No, I am pretty sure neither Napoleon nor Richard would translate into first level AD&D characters. They would translate into characters well over tenth level, so if some lieutenant rode up and rammed a lance through their backs they would just pull it out and beat him to death with it. That should be impossible for ANY character.


There are far better ways to avoid that than making advanced characters so tough they can survive anything short of having a house dropped on them. I mean, really, even with average hit dice rolls and no Con bonus a 10th level fighter has about 55 HP. That means if a 20th level fighter comes up and hits him 10 times with a sword, the 10th level character will probably still be standing: There is simply no way to kill an alert high level character quickly short of some kind of Deathspell.

It is kind of like that scene in Pulp Fiction where a minor character runs in and unloads a revolver at Travolta and Jackson while they just look at him unblinking. Remember that scene? The one so implausibly unrealistic Samuel L. Jackons character concluded it was DIVINE INTERVENTION?! Because if someone comes into a room and fires half a dozen rounds at you from 10', you are dead, even if you are the protagonist. Except in comic books and AD&D.


It just makes things faster; anyone with the knowledge and desire to min/max and rules lawyer (which AD&D pratically encourages, IMHO,) will get there sooner or later, even if occasional bad rolls and/or decisions force them to through a couple characters first. How many people do you know who have "retired" how many characters simply because it was no longer any fun to play them?

I did not use the export trick or anything else my first time through the BG series, but by the time I reached ToB it was pathetically easy. Ironically, the most challenging part of that game was the start, before the game had handed out artifact-level magic items like candy. Even that was not too difficult, but the most time consuming part of the end was dispelling the Prot from Magic Weapons on the snake-demons (forget what they are called.) By "time consuming" I mean "it took maybe 30 seconds to cast the spell THEN shred them, rather than the 10 I spent on Melissan." And that was when I thought I had to be behind people to Assassinate them, and did not think I could do it to bosses at all.


*shrugs* I guess it depends on whether you have any other GMs handy and willing to learn a system that is fairly complex for GMs. Perhaps the biggest trick to GURPS is realizing that, although most systems invoke the "all rules are optional" disclaimer, GURPS really means it: Using every applicable rule each time it is appropriate bogs the game down quickly unless you are VERY familiar with them; often it is easier to just roll a quick Contest of Skills and move on with your life. The combat system is a classic example of that:

1) If you use Basic Combat it is truly basic, little more than moving over to your target and making an attack roll.

2) If you use Advanced Combat you have a lot more versatility in actions and manuevers, but flexibilty and complexity are always proportional.

For players, GURPS is pretty easy, but that is because they do not NEED to know any rules beyond character creation and how their particular dis/ads work. Same reason I never played mages in P&P AD&D: I did not want to have to juggle spell lists and memorization. Ironically, I LOVED playing mages in GURPS, because I built my grimoire from the ground up and virtually all my spells had practical use (plus I did not have to keep track of what I had and had not memorized that day.)

Of course, the downside is that any character who takes obscene amounts of damage will die, however experienced s/he is. And Resurrection is a Mental VH spell with a crapton of prerequisites and a 300 Fatigue casting cost (it is pretty much impossible to cast without a large circle of high level mages, which can link to split the Fatigue cost.)


Scaling is less an issue (up to a point...) than practical invulnerability to anything and everything NOT scaled. Same reason none of my BG fighters ever took that High Level Ability that autokills anything <12th level: By the time they were high enough to get HLAs, they autokilled everything <12th level unaided. In the real world, Patton could beat Rommel in North Africa, conquer Sicily and lead the Allies to victory at the Battle of the Bulge only to snap his neck falling off the seat in a minor car accident and be killed weeks after the war ended. Again, impossible in AD&D, because epic level characters are invulnerable to anything but other epic level characters.


Yeah, I WOULD do that, except my parties are always so heavily stealth oriented fireballs have limited use. Even when I just sneak in a F/T and a straight class Thief it is bad enough, and by the time I get to SoA (or Tutu) I have a Stalker into the bargain, so I have to choose between three backstabs or nuking half my party along with the bad guys. I cannot do both, because Hide in Shadows/Move Silently rolls automatically fail in the presence of an enemy, so unless I can drop the fireball then race into position to backstab a moving target before exposure I must forego the fireball.

The effect is much the same: The mages die in the opening rounds, while the mainline fighters are either killed along with them or critically injured. The main difference is that a specced archer can put so many poison arrows into a mage that he WILL fail his save, and after that I really do not care how long it takes him to die, because he cannot cast.