On Dungeons & Dragons: Race/Class Limitations (Part 1 of Many)

Part of musings on the nature of RPGs, specifically D&D. The good, the bad, and the ugly

In Basic D&D (B/X and BECMI which I will henceforth refer to as B/X for simplicity), race and class were combined. An Elf, for example, was simply an Elf (and in Original D&D had to pick between Fighter and Magic-User, and could change this each adventure; in Holmes Basic, this was changed to progressing equally in both) and had a unique advancement chart.

AD&D 1st edition, and 2nd edition after it, split race and class. An Elf could, for example, be a Fighter, Magic-User, Thief, or a multi-class combination thereof (NPC Elves, but not PCs, could be Clerics; this was later expanded to PCs in Unearthed Arcana along with the Cavalier class). However, they were limited. An Elf could only progress to the 7th level (assuming an 18 Strength, otherwise they were limited to 6th level w/17 Strength or 5th level with below 17 Strength) as a Fighter and 11th level (with 18 Intelligence, otherwise 10th with 17 Intelligence and 9th otherwise) as a Magic-User. Unearthed Arcana and 2nd edition AD&D increased these limits but still, the point was as a demi-human (as Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, etc. were called) you had a “ceiling” of how high you could advance in a given class or classes, while Humans were not only allowed to be any class but also have unlimited advancement.

The idea was obvious: Demi-humans received several additional abilities (an Elf being 90% resident to Sleep and Charm and being immune to the paralysis effect of a Ghoul, for example) so those abilities on top of being able to be any class and achieve any level were felt too gross imbalance them compared to humans; after all, if you could play an Elf, receive all the benefits of being an Elf as well as advance to 20th level as a Paladin, why would you ever opt to play a Human instead? It could be argued that changing this with 3rd edition D&D and subsequent editions had this very effect; Humans became “boring” and less played compared to non-humans when the initial nature of (A)D&D was that the world was humano-centric and other, non-human races were meant to be rare and fantastic.

Is this the truth, though? On the one hand, I completely agree that D&D (which I will interchangeably use with the game in all its forms) is human-centric. I’ve been on a binge reading both the Appendix N listing in the back of the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide (I’ll post more on that another time) as well as reading about history and mythology, in particular, the romanticized mythology made popular in the Middle Ages (e.g. Arthurian Fantasy, the tales of Charlemagne, etc) and I feel that D&D works best when humans are the dominant race; seeing an Elf or a Dwarf, unless you’re in a major cosmopolitan city (Waterdeep or the City of Greyhawk, for example) should be the exception, not the norm, and feel weird and alien to the average person, not be as common as going to the grocery store and seeing people of all ethnicities as in the real world (a future post will talk about the grossly incorrect misconception of many modern-day gamers equating fantasy races with real-world races, leading to many, many issues of perception).

On the other hand, I like my fantasy campaign settings to be fantastic, and part of that involves making the PCs feel unique and special. I firmly believe that the campaign's PCs should be extraordinary, if not exceptional. This means that, to me, the idea of let’s say a Dwarf Magic-User or an Elf Paladin isn’t an anathema, it’s a plot hook. It’s a unique piece of the campaign setting. A Dwarf Magic-User PC might be the only one in the world (or, perhaps, if not then there might have been a mythical figure in the past); that becomes the character’s plot and unique aspect. They have gone “against the grain” of their expectations, like how, often enough, a mythological hero is blessed by the gods or an auspicious omen to be marked amongst their peers for something more.

So given the choice, would I choose to stick with the old-school approach of limiting demi-humans or the modern approach? It’s hard to say. I see the benefits and drawbacks of both. Ultimately, I think, given that the majority of people locally whom I would be convincing to play would have played the more modern iterations of the game and not the original ones, I’d err on the side of freely allowing any race and class combination and not having level restrictions, if only to avoid having them feel the game is too limiting for their taste.