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.

 

[fuindordm]

@James Gasik I am also bitter about how feats turned out. Good idea but terrible implementation and no design guidelines for what a feat should be.

I'm not very happy with 5e feats either.

 

[LordBP]

One interesting question is could you port Sorcerer into 1e AD&D.

But your solution misses the point that fundamentally the power level of low level M-U's is not excessive. M-U's only get to be a real problem when the 5th and 6th level spells come online, and they can start doing really game breaking things. They are generally balanced with the other classes between say 3rd and 8th level, and if anything are on the weak side to that point barring the lucky (and allowed) acquisition of some game breaking item like a Wand of Flame with a lot of charges or a Staff of the Magi. This is even more true if you start applying the whole of the RAW to them, like weapon vs. AC modifiers (the discussion that really launched my series of essays).

I feel sometimes in this thread like the time I met my future brother in law's (then a little high school munchkin) and the friend was telling me about his 30th level Paladin who could kill anything and was currently working his way through the Deities and Demigods, and I was like, "Let's just have a little practice game and let's see if I can kill you with just the Monster manual.", then I proceeded to just murder the Paladin with a pit trap and an eye of the deep, before the then naked Paladin and half-dead Paladin was eaten by a roper. It didn't take much, just making the game something other than duels on a tournament surface.

I assure everyone, a low level M-U does not survive. If I ran a game for a party and one had a low level M-U, they would die to something simply from me not trying to avoid killing them; not even vengefully targetting the M-U.



I'm pretty much OK with recharging wands forever, just as long as you put in the time and appropriate spell slots. I wouldn't let you recharge a wand of polymorph with a 1st level spell, but I would let you say recharge a wand of magic missiles if you knew magic missile. provided you were willing to spend an amount of time and money proportionate to the creation of the item and proportionate to the charges regained.

But the last thing we need is a class that is only viable if they find early on rare and highly expensive magical items.



Which doesn't help you at 1st level anyway, since you have neither the money nor ability to acquire said exotic materials like griffon's blood and giant squid ink.



So, this choice is IMO incoherent (not "I wouldn't use cantrips" but "I wouldn't use cantrips to preserve a low magic setting"). What you end up creating is a setting which is high magic where the PCs are, but which is mysteriously clueless and incompetent regarding something that exists and is actually pervasive with respect to how NPCs behave. What is coherent is that low level magic is common and familiar because all the evidence is that NPCs live in a world where that is true, but high-level magic is very rare and those that master it deemed consequential. Otherwise, you are dealing with a problem that the king's guards make no allowance for invisible creatures, castles aren't constructed with the assumption of flying creatures, and merchants don't realize they can be magically swindled and have no defenses against it. "Only the PCs have magic" is an incoherent choice that leads to dysfunctional play. You don't have to fill the world with magical wonders like Eberron (though that setting is coherent IMO) but you do have to assume that people live day to day in a world of spirits, fairies, magicians, and werewolves because that's where the PC's are going to end up living, and they aren't unique or special.

Even with Gygaxian realism, the presence of high level NPCs is pretty darn prevalent. "Village of Homlet" would not and absolutely does not get passed my own sensibilities because there are vastly too many high-level NPCs in such a small settlement.

I personally wouldn't have a sorcerer at all. Prefer a magic user that has a bit more utility as I described.

As for magic users being weak and easy to kill at low levels, I don't have a problem with that as it tends to balance out their power at the high levels (the lucky and smart survive to make it to high levels).

The recharge wand spell would be just to prepare the wand for recharge. They would still have to memorize the spell that would be used to recharge the wand. Haven't considered if they could use scrolls, but I might let them do that. So, each spell would be 1 charge. Not a fan of multi-spell wands, so it would be limited to a single spell per wand. I would have limits on the recharges though.

As for creating scrolls, each spell would have it's own unique items it needs, so something like magic missile may require white goose feathers and ink made from ground up magnets (just made this up, so don't laugh too much). The higher level spells would have more exotic and harder to obtain materials for the scribing of the spells to scrolls. You could also see if the local alchemist has any needed materials that they would be willing to part with (could be an adventure hook).

I prefer magic to be more like DCC in that it's unstable and has a cost.

Hommlet was a special case as if memory serves a lot of the high level NPCs were there because of Iuz paramour Zuggtmoy, that was imprisoned in the Temple of Elemental Evil and they were there to keep an eye on it.

 

[James Gasik]

@James Gasik I am also bitter about how feats turned out. Good idea but terrible implementation and no design guidelines for what a feat should be.

I'm not very happy with 5e feats either.

At the risk of further derailing the conversation, the 5e Feats are a step in a better direction, mostly. The weak passive bonus type Feats at least grant a stat improvement, and the good Feats have multiple abilities packaged together. Granted, you get less of them, but taking a Feat in 5e usually makes you feel like you got something cool tacked onto your character. Other people, like Kobold Press, have taken this ball and ran with it- "Talents", as they are known in Tales of the Valiant are really cool things to have (though, admittedly, the power level is a little shaky. There's not many duds, but some, especially in the Technical Talents, feel a cut above their peers).

 

[James Gasik]

There was a spell to recharge magic items in an issue of Dragon, my DM ported it into his 2e game. Sadly, I can't recall which issue it was in, and there's a lot of them.

I miss Dragon magazine.

 

[Mannahnin]

I like the revision.

True to the original with some cleanup, and a power bump with spells known and spell slots for higher Int, plus the mechanic to increase Int over time with level. I like the inclusion of cantrips in addition to "real" spells but that they're finite usage rather than unlimited like in 4E and 5E. I like making production of potions and scrolls possible at 7th, though I think other folks (and 3rd ed) are right that you could allow that at lower level without it being unbalanced.

I don't think you're correct that Gary made M-Us unplayably fragile intentionally. I think that he did intend for them to play very cautiously until they got some solid defenses in the form of spells and magic items. But I do suspect that he ran the game differently from you/the procedures he gave us in the 1E books, and I believe you about how easy it is for them to get killed just by normal encounter procedures and a little random targeting.

 

[Celebrim]

like the inclusion of cantrips in addition to "real" spells but that they're finite usage rather than unlimited like in 4E and 5E.

Cantrips as presented in 1e AD&D are mostly color. Sure, every 100 hours of play you might find some real use for them if you kept some prepared, but for the most part they don't do enough to justify losing a valuable spell slot to do something as minor and unimpactful as what the cantrips do. The entirety of 1e AD&D cantrips became the 3e edition Prestidigitation spell with 1 hour duration in which you could create cantrip like effects at will, and it still wasn't unbalanced or very clear what it was good for RAW.

Somewhat after the introduction of the 1e AD&D UA (roughly ~1987), as I started a new campaign, I introduced the idea of cantrips being minor magics that M-U's could do at will, thinking it would be a good roleplaying device to add some color to the player's actions.

My bad.

Even though the cantrips didn't do anything, merely making them cost zero meant that players wanted to do them every round. This was such a problem in slowing play that the experiment only lasted a day before I limited them according to the amount that they have in this write up.

The situation gets worse if cantrips can actually do something and they are free, as in Pathfinder 1e or later D&D. While I feel that in both 1e AD&D and 3e D&D the designers are usually too conservative about what cantrips can do, long experience between 1987 and 2019 with unlimited cantrips tells me that it's a bad idea with undesirable side effects on game play.

If you are going to give someone unlimited magic, the least offensive sort of unlimited spell though would be a magic dart you could throw once a round. That is offensive magic is the least problematic thing you can give to a PC in unlimited amounts, provided that the attack mode is really no better than a dart or a sling stone or equivalent attack available to someone of equivalent level. Unlimited utility spells however is just game breaking both at the meta and in game level.

 

[cbwjm]

I really like the old colour of magic article from dragon magazine and like having unlimited cantrip magic, but only for atmosphere, I'm not sure how I feel about the attack cantrips of 5e, on the one hand, I love them because it makes the spellcaster feel magical since they don't have to resort to throwing darts or using a light crossbow, but on the other hand, with no way to take away their "weapons" it can impact some events and encounters.

Here's the relevant bit from the colour of magic on cantrip effects:

Magic is powerful stuff, and casting even a first-level spell presumably requires a lot of physical or mental effort. No one ought to be able to cast fireballs indefinitely.

The problem arises at the lower end of the magical scale. There are no spells less powerful than those of first level- no cantrips, no minor prestidigitations. A Warlock may be able to fly and turn invisible, but he still has to cook his own breakfast. Xeno the Enchanter can conjure a fireball by waving his arms about, but he cannot light his pipe by snapping his fingers.

Magic-users need a bit more panache than this. In one sense they are only human - even a Necromancer has to use the garderobe - but they are also a breed apart. A magic-user who lowers himself to plebeian levels does a lot of harm to his image,and this illusion of power is one of his greatest assets. To maintain this image, the magic-user ought to be able to do ordinary things in an extraordinary way. Xeno should be able to light his pipe like that - SNAP! He could probably poach his eggs without a campfire, too.

Don't go overboard. A good rule of thumb is to allow magic-users to do magically only what they can already do by normal means. The idea is to enhance the atmosphere of the game, not the power of the magic-user. No effect as powerful as even a first-level spell should be allowed.

To prevent players doing "just anything" with these subsidiary powers, and also for the sake of consistency, all magical effects should reflect the spells that the magic-user already knows. Xeno, incinerator extraordinaire, can dispense with flint and tinder to light his pipe. Corvus the Conjurer (who knows levitate, floating disc, and his own version of magic missile: telekinetic fist) can shuffle cards with psychokinesis. Maximus the Black, who knows death spell, can kill small harmless animals like mice merely by stroking them (he's not bothered by flies or mosquitoes, either, as they die upon touching his flesh).

It is worth repeating that these effects are only for atmosphere. They should not be useful in combat. Tantalus the Beguiler (who knows charm person) can probably haggle a good price on a new horse, but if he is jumped in a dark alley and cannot bluff his assailant, he must resort to his dagger. Supernatural panache is a useful thing to have, but it is not a suit of armour.

 

[LordBP]

There was a spell to recharge magic items in an issue of Dragon, my DM ported it into his 2e game. Sadly, I can't recall which issue it was in, and there's a lot of them.

I miss Dragon magazine.

Issue #136 page 46