Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Alternative Holmesian elf advancement

This odd74 thread suggests a reading of blue book elves I quite like. Rather than treat elves as dual-class magic-users/fighting-men, give them half their earned experience points and apply those XP to the fighter advancement table only. When they gain a level on the fighter advancement table, they also gain spell capacity of a magic-user of the same level.

I may start using this in my games.

4 comments:

  1. If I remember right, when we played Holmes + Greyhawk/OD&D, I think we made the elves earn XP for both fighter and MU class combined to go up a level. It was a considerable inconvenience, but the ability to cast spells and wear armor and see in the dark made it our favorite class.
    As I recall, very few characters made it to second level anyway.

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  2. we made the elves earn XP for both fighter and MU class combined to go up a level

    That's pretty steep.

    I've been playing so that elves choose to adventure as either a fighter or magic-user on a week-by-week basis. Whatever XP they earn that week goes to that class. They re-roll their HP's with the class-appropriate HD type every week too.

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  3. @Limpey: At the lower levels that is the B/X and BECMI method.

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  4. In B/X, the elf XP requirements for levels 1-7 are actually 2x Fighter, rather than Fighter + MU.

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