I wonder why the most agile, resilient, intelligent, wise, or charismatic person in the land is more common?

Gygax gave a few interviews where he discussed percentile strength. Basically, he thought that Fighter strength needed a greater range. He thought that making the strongest person in the land be a 1 in 216 occurrence was too common and ordinary. He wanted the strongest natural humans to be much rarer, and a 1 in 21600 occurrence seemed reasonable. He goes on to say that exceptional strength is only available to Fighters because it is gained through their physical training.

In one interview, Gygax opines that an ability score of 19 must come from a magical source. No human could ever hope to achieve a 19 through natural means. (He is talking specifically about strength, but that logic would presumably apply to all ability scores.)

UA Cavalier, at least, I’ve already covered: http://www.tribality.com/2015/04/02/the-paladin-class-part-two/

I have to admit that bushi, kensai, samurai, and sohei are varied and interesting enough that I want to give them their own article. That article is going to be enormous, so I’m good-naturedly cursing both of your names. =)

I wonder if Brandes will get to the classes in OA (as well as the Cavalier in UA) which began as separate classes from Fighter in 1e before being integrated in as kits/subclasses/prestige classes tied to Fighter along the way.

One thing that is not very clear at first as a major advantage but it really is would be in 2e getting to use your bonus languages to get more prof and for a fighter they can be weapon profs which can be huge. There are some great style prof, weapon specialization, all the potential bonuses to unarmed attacks (there were a LOT of those if you look hard enough), and many other prof that can be a big help (even some that can grant spell casting). Honestly in 2e I would argue that int is a better stat than str unless you get an 18. Something to consider when looking at the 2e warrior classes.

I’m definitely not saying that parties don’t need meat shields! Just that the fighter class is lacks a lot of mechanical interest – which incidentally makes it a perfect intro-to-D&D class.

Aww, the 2E fighter kits help a fair bit in pushing fantasies. There’s a ton of text devoted to pure flavor/RP stuff as actual advantages/disadvantages, some with mechanical consequences.

Having played quite a bit of 2E now, having a strong fighter (or paladin) does feel like a necessary part of the group. Like, the frontline is important, since wizards are hella squishy thanks to their hit dice and inability to just outright learn whatever spell they want. It is still true, though, that rolling great ability scores often means choosing the paladin/ranger instead, since they get so many goodies.

Right, 1e fighters and to a lesser extent 2e fighters are that thing you play if you can’t play something better. Obviously plenty of people DID play fighters, though, in part because so many DMs were utter assholes about paladin strictures (and so many players got a bad taste in their mouths from their first encounter with a paladin). 2e’s kits are not really going to break that problem, because the Complete Fighter’s Handbook was the first one out the gate and every class’s kits were a mess to one degree or another.

The level limit issue really comes down to “why is the race that is weakest on paper the most powerful in the story?”, and it seems to have never occurred to anyone before 3.0 to give humans actual racial features to give them parity. I have plenty of problems with the design of humans in 3.0 and later, but they’re a pale shadow of my issues with humans in 2e-and-prior. (2e’s Skills and Powers starts down the road of getting a pass here.)

When I first started playing 1e (about 1982 or 83), I was a young teenager (13 or 14) and had just come out of playing with my own “understanding” of the Blue-Box-Basic rules for a year or two. So the absurdities of the 1e rules (which were just AD&D rules to me at the time) were lost. I just saw all of those OPTIONS! And UA only added to the many, many stories in my imagination about what all of these AMAZING ADVENTURERS could do.

Now that I’m “all growed up”, I definitely see how problematic the rules were in those older editions. Back when 2e stuff started hitting my hobby store, I couldn’t really see any difference between 1e and 2e. They just felt the same. There were minor differences in some numbers (and the whole THAC0 thing), but in my mind at the time, that made no difference. It was D&D.

I think that Fighters were the least interesting thing to me and others in my group at the time. They were just so “ordinary”. They didn’t have anything that made them feel like they “stood out” from the other classes. Fighters were boring, Rangers were cool. Fighters were normal, Paladins were important. Fighters were ordinary, and pretty much every other class was interesting.

But now, especially given your review here, it is clear why that was the view on this class. There wasn’t much in the mechanics to make them stand out. There wasn’t any narrative that drove anyone to want to play the “sword and board’ in the group. Even the bandage– I mean, Cleric, was more fun.

I’m looking forward to future articles in this series as I think it will get into much of the more interesting parts of the fighter class that emerged in later editions (probably starting with the 2e kits).

Oh, and to just quickly touch on the level-cap issue. Yeah, they were pretty silly. And I’m certain that they were just a stop-gag measure implemented to support the narrative that humans were the most prolific in the world because they were so adaptable. Still, horrible rules that resulted in horrible implementation (or lack thereof) at tables.

I could, but I’m betting Jon Peterson or Shannon Appelcline have already covered it better than I could, both because they are smarter than I am and because they’re not on a weekly column cycle. 🙂