The Gaming Den

I heard expressed before that the 2e Paladin kicks ass. But what specificially puts him head and shoulders above a Priest (Cleric or Druid), Wizard, Wizard/Rogue, or Fighter/Cleric? Is it just the Holy Avenger and Mount (which I admit could be a flying creature at higher levels), or am I missing something?

Mostly it has to do with the different hit point and save paradigm that 2e used. Being a dude with a good THAC0 and really good saves made you pretty hard core. You had a lot of survivability and you could cut through enemies with abandon.

-Username17

It also helped that 2nd edition clerics had limits on their spell access. Only 7 levels of spells (and fewer spells overall), very few clerics got even close to all of them, and most of the spells themselves didn't exactly bend the game over a table and beat its ass.

Magic shenanigans in general were more sharply limited prior to 3e as well. Your spells per day was fixed, the encounter system wasn't designed with the idea that you run out of spells, so there should be fewer encounters, and you didn't start with default assumption that you could cherry pick the hell of the magic item list and fix holes in your magical capability with wands and scrolls of <whatever>.

That said, i don't think the 2nd edition paladin even comes close to sheer level of munchkinism that was the 1st edition paladin after Unearthed Arcana came out and assigned it to a subclass of cavalier instead of fighter... and explicitly gave the paladin almost every single class ability of the cavalier as well as all the existing class abilities of paladins. That was seriously f-ed up and utterly broken, from level 1 all the way up.

Yes, but weren't many of the upper level spells what is now 8th and 9th level spells? It's what I call Duskblade logic - saying they get 5 levels of spells doesn't mean what you think it does if some of those are 6th, 7th, or 8th level for everyone else.

6th and 7th level Priest spells have a lot of overlap with 7th, 8th, and 9th level wizard spells (I'm looking at you Gate and Symbol), but the paladin specifically ony has minor acces to like 4 priestly spheres (which means they cap out at 4th level spells), with a delayed progression to boot that starts spellcasting at level seven.

Just curious as to why the paladin is so hard core over a fighter/priest or wizard or any full (or equivalent) spellcasting class.

2nd edition paladins were also required to have really good ability scores, so the average paladin starts off better than the average fighter/cleric or generic Priest.

Aren't the earlier editions summarized as balance by rarity? Making the rarest classes the best? Then you needed some long list of high stats just to become a Paladin... Eh.

High ability scores would mean something if they meant anything, at all.

Seriously, the most stringent admission price to the paladin class is the 17 charisma which... lets you have 10 henchmen and get you +6 reaction for encounter hostility. Having a 15 in an 2e ability score means shit, you dont get anything nice unless you set a 16 or higher on fire to get a +1 to hit and damage with STR, -1 AC from Dex, or +2 hp/lvl (which stops being applied somwhere between levels 7 and 10) with CON. I don't even know how wizards can cast 9th level spells, because they need a magic item handed to them from the DM to get a 19 INT.

I was mainly referring to the fact getting a bunch of high stats off of 3d6 isn't easy. In other words, pure luck based.

Hicks wrote:High ability scores would mean something if they meant anything, at all.

Seriously, the most stringent admission price to the paladin class is the 17 charisma which... lets you have 10 henchmen and get you +6 reaction for encounter hostility. Having a 15 in an 2e ability score means shit, you dont get anything nice unless you set a 16 or higher on fire to get a +1 to hit and damage with STR, -1 AC from Dex, or +2 hp/lvl (which stops being applied somwhere between levels 7 and 10) with CON. I don't even know how wizards can cast 9th level spells, because they need a magic item handed to them from the DM to get a 19 INT.

Actually, IIRC, 15 was where you started getting bonuses for most 2e stats. The exceptions were Strength (which didn't give you bonuses until 16 and wasn't worth much unless you were a warrior class with exceptional strength), and Charisma (which started giving out reaction bonuses at 13 because, well, it's a weak stat with not many benefits).

But really, that 17 Charisma was a weight on the paladin class, since you always had to blow your highest roll on Cha (assuming you actually got that 17+). Unfortunately, I sold my 2e books a while back, so I don't have a list of the 2e paladin's class features before me. I think the +2 to all saves was probably the most universally useful thing they got. They also had a continuous magic circle against evil, but it was always iffy whether anyone would remember that modifier in the heat of battle.

I think probably the biggest advantage paladins had was the fact that the DM provided all magic items in 2e. This meant they could give the melee classes more stuff to counterbalance the fighter/caster disparity. Fighters tended not to look so bad because they always managed to find a kick-ass sword at high levels, and every paladin character in campaigns I played in managed to find a Holy Avenger at some point.

The default rules were that you rolled your stats in order, so you didn't "blow" a 17 on Charisma, you rolled a 17 in Charisma. That 17 wasn't going to do anything else, because it was already assigned before you rolled it.

-Username17

We all know that paladin are flat-out better than a fighter, right? So we are on the same page here.

2e is a game played primarily between levels 1 and 7. I have heard of high-level games, but they started at 10. This is personal experience that I believe reflects on the game as a whole. As a side note, high-level characters have an unusually high chance of getting level-drained.

The wizard starts coming into the game at level 5, with fireball (there have been many comments on the scaling d6s versus monster hp scaling, which was lower then), but has been useful since Web and Sleep. Lack of specialization and limited availability of spells makes the wizard a one-shot character before about level 5, but extremely powerful.

The cleric is a fighter that can heal for the first several levels. Look at the combat utility of 2nd level spells, seriously. The cleric gets decent spells around level 5, and gets good spells around 7-9. The ability to heal makes the cleric useful, as always, and the ability to fight almost as good as a fighter is good at the 1-7 level range.

Thieves are a special case, the lack of Sneak Attack makes their utility iffy in combat.

But, for all of the reasons stated above, the paladin is a better fighter than a fighter, can heal (later), and has better defenses than the fighter, cleric, or wizard. If you are going to make a character whose purpose is to fight in 2e, then you would rather have a paladin than a thief, warrior, wizard, or cleric. The class stays useful into higher levels by picking up healing spells and weird mount stuff.

For the record, IIRC, monks had similar issues. Something about monks and shurikens comes to mind too.

Hicks wrote:High ability scores would mean something if they meant anything, at all.

Seriously, the most stringent admission price to the paladin class is the 17 charisma which... lets you have 10 henchmen and get you +6 reaction for encounter hostility. Having a 15 in an 2e ability score means shit, you dont get anything nice unless you set a 16 or higher on fire to get a +1 to hit and damage with STR, -1 AC from Dex, or +2 hp/lvl (which stops being applied somwhere between levels 7 and 10) with CON. I don't even know how wizards can cast 9th level spells, because they need a magic item handed to them from the DM to get a 19 INT.

I might be incorect, because I gave away my 2E books years ago, but isn't that a 3Eism?

Yeah, you had to have a minimum intelligence to cast wizard spells, but I don't think it was as high a requirement as 2E.

I whipped out my 2E books. Mages require a 9 Int for 4th-level spells, a 10 for 5th, a 14 for 7th, a 16 for 8th, and an 18 for 9th.
_____
Having played in a 2E game for a decade, my mage made it from 5th to 11th level. I estimated it would have taken another 3 years of weekly play to reach 12th. Then we switched to 3E. Thank God.

Of course, wizards (by RAW) were limited to a certain number of spells based on their intelligence. Of course, I'm not sure I ever played with a DM who actually enforced that rule.

I would have, but it never came up. Wizards in my games (played and dm), found enough scrolls to be functional, but not enough to fill all those slots up.

The more important part is the thing where you have a percentage chance to learn any particular spell each level. So people without super human intellects ended up having to take their second or third choices of spells each level sometimes. And yes, I did see people play with those rules. I really think that they added something to the game. Indeed, I'd suggest that the chances should have been fixed and not attribute dependent.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:The default rules were that you rolled your stats in order, so you didn't "blow" a 17 on Charisma, you rolled a 17 in Charisma. That 17 wasn't going to do anything else, because it was already assigned before you rolled it.

-Username17

As if most groups played AD&D with all rules as-is.
"Oh shit, rolled a 3 for INT, 5 for WIS, and 7 for CHA. Guess I have to be a Fighter."

I never suffered the percentage roll for spells either. I mean, we have the choice to screw ourselves over if we wished, but after the DM said "you can just pick 'em", the optimum choice is clear.

In the aforementioned 2E game I went for about a year preparing fourth-level spells as fifth-level spells because the one fifth level spell I'd encountered I blew the chance-to-know roll.

No shit.

That's a particularly harsh houserule. By 2e RAW, at every level (or maybe just when you got a new spell level), you got to roll to know any spell in the PHB, and you could go down your list of choices until you found one that stuck.

Hmm, even in 2ed there were lists of different ways to roll stats.

The "grid" system was interesting. There was also one where you would roll a great big pool of dice, then arrange them into groups and no stat could be over 18 using any amount of dice in the pool, so many 16's and 15's were the result.

Absentminded_Wizard wrote:That's a particularly harsh houserule. By 2e RAW, at every level (or maybe just when you got a new spell level), you got to roll to know any spell in the PHB, and you could go down your list of choices until you found one that stuck.

The problem with that is that a wizard does not get any free spells when he levels (that "learn 2 spells on level-up" is a 3ed edition thing). The only way for him to gain spells to cast with spell slots is to find a scroll of a wizard spell and scribe it into his spellbook. He didn't have a 4th level scroll randomly appear in a treasure horde for over a year.

Oh, you could try to bribe the DM (food, money, sex?) into letting your character "research" a spell. Set up the required research lab to "discover" new spells, pour mountains of gold into your spell, and set several weeks of your character's life on fire just to even see if you don't flub your roll to learn the spell being research, and have the lab, gold, and time consumed for nothing.

If I recall correctly, you did get XP for researching new spells, as well as making magic items.

Hicks wrote: The problem with that is that a wizard does not get any free spells when he levels (that "learn 2 spells on level-up" is a 3ed edition thing). The only way for him to gain spells to cast with spell slots is to find a scroll of a wizard spell and scribe it into his spellbook. He didn't have a 4th level scroll randomly appear in a treasure horde for over a year.

Yeah, in 2E, spells weren't really class abilities, so much as magic items. If you never found a scroll of something, you were shit out of luck pretty much.

I'm aware they didn't get spells every time they leveled up. I'm pretty sure they got one spell of the appropriate level when they gained a new spell level, though. I remember that because one big balancing factor for bards as spellcasters was supposed to be that they never got to learn new spells except through scrolls and wizards did. This is one of those times I wish I hadn't sold my 2e books so I could look it up.