Knights & Knaves Alehouse

AxeMental wrote:

TheRedPriest wrote:

AxeMental wrote:You see TRP that is the basic problem. 1E AD&D was perfect for the vast majority of players. Why go screw it up with something half the players were going to hold their nose at like WS.

So, the half of us that are not holding our noses are playing incorrectly?

That's basically how this dialogue is playing out. SOME of those here that don't like weapon specialization are trying to convince those of that use it, that we shouldn't. Why? What evidence do you have that my game is somehow diminished through the use of this rule? I don't recall seeing you at my dining room table.

I'm not proselytizing that everyone should play with the rule, so what's with the hard-on to get me change?

Believe it or not, I'm fine playing in games that don't use the rule.

actually, I'm saying the opposite, you are playing the most recent 1E AD&D, we are not. My point was that it didn't fix the game it broke it, at least for alot of people. And worse still, it managed to infect every table, because on the face it doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Its not until you use it for a few months that you see the problem. But by then its too late, half the players at the table love it the other half hate it. The half that hate it vote to get rid of it, and the table splits (or at least hard feelings develop). UA was the begining of the end of the "Golden Age" of 1E AD&D...and that can be traced back to Weapons Specialization.

Oh good lord.

I quit.

Okay, Axe, I think you have stated your position, now let it go; you don’t have to always have the last word.

So, when my high school freshman year English teacher played the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet for us in class, holy crap, that blew my mind! Yeah, you know which scene I’m talking about!

Falconer wrote:So, when my high school freshman year English teacher played the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet for us in class, holy crap, that blew my mind! Yeah, you know which scene I’m talking about!

That scene is forever etched in my brain as well.

Oh come on I was just trying to drive TRP mad a bit. Ok....will stop and go watch Eiger Sanction.

AxeMental wrote: Matthew, I might agree with that except for all the posts I've read by Gygax reminding people of how much money he made and the accomplishments he had in transforming a basement business into an empire. UA sold well and made TSR alot of money, WS was a big part of that success, as "must have" reason for DMs to buy it. The fact that after this we see more rules revisions over and over suggests this became the template: change rules so people have to buy new hard backs. Even todays Retro publishers say the same thing. Its much more profitable to sell rule books then just modules.

Sure, money and empire building was a driving force for Gygax, but you could say that about AD&D versus OD&D as UA versus AD&D. More interesting in that respect is his intention to do a "second edition", as opposed to a reprint with new layout (as was done for the actual second edition in the mid nineties).

Matthew wrote:Much more probable, given the evidence, is that Gygax enjoyed tinkering and was confident that he could improve on his AD&D design (itself an improvement on OD&D, perhaps).

Here's the thing. I think OD&D was near perfect. I think AD&D was near perfect, in a different way. And I think that tinkering is great, to be able to build the play experience you really want at the game table (whether that varies with the groups you run the games with or not). Some people will have found one or the other game (or some other game yet) to be perfect as it is, requiring no tinkering on their part - and there is nothing wrong with that at all. Other people will want some fine tuning, and for them, books like Unearthed Arcana are welcome, for if they do not adopt most of its (lame) options, they will think about different aspects of the game and maybe pick up an idea here or there that will inspire their own house rules.

So in the end, I think books like UA are a good thing, even if the options described therein would wreck a game when implemented all at once.

The problem, to me, is when all that stuff is taken as "Official(TM)" and inspires a next edition to the game that screws everything up, making all that sludge part of the core experience of the game in a way that wasn't intended in the first place. That annoys the hell out of me. And I wish we'd still have AD&D published, like we still (mostly) have games like Call of Cthulhu around.

It's an interesting thought, because I think that, in hindsight, it would probably have made me dislike EGG's 2nd edition if it had existed under the "D&D" name (as opposed to Mythus, say).

I like WS for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with "the fighter is weak." I welcome the presence of WS in the corpus of rules as an option. As an integral part of the non-optional published system, however, it's a mistake.

AxeMental wrote:UA was the begining of the end of the "Golden Age" of 1E AD&D...and that can be traced back to Weapons Specialization.

Actually, the "beginning of the end" could be traced all the way back to the addition of the Thief.

Odhanan wrote:

AxeMental wrote:UA was the begining of the end of the "Golden Age" of 1E AD&D...and that can be traced back to Weapons Specialization.

Actually, the "beginning of the end" could be traced all the way back to the addition of the Thief.

Respectfully, bullshit on both accounts. The beginning of the end of the Golden Age was Hickman.

- Wheggi

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this over the past few weeks. Okay, "a lot of thinking" is a relative expression, but yeah, I've done more thinking on this in the last few weeks than I probably have totally over the past 30 years.

It's not so much that the fighter is under-powered compared to the magic-user, so much, as low-level fighters are under-powered compared to low leveled-clerics.

A 1st level fighter with a 15 strength needs to be inherently better at fighting at 1st level than does a first level cleric with 18 strength. This is an absolute, and it must be independent of all other factors. That means the fighter requires some type of adjustment, for which it need forfeit nothing in return. That is, because this is a boost. Simple as that. It was either earlier in this thread, or in the weapon specialization thread, where P&P already stated this essentially, and I obviously agree.

To address another point, the light of the Golden Age is alive and well and can be experienced every other Friday night in the vicinity of the Big Easy, and other times and locales as well. If there's ever an end to the lights of the Golden Age, it will likely be when dogmatism becomes universally more important than actually playing the game.

Hickman. Can we all agree Dragonlance was a bogus attempt to mold wild & wooly AD&D into a Mormon morality play for slackjawed suburban Americans? Why not just call it The Book of Mormon - erm, I take that back, thats way too much fantasy for AD&D!

TheRedPriest wrote:It's not so much that the fighter is under-powered compared to the magic-user, so much, as low-level fighters are under-powered compared to low leveled-clerics.

I think AD&D -- despite the spells at 1st level and the bonus spells -- pretty well addressed that, although what UA giveth unto the C may be one reason to give more to the F. Although the cleric's capacity for independent operation is remarkable, in the usual course of things the class is much more of a supporting character than the fighting man.

With strategies built around the success of the party, the fighter typically gets plenty of opportunity to display its fighting prowess.

However, here is another example of how the "game balance" in old D&D is not the same as the "game balance" in certain other RPGs. Whereas the m-u starts with little distinctive and becomes extremely versatile if it survives a very risky career, the cleric starts with a boost and proceeds with notable reliability toward a sort of "last big blow out" around Name level, after which the fighter and m-u become more spectacular assets.

The classes really are not equivalents by level in combat power or probably anything else, and -- a BIG part of the arrangement -- there is no guarantee of survival and success at the same rate as any other given character.

There are different approaches one can take, in a milieu in which characters' states cover the full spectrum from permanently dead 30th-level almost-liches to comfortably retired 4th-level hobbits.

The great drawback of a magic-user at any level is high average mortality due to multiple factors including low average hit points. By assuming survival to level X, and assuming acquisition of spells and magic items, we bypass the actual game-balancing mechanisms.

By putting everyone in the whole campaign in lockstep and effectively "ending the game" at Level X, we bypass the expected development of the campaign in terms of clerics, non-human characters, and other factors.

Thus, I think it is pretty fairly claimed, by promoters of "balance by level" schemes (and "balance on combat power" to boot) that their preferred approach is more flexibly adaptable -- in the sense that one can still run a game that allows imbalances to arise, but it is easier to set up a game, at any level, with characters in balance.

In my current AD&D group, which has been doing the (now widely standard) "monolithic party" thing, players have noted that the group has become basically "the mage and his helpers" by 6th level. Certainly some DM "house rules" have exacerbated the issue, and grants to clerics have been very much to the end of curbing not just character mortality but down time. However, the whole nine yards fundamentally come down to accommodations for a particular large-scale structure.

Logistical factors (such as playing but once a month) contribute to the appeal of that structure. I am made keenly aware, though, of ways in which it is at odds with the default assumptions around which Gygax had designed OD&D, and continued to design well into the AD&D line.

Dwayanu: "In my current AD&D group, which has been doing the (now widely standard) "monolithic party" thing, players have noted that the group has become basically "the mage and his helpers" by 6th level."

ALot has to do with how the monsters are set up and behave. If you have monsters split up or coming in waves (to reduce losses due to area of effect spells -in a world filled with magic, they may know to do this) the 6th MU will certainly start running low on spells and will need to conserve. I see it more as "I don't want to waste my spells yet, you guys take it" and thus the fighters hogging the majority of the action while the PCs playing the MUs (even high level) sitting around twiddling their thumbs. Of course the worst hogs are the thief scouts that end up seeing everything first, that really does turn into "everyone watch the thief play" if the DM isn't careful in how he designs his dungeons.

AxeMental wrote:TRP: "In my current AD&D group, which has been doing the (now widely standard) "monolithic party" thing, players have noted that the group has become basically "the mage and his helpers" by 6th level."

ALot has to do with how the monsters are set up and behave. If you have monsters split up or coming in waves (to reduce losses due to area of effect spells -in a world filled with magic, they may know to do this) the 6th MU will certainly start running low on spells and will need to conserve. I see it more as "I don't want to waste my spells yet, you guys take it" and thus the fighters hogging the majority of the action while the PCs playing the MUs (even high level) sitting around twiddling their thumbs. Of course the worst hogs are the thief scouts that end up seeing everything first, that really does turn into "everyone watch the thief play" if the DM isn't careful in how he designs his dungeons.

Axe, get yourself straight. I didn't post what you're trying to quote. Seriously, learn to quote.

My game isn't even vaguely like this.

TheRedPriest wrote:

AxeMental wrote:TRP: "In my current AD&D group, which has been doing the (now widely standard) "monolithic party" thing, players have noted that the group has become basically "the mage and his helpers" by 6th level."

ALot has to do with how the monsters are set up and behave. If you have monsters split up or coming in waves (to reduce losses due to area of effect spells -in a world filled with magic, they may know to do this) the 6th MU will certainly start running low on spells and will need to conserve. I see it more as "I don't want to waste my spells yet, you guys take it" and thus the fighters hogging the majority of the action while the PCs playing the MUs (even high level) sitting around twiddling their thumbs. Of course the worst hogs are the thief scouts that end up seeing everything first, that really does turn into "everyone watch the thief play" if the DM isn't careful in how he designs his dungeons.

Axe, get yourself straight. I didn't post what you're trying to quote. Seriously, learn to quote.

My game isn't even vaguely like this.

Whoops, my mistake. Corrected.

AxeMental wrote:ALot has to do with how the monsters are set up and behave.

That's as much more of a lot as this arrangement leaves the DM so much more in charge of deciding where our characters go and what they do. The 'adventure' is really more stuff that happens to us than what we do.