving throws) but overall 3e is just fixed 1e AD&D.

I think 2e was trying to be fixed 1e - one could argue whether it succeeded or not - but lost the plot once the splatbooks and supplements started coming out. 3e broke as much as it fixed and shoehorned far too many things into the d20 mechanic.

 

[Lanefan]

c) No one has commented on the fact that I didn't fix the wonkiness of the XP progression of the class. The class starts out slower in progression than a fighter but then rapidly speeds up until it is faster than a fighter through the mid-levels, before slowing down to be appropriately much slower than a fighter at higher levels.

I didn't notice that, but it's IMO a problem with RAW 1e. MUs should advance slower than Fighters all the way along, except mayyyyybe at 1st-2nd level.

 

[Lanefan]

AD&D xp charts are just mind-boggling. I remember the 2e DMG attempted to explain how they were derived, with it's class creation rules, but then immediately pointed out you cannot create the existing classes using them! The numbers seem completely arbitrary to me, and stray from their pattern at equally arbitrary intervals- maybe someone understands it, but I sure never did.

Yeah, there's some oddities there - but they're easliy fixed.

It also doesn't help that there is no rhyme or reason to the source of xp. The xp value of monsters has many, many examples where someone just decided on a number and called it a day.

More consistent, though also more work, is to use the xp calculation chart for everything rather than relying on the numbers given in appendix E. That said, I'm lazy, and if appendix E gives me a number I'll just use that.

... there are many effects that can raise or lower one's level or xp total out of thin air.

I love these!

How quickly a given character advances in level is entirely dependent on the campaign and often pure luck, and that's without even getting into the madness of training subsystems that function as a limiter on advancement

I've always seen D&D as a game of luck anyway. The RAW training system is too harsh IMO where it stops you dead at 1 point into the new level. Better I think to allow some advancement into the new level at a slower rate, but no benefits of said new level until training is completed.

(and additional limiters like Druids, Monks, and Assassins duking it out for the privilege of advancing to a new level of experience).

That's one that doesn't make sense to me and never has; in that by strict RAW if there's nobody already in the level for you to kill, you can't advance.

Then again, kill-to-advance doesn't start until about 11th level, so it's not something I've had to worry about yet.

I made a comment previously about lowering the xp requirements for Illusionists, but I don't know that it would make much of an impact. I've had more than one DM who, tiring of the bookkeeping of calculating xp, would just arbitrarily advance characters in level across the board when they deemed fit, radicalizing the imbalance between classes- imagine a game where the Fighter, Thief, and Magic-User are always the same level as one another!

That's a lazy DM, and one I'd have serious second thoughts about playing with.

 

[Celebrim]

Feats were a nightmare.

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.

The design direction of pushing more game-mechanical work over to the players never sat well.

Not sure what you mean by that.

I think 2e was trying to be fixed 1e - one could argue whether it succeeded or not

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.