The Magic User may only wear leather armour or no armour at all, and is restricted to the use of staffs and daggers as weapons.
As far as I am aware, the bit about leather armour has never been the case in D&D, so where is Livingstone getting this idea from?
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Can he not wear leather armour, but have to take on an increased chance of spell failure?
ReplyDeleteThat's the case in 3E, but in previous editions, it was no armour or no spells.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if this is insanity on Ian's part or just carelessness. Some folks just don't read the rules properly - they usually get corrected by more astute fellow gamers, but I'm guessing Ian's editor for this book wasn't familiar with D&D.
This might be one of Ian's house rules, but if so he should have said so.
Well, this is 1982, at the height of D&D's popularity and Games Workshop were at the time responsible for importing -- and had earlier published -- the game into the UK, so one would assume that Livingstone would know how it worked.
ReplyDelete"Furthermore, they can wear no armour and have few weapons they can use, for martial training is so foreign to magic use as to make the two almost mutually exclusive." PHB (AD&D), 1978, page 25.
ReplyDeleteIndeed. I have no experience of AD&D1, but I did examine the retroclone OSRIC, and there was nothing about armour in there.
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