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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: 9887555" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't think anyone in 1989 would consider a fix to then known problems to have been a backport of ideas from 5e, which I wouldn't even suggest as a fix to known problems of 3e - even though Monte, the games designer, foreshadowed what you are talking about in his variant of 3e in the Arcana Unearthed alternate Player's Handbook.  Likely it was something he'd argued for in 3e design, but it was probably felt it was too big of a departure from what had come before.  In any event, none of the real problems of 1e M-U's have to do with the flexibility of the Vancian casting system.  While there was a lot of groaning and complaining about Vancian casting circa 1987, and people would branch off to form their own fantasy heartbreakers, I feel that Gygax-Vancian casting has stood the test of time and usage, and things like the 3e sorcerer show how small of a change is required to produce a class that is more flexible if that's the main need.  That said, while I could easily backport the 3e sorcerer into 1e, I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be good for the game because it would essentially be a class that "took only the good stuff".  Without a major blanket revision of 1e spells, a sorcerer just wouldn't be balanced and doesn't IMO represent an interesting tradeoff.   You can see that in my thinking with regards to specialist M-Us - it's enough that you are given a reasonably high chance of missing out "on the good stuff" to balance the subclasses.  I'm not tied to doubling every level since that is never how the XP progressions ever worked, but rather just how they are remembered to have worked by people who didn't actually study or think about them.  Doubling as a mechanic for 3e would work fine with a revised XP earned per CR/EL table, but it doesn't really work for 1e AD&D because that's not the design.  The sacred cow here that needs to go has to do with an aesthetic about when the doubling happens.  There is a pattern Gygax adhered to when you hit your HD cap that the next level requires N XP and then every level after that also requires N XP.  That's the only sacred cow I think needs to die here, and it's such a small one that if I violate it without saying that I'm violating it 90% of people wouldn't notice what I did.</blockquote>

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