Maybe? It's a gray area, still. The example in B/X Moldvay was a 1st level thief IIRC. This seems like more of a nerf to keep the game from being too lethal. I don't mind that at all, but it seems inconsistent for you to be okay with this. But then, people are consistently inconsistent.
Being 100% consistent is too heavy a burden for me to bear. I'm at least a tad mercurial. (Sometimes!)
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Even though I've already pummeled you all with enough of my biases --- here's one more to chew on.
I picked AD&D to adopt because I trust it...and specifically
him.
It was Gygax's last and best attempt (before life overcame him) to "sort things out" after an insane amount of play-testing and thought put out by the whole Lake Geneva/Minneapolis crowd.
The tone and content of the 1e DMG speaks to me of accumulated wisdom, and I just don't get that nearly anywhere else.
I "get" that people prefer B/X because it's OD&D-simple without all the rough edges. Swords & Wizardry did that for me too. It held my hand in a nice way as well. Like the AD&D DMG, S&W was full of Finch's fatherly wisdom. It encouraged and commiserated.
I bring this up because of
@The Heretic's example: I don't trust Moldvay, just like I don't trust Metzner or the (2e DMG's) "Wizard's RPG Team". I am not confident about their hands on the tiller. I know where AD&D leads --- I don't the rest. Those authors didn't get the chance to course-correct multiple times.
B/X is tidy --- but I don't know if it's well built for the long campaign which I love. Certainly it appeared on the scene after the rot had started to set in at TSR and the type of people (and what they wanted from D&D) had begun to slowly shift. So, while it's familiar on the surface, the trust is just not there for me.
Just throwing that out there --- not as a slam, but just to share my own personal decision process.