Advanced Dungeons and Dragons adventures!

So I hauled out my copy of the Player's Handbook along with the Dungeon Master's Guide, since the DMG is where you find saving throw and attack matrices. And here's what I notice so far;

• Some things with character attributes are 'way more draconian in later editions.
  
  
  • You get only one chance to bash a door in, and it's probably not all that good (18/00 strength fighters get two chances at 1-4 on a d6); I assume this is a tool to streamline play, so that players who don't successfully pick a lot or bash in a door give up and go elsewhere instead of camping out at the door.
    
  • Obviously the big strength thing I've never seen in play is the insistence that women have lower strength, because it's both sexist and no fun. A while back I realized this is what made changing a presumed-default-male-character's gender in game not simply a puerile dick move ("Holgar the Mighty is now Helga the Mighty! Ha ha ha, where're you gonna find a comfortable bra that fits DD cups on this level?") but a DM dick move ("Holgar the Mighty is now Helga the Mighty! Reduce your strength score from 18/78 to 18/50, sucker!").
    
  • Intelligence determines the minimum and maximum number of spells you can learn. There's a chunk of game I've never seen anyone play with, where the would-be magic user is basically questing for more spells to scribble into his dog-eared, stained spellbook - as well as presumably someone to cast Wish so he can actually learn higher level stuff. What might be the average magic-user will only know at least 6-7 spells and at most 9-11 spells per level. Ow.
    
  • Wisdom allows bonus spells for Clerics only, and if you're playing a Cleric with 9-12 Wisdom there's a chance of spell failure.
    
  • Your reaction bonus from Dexterity is not the same as your Defensive Adjustment (your AC adjustment).
    
  • Obviously, fighters get slightly better Con bonuses to hit points than anyone else - but this probably won't come into play for most fighter types. This is getting into my next point.
  
  
• The PHB as written probably assumes that you're rolling 4d6, discard the lowest die. I did some character-rollin', and I found not surprisingly you mostly get characters who are good but not great, with lots of 11-14 range stats. This makes pretty much all non-human race options accessible and means you can play any of the default four classes. Specialists are a lot rarer - a Druid will require a 15+ charisma (something I didn't remember), an Illusionist needs to have 15+ in int and dex, paladins need three pretty good attributes and one ridiculously awesome attribute, and rangers weigh in at the hardest to actually roll up at 4 stats of 12+. If you're using this method forget playing a bard. It's not going to happen.
  
  I have to wonder whether this ever really affected party makeup ("Aw man! Three twelves, an 11, a 16 and a 15! Hey, I could play an Illusionist!" "But we need a cleric." "You say that every game and I'm tired of being the First Aid Kit. We'll just buy a batch of potions or whatever, I want to try this.")
  
  The moment you do character generation at all differently all of this weird little balance of specialists being rare goes out the window. Which is fairer. I remember when I was introduced to the game, there being a house rule that you had one 18 - you had to roll for the rest. This, I think, actually really is a nice balance between points based chargen and the "too bad" design of the PHB.
  
  
• I've never actually seen anyone play with the racial antipathies or class limits in the PHB. The class limits are set in an arbitrary range of "you can get a lot of play out of your metahuman, but not enough to really play at high levels." I think I'm missing the rationale behind the design decision to allow unlimited advancement as Thieves for all metahumans (except half-orcs, which have unlimited advancement as Assassins, I suspect as a tool for creating NPCs). Kinda-nice race advantages plus kinda-nice class advantages stacks up equal to humans with no race advantages and really boss class advantages?
  
  
• I notice that some awesome class abilities are front-loaded. A 1st level paladin or thief has the teaser that their lay-on hands or move silently abilities may some day blossom to being vital battlefield healing or masterful stealth. I do kinda like that approach, though I have no idea how to implement it in a way which isn't "yeah yeah right, I can heal two hit points, big whoop."
  
  
• Weapon proficiencies are very draconian. Don't worry too much about how many levels it'll take you to get access to that horseman's flail you want for your cleric, because honestly there's not much you can use other than that footman's mace you're toting.
  
  
• Obvious but worth repeating; for some reason throwing vials of burning oil is somehow kinder than using poison, pretty much every class has that as a fallback option. I'm not giving the orcs agonizing third degree burns and life-long scarring, I'm so good-aligned I'm granting them Pelor's light.
  
  
• A rule I'd never noticed; your shield has a limited number of uses. Unless magical it's only -1 AC, but that goes away after you block one, two or three attacks each round depending on size, which is pretty fair considering that you have a fairly low chance of fighting more than one opponent or something with more than 2 melee attacks each round.
  
  
• Melee weapons are assigned a speed as well as space limited to swing them, and missile weapons have a fire rate, which realistically limits what most characters will carry around. Holgar the Mighty cleaving through the Irish with his Danish Axe might be an awesome picture, but it has a speed of 7, and Holgar will probably prefer a speed 5 broadsword if he wants to get his 3/2 or 2/1 attacks per round. There's also a vaguely arbitrary matrix of hit bonuses and penalty per each weapon - that awesome battle axe might not be as awesome as the horseman's flail which has no penalty against AC 5 or less opponents. I've only seen one person ever use this in play, which was me. And I dropped it after a while because even though the rules said it, other players who ignored it were unsurprisingly doing 'way better in combat.
  
  
• Old observation worth mentioning; the 1-10 AC scale sounds like an okay way to generalize what characters' agility and various historical armors can do. As soon as you start ornamenting it with field plate, full plate, Dwarven banded mail, sleeping in your gambeson because that's what you can still be comfy with, or wearing only kabuto/kote/suneate because your bushi can't afford better, it becomes arbitrary and weird.
  
  
• Determining surprise is this confusing tangle of d6 rolls by the group, but I still can't tell whether having a ranger in the party affects the whole group's roll, and of course ranger or thief scouts will get different rolls. I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually use dice to determine rolling for surprise, and since it sure seems like a surprise segment wouldn't really allow spellcasting so much as a chance for fighter types to whack something before casters can be awesome, it'd probably generate a lot of ill will anyway.
  
  
• And then there's between levels training, something I've never seen anyone use. I assume that, like purchasing material spell components, this motivates characters. My magic-user needs to visit the Citadel of Chaos again so she can earn enough to actually learn new arcane mysteries and purchase more of those awesome little clay ziggurats and balls of bat guano, instead of retiring to own a stablery. But she can quit at any time, honest.
  
  My opinion of encumbrance and material spell components is real mixed. It'd be nice to have characters carrying around believable amounts of gear, but how exciting is slowing the game down to carefully balance out what's in the belt pouches versus what's on that mule we have to leave tethered outside the caves? It'd be nice to have some sort of really simplified house rule for number of items, just in general. And while collecting bits of arcane foci for various spells lends magic a mystery and consistency, it might not play out that way. Hunting manticores for their tail spines is cool and thematic if ethically dubious, finding that only the next city over has a shop with manticore spines in a jar is not.
  
  
• I'll probably read the DMG in more detail later, but taking a short jaunt into the DMG now for saving throws and attacks, since those could be in the PHB just as logically;
  
  
  • Something really obvious is that monsters have a better attack matrix than player characters - I think it's supposed to balance out how PCs probably have more hit points, more magic items and healing, and lower armor class.
    
  • Attack matrices are similar across classes - it's the level advancement that really makes the difference here.
    
  • Saving throws are lumped into categories of stuff you're going to encounter rather than how you resist it, which is vaguely just as logical (a thief should have a good dexterity, it makes sense that they'll have good breath weapon saves = a rogue has a good dex and will have better Reflex saves). Saving throws are actually kinda harsh in AD&D, by comparison to 3.5 or Pathfinder, where you really want to take no-save spells as much as possible.
    
  • I have yet to look at the DMG in greater depth but something I hadn't noticed before; if you have high enough hit dice (levels), you can actually hit stuff that requires magical weapons to hit. I think that's an okay game balance (your fighter can actually hit that wraith because he's just that awesome) but it's obscure, tucked under the attack matrices.
  
  
• One salient fact about these books so far is the physical design isn't very good. How often can clerics turn undead? Well, their ability to turn is carefully set apart from 12 point regular font with more 12 point regular font within a paragraph. The spell lists in particular confront the player with a wall of text. I know personally I find illustrations in spell lists really enticing - "wow, I want to know what does this badass thing!" This is a design thing which I still don't know how you work with as a compromise between AD&D wall-o-text and having a little illustration for each spell.