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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9887409" data-attributes="member: 4937">If that was actually the modality going on, it would be easy.  Instead, Gygax has a much more complicated pattern going on than that, and while his choices with the Wizard are understandable, they also result in him being forced - if he is to stick to the general pattern - to have a few levels where the M-U's XP requirements are increasing but linearly at exactly the moment the M-U is experiencing quadratic growth in power.  To compensate, he delays acquisition of 6th level spells by a level, but it still creates this weirdness where for a brief period the M-U is leveling up faster than a thief and I'm not entirely sure what the elegant solution is.  Doubling creates a problem where by 3 million XP you only hit 15th level, which I'm not sure is right.  Certainly, it solves the problem that high level play is focused on the spell casters, but would you rather play a 15th level M-U or an 18th level Paladin, or a 20th level fighter, or a 22nd level cleric, or 23rd level thief?  If the answer is the M-U for a considerable number of people, then we are fine, but it's not obvious to me that is true.  It's hard to argue against the M-U at higher levels needing the most XP to advance, since you are the only class still gaining a great deal at every new level, but figuring out a pattern that is fair at every amount of XP and is elegant isn't trivial.As far as the spell system goes, I've played GURPS.  Spell points have their own problems.  And, while you can do whatever you want at your table, the goal of this series of revisions is to make the minimal sorts of changes necessary to increase play balance and reduce ad hoc rulings and kludges to make it all work.  Ideally the revisions look like something someone might have written in 1989 or so, as an alternative 2e and not like a pile of someone's house rules that take the game in unexpected directions and having very large departures from anything found in 1e/2e circa 1990 or so.  I want this to really read like something written by TSR in that period.  And spell points just radically would break that.  On the other hand, M-U's getting bonus spells at low level similar to a cleric isn't really a big stretch or unsurprising as a mechanic given that it's a) preexisting, b) addresses a complaint widespread even at the time, and c) is eventually what was done anyway.</blockquote>

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