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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 4987029" data-attributes="member: 22779">Well, yes and no.  Yes, the fighter may have had less hit points (depending on the luck of the dice) but, let's not forget, the orcs and kobolds are hitting far less often and far less hard.A 1e fighter at 1st level isn't too put out to get an AC of 4 (chain+shield is hardly a difficult assumption.  Banded is quite possible for an AC of 3) and the orc or kobold had a THAC0 of 19.  That means the orc's only hitting about 25%.  If the fighter has a dex bonus, that goes down by 5% every point of AC bonus.  A 16 Dex (again, not a huge assumption IME) is worth a -2 AC bonus, and now the baddies are only hitting about 10-15% of the time.And, let's not forget, the average damage for an orc is only 4 points.Compare to a 3e orc, where his effective base THAC0, because of his strength, is 16 and the AC of the fighter at 1st level isn't all that different with a 16 or 17 AC being about average.  That means (in 1e terms) the orc is now hitting on a 12 or a 13, instead of a 16 or an 18.  Plus, our orc is now doing an average of 9 points of damage per hit.  IOW, the orc is hitting twice as often and twice as hard.I'm not sure I agree with the idea that 1e 1st level characters were these fragile little flowers that folded if you sneezed at them wrong and 3e 1st level characters could waltz all over every encounter.  IME, 3e combat was far more lethal (barring save or die) than 1e.  I rarely killed PC's due to hit point loss in 1e.  In 3e, it's ridiculously easy to obliterate a PC at just about any level with an EL=Par encounter.</blockquote>

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