A CP-Based AD&D

Link to the material here.

So, a very long time ago, before there was officially a 3rd edition D&D, I launched an ambitious project: I was going to use the Skills and Powers and Spells and Magic Character Point (CP) system to remake AD&D. I had roughed out some changes to make to the system; I was planning on splitting Defense from Armor, with armor providing damage reduction. Races would be a basic chassis of natural abilities with a slate of optional, cultural, abilities to choose from, and classes would be based on a three-class system of Warrior, Rogue, and Magic-User. I developed a lot of it, but Wizards of the Coast announcing their official 3e took some wind out of my sails, and it wasn't long thereafter I began writing my first book for Palladium, Mysteries of Magic (of which, sadly, only a small part has been published, and that 10 years ago).

Time went on. I worked on other projects, but the idea kept coming back to me.

The material at the link above is the most recent peak in that idea. This defaults largely back to the 2nd edition rules, and does not include a set way of increasing skills so gained (such as Sleight of Hand or Stealth); it may in the future. As presented, there are no guidelines for creating a class in it, but the last few years have led me to like single XP tables for class-based games; rather than balancing various abilities and various XP tables, there's a simplicity in balancing everything on a single XP table, and making efforts to balance every class on that, itself. To that end, I propose two solutions, depending on your love of crunch.

1) Allow everyone to build their character, and set an XP table based on their total cost. To do this, you reference the "create a class" rules in the 2nd edition Dungeon Master's Guide, and give a 0.05 multiplier on the XP table (Table 21) for every point used in class creation (and, thus, a full 1 multiplier for every 20 points spent). Everyone will have a different XP table, but it will be one they've chosen, based on what they want to do.

2) Set an XP table, set a CP cost, and let people design their own classes. If you give everyone 200 CP, you can make most characters in standard AD&D; lower numbers might require some hard choices. Everyone is on the same XP table, and everyone has the same starting CPs, so everyone should be more or less equal. You can set whatever XP table you like, but using the method of determining XP table in option 1 isn't the worst way you can do it.

I'm posting a link to this, rather than copy-pasting the whole document, because I intend to make occasional changes to it as I go along; I'm still interested in adding some rules for creating psionic characters, for example, but that requires me to decide which psionics system from AD&D I want to use, or if I want to volunteer my own.