Sweet Spot in AD&D1

[Cardboard Carnage]

I played AD&D quite a bit back in the 80's and maybe 90 or 91, so it has been awhile, but I think levels 5-10 or thereabouts were my sweet spot with the game, we had a lot of fun at those levels... After level 10 I seem to remember characters either starting to get too powerful or too weak, and the game began to hit a critical point not to far thereafter where campaigns would end and new games and characters would begin.

D.

 

[Wik]

A quick note: I just bought UK 6 today, and while it says "3-5" on the top, the game is actually for 5-7 (as stated in the synopsis on the back, and in the introduction of the game)

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As for the question at hand... I dunno. I never really played 1e, but I did play a lot of 2e, which is similar enough - but I'm sure there were many changes, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

I'd put the sweet spot around 3rd to 10th level. It starts at 3rd because that's when things really start to open up for the characters - you have a magic item or two, you start getting your unique combination of skills or spells or whatever else, and you have a background statted to a character that is beginning to "come alive". Mechanically, you can take a few hits, but things are still scary.

By 10th level, you start getting followers, and while they're fun for a bit, I think the game starts to taper off at around this point.

now, when I play DARK SUN (the best thing about 2e, in my humble opinion), these numbers change. 3rd is still a good sweet spot (you're just starting, but it's fun trying to scavenge together a full suit of hide armour!)... but it extends far past 10. I'd say 15 or 16th would be the upper barrier to the sweet spot.

Why? Because mages can't go willy-nilly with magic, lest they get killed by the bigger defilers. Priests can't go crazy with their spells, lest the templars lynch 'em. And the fighters and rogues are still comparatively powerful because of this (sure, your mage can mimic the rogue... but it's going to require magic, which is dangerous...) - not to mention that any character could have a psionic wild talent to act as a pretty big "equalizer".

 

[Lanefan]

For the players, about 3rd to 9th; the range in which characters have enough power to think they're powerful and enough mortality to realize they're not.

1st-2nd rocks as well. At and above 10th the game tends to fall apart, unless one can contrive a way of taking all the magic away they've acquired over the first 9 levels.

For the DM, 1st-3rd is great. After that, spells can more and more easily take the place of thinking, such that by 11th or so it is very difficult to design a decent adventure without nerfing some PC abilities (e.g. flight, divination, etc.) in order to make it a challenge.

The trick in either case is to scrap the ExP-for-g.p. rule to slow the advancement down - it makes the sweet spot last way longer in a campaign.

Lanefan

 

[S'mon]

I never really bumped into the sweet spot issue until 3e. I never felt the wizard outclassed the rest to the point where they were just henchman, well except maybe a single class thief.

Yes, I concur with this - I found 1e worked well at all levels I played & GM'd, from 1st to 117th. While there is a 1e sweet spot, it's much less marked than in 3e; a 1st level 1e PC is dealing with ogres doing 1d10, not 2d6+7. Likewise a high level 1e M-U's spell strength is balanced by continuing physical weakness, and he cannot reliably cast spells in combat. Plus his saveable spells are usually saved against. And in 1e a Fighter can use many more magic items, including wands of fireballs! Overall the high level 1e M-U doesn't dominate nearly as much as a high level 3e Wizard.

 

[Starfox]

One thing to remember about 1e and 2e is that levels did not mean the same thing back then. Give out a particular number of xp, and various classes end up at wildly different level. This mainly affects the thief after level 9; basically you got more than two levels of thief for every level of magic user.

This means that when you say the sweet spot ended at level 15 for a magic user, the rogue was level 18. The bard in 2ed actually cast very close to the same amount of spells (from the same list) the wizard did if you counted by xp and not by level.

The problem is that many DMs handed out a level and not a number of xp.

In addition, the progression tables were very odd. In the beginning, where magic users were weak, they needed prodigious amounts of xp to rise. Then, by mid-levels when they started t gain in power, their xp requirements fell compared to the other classes, only to rise again by the end.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I never really bumped into the sweet spot issue until 3e. I never felt the wizard outclassed the rest to the point where they were just henchman, well except maybe a single class thief.

Pretty much my experience as well. Even the thief wasn't too underpowered in some games. If the campaign included urban adventures and interaction with the underworld power players, the thief became one of the most influential characters in the game.

I think that the way initiative, and spell use in combat was handled in 1E helped keep the casters from dominating play at any level, thus making any "sweet spots" less noticeable. There were more adventures published for the middle level ranges but I don't really see that as a sweet spot issue.

 

[Bullgrit]

Now the question is: Did the modules published by TSR reflect the AD&D1 sweet spot? I'm curious to know how the level ranges for published modules were chosen. Was it a company design decision? Was it just what the author wanted to write?

Bullgrit

 

[UniversalMonster]

Are you factoring in training time/costs?

I ran AD&D last year and had a great time with it. There's an interesting thing that happens during the low levels of AD&D:

Let's say you are playing a thief, and you have accumulated 1300 XP. 800 of which came from gold. This is enough to go to 2nd level.

Ok, so it costs around 1000 gp a week to train to the new level, and it requires a number of weeks according to the E, S, F, or P rating the DM assigned for "how you did during that level.."

So let's say we got "S" for superior. Thats'two weeks. Time to go adventuring again, because we are now 1200 gold short of the gold we need (to pay for training!) to hit 2nd.

So we go out and adventure again, and bring back 1200 gold. We also gain another 600 XP in monsters killed, or whatever.

Now we are at 3000 XP. And we just barely trained up to 2nd level. But we have enough XP for 3rd level! But crap, we're out of money. And it's going to cost us 3000 gold this time. And by the time we haul that home, we'll have enough XP to actually be 4th... And you know what happens to excess XP? You lose them!

You never get out from under this cap until like 6th, at which point the training costs start to become irrelevant.

Here's a table with the fighter from the actual campaign we ran: I always assumed a "2 week" training period.

Ok, and this also means characters up until this point will constantly be broke, having to pay it all into training. But that's kind of cool, actually.

 

[Harlekin]

In my experience levels 3-6 are the sweet spot for AD&D. Before those levels, PCs were too fragile and after those levels, the game turned into Ars Magica, 1 Wizard and his/her henchmen.

Thus 3rd edition already managed to extend the sweet spot by quite a bit.

 

[Plane Sailing]

In my experience levels 3-14 was the sweet spot for 1e and earlier games.