In answer to some of your questions
1. The charge across the room put me 5' in front of the druid and 10' in front of the monk characters who had just retreated from the door. If the Wizard had put the prismatic wall 10' behind me he would have trapped 3 characters.
2. I do not see how you see that saving throws of +7 against DC 24's is a fair chance at this level. 20% pass rate. If you think they are good odds then you are exceptionally lucky.
3. When I was attacked by the wand, fireball etc I was at the other end of the room, taking on another ice golem.
4. The warning was that the Simulacrum said surrender and stop the fighting. Would you stop fighting if you were getting the upper hand on two ice golem creatures and a simulacrum with a wand. I do not think so. The last ice golem died because of the 150+ points of damage from the fireball. All the information that we received was that the Wizard was about 14th. Plus if we were playing the game properly we would not know the power of the Wizard as we had no spell casters to tell us the level of his spells.
5. The Half dragon was only 12th because there are aspects of the template that are not per the MM. The rest of the party consisted of a 12th human 'rogue'; 11th level dwarf fighter, 10th level human druid and a 9th level half dragon monk. There was no spell casters as the 11th level wizard and 11th level cleric did not turn up. So would you have chatted for the evening and had a few cups of tea and turned up next week when you had a decent party or would you expect the DM to modify his adventure to take in the change in party.
6. As a fighter then would you choose to see what happened at the back of the party or seek to protect the party so that an assessment could be made of the situation. True most heroes end up dead. My view was when the wall went up and you have a trapped the character why not say surrender. If I continued then I should die. Not kill one then move on with the conversation.
7. I am also not a fool when it comes to negotiating my way through the Dungeon. The scheme was not to defeat this Wizard but to steal an Orb of Dragonkind from a White Great Wyrm. The party is not gung-ho. We were trying to take out some of his minions in small caverns. We had already defeated the 17th level barbarian and a Barbarian Ettin. We wanted to anger the Wyrm to come away from his horde and then get the rogue to get the orb. Therefore, I/we did not expect to have a conversation with a Chaotic Evil Wizard. However, it now seems that he wants to help him get some components so he will help us???
Everybody in the world would have seen that coming. Hence why we should have stopped attacking in the middle of the fight and said lets talk. The wizard never said a word nor entered the room.
8. Yes in AD&D 1 a 16th level Wizard is very dangerous, however, he can not maximise, nor quicken spells. Yes, he had the option of a delayed blast fireball, but that is still one spell a round. I also never got to the stage where I was fighting against levelled Ettins. It was dangerous against normal ones. Plus you did not have saves against massive damage as not many creatures did 25 points of damage a hit.
9. The house rule we started was to make Armour worth while. At this level it soes not matter what your armour class is you always seemed to get hit. In trapsing the snowy wastes my character had his plate on. Slowed the party down. Got cold. In the fight got hit every time AC26. Plate +3, Natural Armour +4 Dex +1. Took his armour off to speed the journey, got hit everytime. No point to armour when most creatures we were fighting had +20 to hit.
Therefore we took Armour out of the AC and left it to just Dex, rings of protection a few other things. The Plate armour went toward reducing the amount of damage the character suffered. Plate reduced the damage received by +11, Natural Armour +4. So if I was hit for 24 points of damage, then I only took 9 points. Criticals get through and all damage is subtracted from hit points. Finese weapons were like normal. You had to beat the AC of Armour, dex etc put together. This is why the normal AC for the Ice golems was 40. Therefore, you had to beat AC 40 to hit these creatures with finese weapons. Normal fighters had to beat AC8. However, the damage knocked off for natural armour was 32. This meant that the fighter had to do 33 points of damage so that the Ice golem received 1 point of damage. As a construct they could not be criticalled. Useful that. This meant the fights lasted a bit longer and armour plays a sensible part. Also power attack becomes very useful.
This meant that in this fight the 'Rogue', Monk and the Druid were basically useless as they could not do much damage and had run out of fire type spells they could use when the golems were in combat. They took on the Simulaculum and destroyed it.
10. This meant that when the Wizard had walked throught the door I had taken about 4 damage from 107 hit points. Well worth surrendering in that position. The fire ball reduced a few more, but I did have fire resistance. I still did not see the situation. Now I agre the DM was playing a well organised bad guy. However, If I ran for most of you, I could kill you every encounter. That is because I would know your armour class, hit points, feats, skills etc. Going back too to the previous campaign when it was TPK. The last character had a very large AC and was a fighter that specialised in spring attack - the Cleric in this case had a wand that removed constitution 1d6 - sounds familiar. The fighter did not use ranged weapons - so the cleric flew and attacked him with the wand. No save, ranged touch attack. The cleric was recieving 1d8 points of damage from an arrow. Fighter dead. It is amazing how many different spells and monsters out there seem to know your weaknesses.
