Reminder That Caster Supremacy Used to Be a Conscious Design Choice in D&D

See title. Magic invalidating anything a non-magic class can do wasn't just bad design - it was INTENTIONAL bad design. What we're still struggling with nowadays was put in the game on purpose.

Dude, the picture you posted does not support your argument at all. I dislike a lot of D&D because of caster supremacy, but you're really grasping at straws.

All your picture shows is that the designers were aware that some spells could obsolete mundane abilities. Way to go captain fucking obvious.

Just play something you like instead.

The name of the picture is bait, you mong. Do like the sages and shut the fuck up

Not really, Gygax wrote an article way back in the day saying he thought the best game was one where everyone were playing roughly as equals and casters were intended to have limitations to that effect. You can find it in here under "The D&D Magic System".

But older games were more janky than we're used to today and the balance was likewise janky.

Definitely seems to imply the thief class is made obsolete by spells "even at low levels"

>martials crying about working harder for less pay
Guess you fuckers should have stayed in school.

>Needing a 15 Dex, 17 Int, and 16 Wis
Someone has a right to be overpowered if they rolled those stats.

Also
>Dual Classed

You gotta stop leveling your first class when you start your second class and your first class is permanently stopped where you stopped it.

Yup, thief/necromancer is actually really good if you level thief to 7 or 9 and then go caster, it takes ages to get your thief skills back but a midlevel caster isn't useless and eventually you'll barely be behind at all.

The same book where the OP quote is from also says dual-class necromancers are rarely high enough level in their first class for them to matter much, because clearly they weren't very dedicated to them.
To be fair, the whole section does say "thief/necromancer is possible but doesn't really make sense," so it's actually all pretty consistent.

>Gygax wrote an article way back in the day saying he thought the best game was one where everyone were playing roughly as equals and casters were intended to have limitations to that effect.

This failed right out of the gate. When they were experimenting with fantasy battles, they kept all the combined-arms stuff they were using in historical medieval combat. The artillery became wizards, the sappers became thieves, men-at-arms were the "fighters". These don't have relationships to each other, whoever sees the other first fucks him up. So they're equal in that sense. But they really shouldn't be combined arms at all. The idea was for team members to have to help each other in order to survive. But that just made it harder, because instead of just trying to survive a Gygax-era dungeon you now also had to protect the squishies in the back row. In other squad combat, all units were looking out for ambush, all units were looking out for booby traps, all units had grenades. Support was a matter of simple will and you didn't have to babysit other squad members. Gary never got that.

>the sappers became thieves
Weren't thieves not a thing in original D&D?

>used to be

Maybe it'd work out if each got some form of limited use abilities they have to manage (sorta like grenades), as well as a more even distribution of utility capabilities between the classes.

>talking out your ass this much

they were not a thing in original D&D, no.

Old D&D fighter was a monster if he could get close to anything, since spells were hard to cast and easy to disrupt.
What I never liked was the fighter = new player class, so it had almost no expendable resources and was only "I attack".

Sort of? They aren't part of the original original book, but they were introduced with the very first expansion, so it's a very fine distinction.

>I'll just completely ignore the fact that a fighter could take out a wizard if their expeoernce points totals were equivalent
You're one of those idiots who never looked at the actual charts in the AD&D books, aren't you. In AD&D you had a percentage chance to just ignore invisibility. Fighters had multiple attacks, and these attacks stacked with missile weapons. Casters took a long time to cast their spells, and the fighter could literally throw multiple attacks at them while they were trying to build up to their spell, and if any of them hit, the spell was LOST.

Now combine this with monsters who could have a base percent chance to ignore any spell, and also gained multiple attacks. Fighters were a necessity for a caster to have as defenders in AD&D.

Before the D&D rules were written, there was C.H.A.I.N.M.A.I.L, and before that, homebrews.

>File: Bait.png (89 KB, 578x364)
>Replies: 20

That's 2E i'm pretty sure, written by the people who would go on to ruin D&D with 3E.

Gygax meanwhile really loathed the idea of Wizards overshadowing "regular" Superheros like Fighters.

>C.H.A.I.N.M.A.I.L
Creeps, Half-Asians, Incels, Neckbeards, MRAs, Autists, Invalids and Losers?

Pretty sure MRAs did not exist back then.

> Fighters were a necessity for a caster to have as defenders in AD&D.
>> you now also had to protect the squishies in the back row.
Yes, we agree, sorry for the jargon.