The miniature paints jobs rock too. Alas, I lack the patience (or the time) to paint these days, and I’m sure when I finally have the time I won’t be able to see the dtails to paint them

No Fighter. No Thief.

That way, when everyone rolls up characters, and they interact with NPCs, everything from the ground up has a different flavor.

Similarly, the monsters in 1E MM are fine for Greyhawk, and act as a good base for other settings, but you can probably only use about 3/4 of them in any other setting. And you SHOULD replace almost every single one. This can be just a reskin, but as you go you’ll probably come up with cool ideas for special abilities and weaknesses.

Same with magic items. D&D steals a lot of magic items from various mythological sources, but I bet you can go through the 1E DMG magic item lists and pick out the ones that best represent an Arabian setting, and then expand upon those. Reskin anything else.

The end result will be a big binder full of classes, maybe 6 or 7 per setting, multiplied by maybe a dozen settings. At some point your players will want to just pick from the big list of classes. Here is where class-based games break down: new players are paralyzed by indecision and even experienced players spend too much time picking a class.

Yes you can get an assassin by multiclassing F/T. But you still don’t actually have an assassin: there’s no poison skill, no languages, no assassination roll. The reason different classes are desirable is because they each have different special abilities. Multiclassing just gives you the special abilities of a couple classes – salad-like, not soup-like.

An alternative is a skill-based game. Reject classes. But then you lose the goodness of classes: ease of advancement, ability to define a character simply: Elf F3. B/X strips that down further: Elf3.

And I think either way is fine. A profusion of classes, for people who don’t mind just picking something and hitting the road. Choose your skills and customize, for people who really want to make a snowflake. I like both, and I don’t like them. The search continues.
1d30 recently posted..The Grey and Wolves

Using stats just seems natural to me though.

http://divisionnihil.blogspot.com/2012/02/take-20-creating-constrained-setting.html
Lugh recently posted..Take 20: Creating a constrained setting

Also, I’m not sure if you intended it, but your proposal of “a ranger [is] just a fighter who knows how to live off the land” is pretty much exactly the paradigm that 2e went with. Four core classes, and a small selection of sub-classes. Personally, I much prefer going with a handful of core classes and making the other classes essentially codified multi-class options. I.e., a paladin is just a specific fighter/cleric, a bard is a specific thief/mage.
Lugh recently posted..Encyclopedia Magica: The Acorn of Wo Mai