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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9880940" data-attributes="member: 4937">I keep thinking that I'm done with my exploration of the rules of my youth.  There are three things in 1e AD&D that I don't think can be fixed.  The first two I knew about.  The third one is coming as a bit of a surprise to me, even though I always knew it to be awkward and clunky.  If all the things I knew about needing a fix, this one wouldn't have been the one that I thought was the breaking point, but the more I theory craft, the more it looks like the problem.First, the two obvious problems:1) Surprise: The woes of AD&D surprise when generalized are well known.  But 2e AD&D fixed the problem just by gutting the system out and replacing it and I think with some tweaks to the 2e system I would be happy.2) Initiative: Again, AD&D initiative when generalized was nuts, and this is well known.  But again, 2e AD&D fixed the problem just by gutting the system out and replacing it and I think with some tweaks to the 2e system I would be happy.But the third problem is bit more difficult and pervasive:3) Ability Scores: Unlike 3e's streamlined cleaned up regularized ability scores, the ability scores of 1e AD&D are a mess of unique mechanics that behave in non-linear fashions.  Since the value of high ability scores increases exponentially at 15 and up, the game heavily pressures players to play characters with multiple high ability scores.  In particular, 18's are typically necessary to unlock all of a class's potential, and without at least one 18 you are notably weaker than a class that has an 18.   The most obvious example of this is the Fighter with its massive bonuses for getting 18 Strength.  Essentially if you can get 18 strength as a fighter, you unlock a secondary table that lets you unlock 5 new tiers of strength - potentially tripling your strength bonus.   Imagine if you had an 18 strength fighter (and only a fighter of 18 strength) in 3e or 5e, there was a special rule that said - "Roll a d10 and add that number to your strength.  This is your starting strength."   Obviously, every other sort of fighter would look pretty pathetic and overmatched by comparison. These tiers are nested between 18 and 19 strength and none of the other ability score tables have this nested scale.   If we uncompress the table, we end up with Strengths ranging 3 to 30, while every other ability score goes from 3 to 25.  If we try to do this uncompressing, it has impacts all over the entire game.  For example, a Hill Giant "only" has a 19 Strength, yet this is actually 6 tiers higher than an 18 strength.  This is most easily seen by the fact that 18 Strength gives you a bonus weight allowance of 75 lbs, but a 19 strength gives you a bonus weight allowance of 450 lbs - a six fold increase.While strength is the obvious culprit, the problem extends throughout the system.  A character with 18 CON has about twice as many hit points as a character with 14 CON.   A 14 Charisma gives you basically a +1 bonus on checks.  An 18 charisma gives you basically a +8 bonus on checks.  A 14 Dexterity gives you basically nothing, while an 18 Dexterity gives you a +4 bonus and a whole levels worth of improvement to your thief skills.  A 14 wisdom gives you basically, nothing, while a 17 wisdom is basically required to unlock the upper levels of cleric just as high intelligence is required to usefully function as a M-U.   Indeed, while the hard prerequisites to base classes are quite low - usually 9 - as a practical matter you usually can't function as the class without a 13 or higher.  Cleric spells randomly fail, M-U's aren't able to learn spells, thieves have penalties on all their skills, and fighters lack the strength to wear the armor and weapons they need to function.   And on top all of this, desirable classes like Cavalier, Paladin, and Bard all have requirements of multiple 15s.  And it's not terribly hard to qualify as a Ranger (a "mere" 13, 14, 14, 6, 14, 6 is needed), but to really take advantage of being one you need at minimum something like 16, 16, 16, 6, 17, 6. and there is hardly a point to playing a Barbarian if you don't have 16 or better in Strength, Dexterity and Constitution.  These ability score problems put huge pressure on players to cheat in some fashion in order to unlock characters of the best sort, while putting huge burdens on designers to come up with some sort of character generation system that would actually work.  There was endless discussion of character generation methods back in the day, and until now that never really twinged in my head as a sign of just how bad the problem was.  The Unearthed Arcana went so far as to create a system where at worst you got the minimum necessary to qualify for the class you desired, which of course broke the game wide open as there was then no reason not choose the most desirable classes with the greatest advantages.The more I look at this part of the system, the more it is obvious that I can't just tweak it.  It has to get gutted and replaced.  I looked at fixing it with generous chargen methods like Method III (probably my favorite) and 6d6 take the best 3, and none of it really works because the narrow range of rewards in system makes random generation bad while making point buy silly (since you aren't really punished for dump stating and massively rewarded for spending everything on one or two good ability scores).  In 3e, and in especially my 3e homebrew a full slate of six 14's is really good, because every ability matters to you even if they don't matter entirely equally to every character, and a +2 to what you do is good.  In 1e, a full slate of six 14's is arguably unplayable in a party where anyone else has multiple 16's because the system just stacks benefit upon benefit only for having scores of the highest tiers - access to more powerful characters, exponentially increased bonuses, increased speed of leveling, etc.Perhaps the most functional system for chargen in 1e AD&D I've yet considered is 1d6+12 across the board.  Because really this is what the tables want of the character, that any ability score be in that narrow range of 13-18 where they actually matter and 18's are as common as 13s.  Just straight up give the system what it wants.And gutting it out is a massive mess because it impacts so much of everything else.  How ability scores work is core to a system and relied on repeatedly in the rules discussion of any system.</blockquote>

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