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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ECMO3" data-source="post: 9142557" data-attributes="member: 7030563">1E fighters were more powerful than 1E Magic-Users, even at high level.  Magic-Users were gimped at every turn.  To start with they needed a minimum Intelligence to even have higher level spells in their book and this was in an era of rolling abilities and not rolling and then deciding where to put the number.  Then their 4 spells at 1st level were random and they only added 1 per level up to a predetermined number of maximum spells.  Every time they found a scroll or added a spell they needed to roll a check to see if they even could learn that spell.  So while there were powerful spells like fireball, there was no guarantee you would get them and you might instead end up with feign death.Comparing a 18th level 1E Fighter and Magic User 1V1:Because of the wired rules on casting spells and initiative, if a magic-user is casting a spell and gets attacked, the attack occurs at the time he starts casting the spell if he wins initiative and if it hits then it disrupts the spell.   The only way this is mitigated is if they are not within melee range and it would take longer in movement for the opponent to close and attack (assuming they are not attacking the magic-user with a missile weapon).  So even if he wins initiative he is still screwed.In some corner cases could cast something like Power Word Kill that got no save he could beat an 18th level fighter, but other than that he was done for.  For example he needs an 18 intelligence (very unlikely in 1E) to even be able to cast 9th level spells, he needs to roll low enough to be able to learn Power Word Kill, he needs to win initiative, he needs to not have his spell broken before complete.  If he did all that he could take the fighter down in the first round.On the other hand the magic user had an extremely bad AC and really low hps (about 35 at 18th level).  After weapon specialization came along an optimized fighter would be getting 3.5 attacks a round at 18th level, needs a 2 to hit and if had an 18 strength (to match the MUs 18), he would be doing about 10 hp damage per hit.   To make matters worse against really weak foes that fighter could get 15 attacks a round, so even the Wizard being able to fireball a slew of Goblins was not that impressive when the fighter can down probably as many or more.</blockquote>

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