Nonhuman races before they became green humans?

[Gensh]

I've heard that the so-called standard races used to be different back in the day and that humans were much better in late-game to discourage munchkins from playing them without roleplaying them properly. Could someone give me a solid breakdown on how this was supposed to work or maybe share a story about a time when someone played an inhuman character especially well?

I'm not looking into a game in particular, so if you've got examples from something other than older editions of D&D, go ahead and share. :smallsmile:

[Rhynn]

From OD&D through B/X to BECMI and AD&D 1E to AD&D 2E, demi-humans (elves, dwarves, hobhalflings, and everything else that got added) had level limits.

In OD&D, elves could become 4th-level fighting-men and 8th-level magic-users (they were both at once in a way that was not explained at all and left to the DM and players to work out), halflings could become 4th-level fighting-men, and dwarves could become 6th-level fighting-men.

As editions went on, the level limits got steadily increased (as did what classes demi-humans could take). AD&D 1E increased them, although they were still pretty strict: only half-elf and half-orc could be demi-human cleric PCs (other demi-humans had NPC clerics only), up to 5th and 4th level respectively. Elves could become 5th-level fighters (6th with STR 17, 7th with STR 18+) and 9th-level magic-users (10th with INT 17, 11th with INT 18).

AD&D 1E's Unearthed Arcana loosened the limitations slightly and emphasized ability scores' effects. Demi-human PC clerics were permitted; gray/high elves could be 10th-level fighters with Str 18/00, and 11th if they somehow got to 19+ (such as one of the infamous magic pools that may randomly increase or decrease an ability score).

AD&D 2E loosened the limitations again, and offered streamlined optional rules for having ability scores affect them (strictly optional; by default, ability scores had no effect on level limits). Now elves could become 15th-level mages, 12th-level fighters, 15th-level rangers, etc., half-elf clerics could get up to 14th... a prime requisites increased the limits: +1 for 14-15, +2 for 16-17, +3 for 18, +4 for 19.

Basically, the idea was to encourage human characters by giving the non-humans' special up-front abilities a high cost in the late game; although by AD&D 2E, IMO the limits were so high as to not practically matter.

There's nothing about old D&D that really makes demi-humans feel different in roleplay, though - that's up to the DM and players to accomplish. This is just mechanics designed to discourage them, which were gradually phased out.

It's late, but tomorrow I'll spin some yarns about Gloranthan/RuneQuest vegetaricannibal elves, cog-dwarves, and the glorious Uz. :smallcool:

[Water_Bear]

(Note, this is all based on the having read the rules and a lot of second-hand info; I've never actually gotten to play these systems)

Racial Classes:

Games like oD&D, Basic (B/X, BECMI, Rules Cyclopedia), and AD&D 1e had all the traditional classes like Magic User and Fighter as human only. Demihumans had their own "class" based on their race; Elves took levels in Elf, Dwarves in Dwarf, etc.

These were similar to and different from the human classes, and reflected that the Demihuman races had particular talents and mindsets which humans don't share. Plus, what we now call "racial traits" were class features in these editions.

(AD&D 2e had something somewhat analogous to this with racial multiclassing. In the old days only Demihumans could multiclass, and only into specific archetypical combinations like Elf Fighter/Wizard. This let them avoid their level limit and made it easier to port in characters from older editions; Elf = Fighter/Wizard, etc. Humans could Dual Class, but that was very different.)

Also, in games with a stronghold/domain management "endgame" like B/X BECMI and Rules Cyclopedia called out the social differences between humans and demihumans. Demihumans are far more Clan-oriented and traditional than humans, with even maximum level Demihumans locked out of actually leading the clans or dealing with their mysterious Artifacts. Rather than ruling like a human, Demihumans end up as ambassadors or advisors within their Clans and thus their gameplay after Name Level (assuming they can advance that high at all) is very different.

Racial Level Limits:

In every edition before WotC made AD&D 3e there were limits on how many levels a Demihuman could take, usually in the range of 8-12, after which any new XP had limited use if any. In terms of HP it didn't make a huge difference (you stopped getting new HD at 9th level) but in terms of THAC0 and Spells it was a bit of a big deal, if your game managed to get that far. This helped establish why humans were dominant; despite being fairly weak for the most part we produce exceptional individuals with limitless potential as champions.

As mentioned before, AD&D 2e let Demihumans skirt these limits somewhat with Multiclassing.

Racial Ability Score Minimums:

This one is AD&D 2e only, but is weird enough to make it onto the list. To make a Demihuman character, you needed a set of rolls which met certain minimums in specific ability scores. This established some of the differences between humans and demihumans; knowing that even the weakest Dwarf is Con 8, for example, gives you a better sense of their nature.

Feel free to correct any inaccuracies.

[Rhynn]

Games like oD&D, Basic (B/X, BECMI, Rules Cyclopedia), and AD&D 1e had all the traditional classes like Magic User and Fighter as human only. Demihumans had their own "class" based on their race; Elves took levels in Elf, Dwarves in Dwarf, etc.

Small but IMO extremely important correction: AD&D 1E already separated race and class.

In fact, OD&D did, too. In OD&D, you weren't a "4th-level halfling" (unlike in B/X and then BECMI, where you were exactly that), you were a "4th-level halfling fighting-man." The B/X simplification made sense, since a dwarf or a halfling could only be a fighting-man*, and an elf was a magic-user and a fighting-man, but AD&D 1E was more or less independent parallel evolution rather than an extension of B/X; B/X was Holmes' and then Moldvay's interpretation of OD&D, and BECMI was Mentzer's re-write and expansion on B/X, while AD&D 1E was Gary Gygax's own vision.

* But only because B/X ignored the OD&D Supplements. Supplement I: Greyhawk added thieves, and demi-humans could be thieves; this is also where demi-human NPC-only clerics come from. It's also the source of the "high ability scores increase level limits" thing.

So only B/X and BECMI (Rules Cyclopedia) treated races as classes.


(AD&D 2e had something somewhat analogous to this with racial multiclassing. In the old days only Demihumans could multiclass, and only into specific archetypical combinations like Elf Fighter/Wizard. This let them avoid their level limit and made it easier to port in characters from older editions; Elf = Fighter/Wizard, etc. Humans could Dual Class, but that was very different.)

That's from AD&D 1E. 2E is about 95% the same game, with just some details changed.


This one is AD&D 2e only, but is weird enough to make it onto the list. To make a Demihuman character, you needed a set of rolls which met certain minimums in specific ability scores. This established some of the differences between humans and demihumans; knowing that even the weakest Dwarf is Con 8, for example, gives you a better sense of their nature.

Again, 2E got that straight from 1E.

[LibraryOgre]

That's from AD&D 1E. 2E is about 95% the same game, with just some details changed.

A story I heard at Comicpalooza (from another player, whose name I don't recall, so take that as the golden source it seems to be) is that with 2e, the only reason they were allowed to do a 2nd edition is that they claimed it wouldn't be so much an addition as a few tweaks.

At the time, as I understand it, the ownership of TSR *really* hated gamers. And they weren't too thrilled about the development time of a new RPG. So, some of the "innovations" of 3e were things they would've done, had it not been for the difficulties.

[Rhynn]

At the time, as I understand it, the ownership of TSR *really* hated gamers. And they weren't too thrilled about the development time of a new RPG. So, some of the "innovations" of 3e were things they would've done, had it not been for the difficulties.

Ah, yes. The Lorraine Williams Days. I have read many horror stories. Dark times for D&D. Hey, at least we got Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday and Matrix Cubed...

But it does seem credible. I think that, other than spells and monsters added to the core books, they removed more rules than they added, and tweaked some of the rest.

[tensai_oni]

I've heard that the so-called standard races used to be different back in the day and that humans were much better in late-game to discourage munchkins from playing them without roleplaying them properly.

Ha ha ha, it was done for the exact opposite of roleplaying. First editions of DnD were glorified small-scale wargames, with roleplay elements tacked on. No, the level cap was introduced to balance out the frontloaded bonuses. And since those games were played with a player-vs-DM mentality and threat levels were quite extreme, it was a rare occurence that anyone reaches high levels anyway. So it was a worthy tradeoff.

[satorian]

Ha ha ha, it was done for the exact opposite of roleplaying. First editions of DnD were glorified small-scale wargames, with roleplay elements tacked on. No, the level cap was introduced to balance out the frontloaded bonuses. And since those games were played with a player-vs-DM mentality and threat levels were quite extreme, it was a rare occurence that anyone reaches high levels anyway. So it was a worthy tradeoff.

That's really only true of tournament play. From the very beginning, even in Gary's games, there was far more roleplaying than you represent. Check out the Let's Read AD&D thread that is currently active to see how roleplay oriented that edition was intended to be. Also, remember that all those named wizards who named spells were originally PCs that reached high levels and made their own spells in real games.

[Mordar]

At the time, as I understand it, the ownership of TSR *really* hated gamers. And they weren't too thrilled about the development time of a new RPG. So, some of the "innovations" of 3e were things they would've done, had it not been for the difficulties.


Ah, yes. The Lorraine Williams Days. I have read many horror stories. Dark times for D&D. Hey, at least we got Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday and Matrix Cubed...

But it does seem credible. I think that, other than spells and monsters added to the core books, they removed more rules than they added, and tweaked some of the rest.

I don't know that "TSR" hated gamers as much as Williams didn't like people who played games but liked their money. 2e was low development cost, high return because it was a revision of AD&D, not "Really Advanced Dungeons and Dragons", a whole new game. TSR cranked out a lot of other games in her era, many of which I bought.

Probably Useless History
Magic: The Gathering (interestingly, I think a total rip from Tom Wham's Kings of the Tabletop (http://www.tomwham.com/kott.html), a rant for another time, because it appears that Tom Wham doesn't think so) was the death-knell for TSR, following close on the heels of the WoD boom and a resurgence of popularity of Games Workshop products. The market offered too many shiny new things, and D&D looked liked your father's role playing game. Add in a failed attempt at a collectible dice game and (news to me, but makes sense) a really bad year for their fiction lines, and TSR had to sell out to the new kid on the block (WotC)...who as we know got big enough to be seen as food for sharks and became part of the Hasbro empire.

tl;dr: They didn't get dark and gritty enough (or emo enough?) to compete in the new era of RPGs, and like 99% of the other attempts to make collectible games, over-invested and failed.

The company never hated...and it was sad to see it all fall apart...still plenty of good products from the Williams years (and some dogs, too), but she was the captain when it hit the iceberg.

So, yeah...to make this on topic:

I started playing in 1982, D&D Expert Edition and AD&D at the same time. There weren't munchkins then...rule of cool was everything, and optimization wasn't even a word, much less one applied to RPGs. We played elves, half-elves, humans, halflings, and dwarves, pretty much in that order of frequency. We viewed the restrictions and level limits as more guidelines than rules when it came to AD&D (primarily because we all wanted to be not-humans...which is probably exactly why the rules existed) paladins excepted. Oh, an *no one* played half-orcs. Ever.

Even had we cleaved to the rules, our AD&D games were generally "module" (published adventure/scenario) based, so the ongoing campaign issue never hit home with my group. We found our longer campaigns in other games (Star Frontiers, Call of C'thulhu and RoleMaster in particular - clearly later in the mid 80s), so those dynamics never really impacted our group.

There, now go mow my lawn :smallbiggrin:

- M

[Need_A_Life]

Could someone give me a solid breakdown on how this was supposed to work or maybe share a story about a time when someone played an inhuman character especially well?Depending on what you mean by inhuman, that may be an impossible standard, since - no matter how great the roleplayer - they are still humans themselves and thus have a human perspective that they are tweaking rather than an inhuman perspective.

That being said, I've played fairies who had to follow the narrative of a fairy tale when such was presented (if a SWAT-team starts clearing rooms looking for it, it was a lot more dangerous than if someone wandered around curiously, for example, because the latter is a stable of fairy tales while the former is most definitely not), mentally ill characters and characters who would gladly cannibalize a fallen ally, since there was no reason to let his body go to waste.

Game editions have had no influence on the roleplaying inclinations of munchkins.

[satorian]

As I think about it, the core of how the rules defined a different playstyle for different races is merely that they did something, something at all, to discourage playing a nonhuman. And of course the issue isn't so much about discouragement being important, but difference being important. When an orc or elf or even half minotaur half dragon half ogre aasimar is just a different bundle of numbers on a page, there is less incentive (or possibility once you get into the multimixes) to play differently with different races.

One could argue that the 1e aesthetic was little more numbers on the page, too, but I would suggest in response that there was more to it than that. Perhaps it was intangible, and perhaps it was merely the fact that Warcraft instituted orcs as noble savages instead of mere monsters, but it felt like there was more in my games.

[LibraryOgre]

tl;dr: They didn't get dark and gritty enough (or emo enough?) to compete in the new era of RPGs, and like 99% of the other attempts to make collectible games, over-invested and failed.


There was also significant market fragmentation as a result of a lot of settings. Many of the excellent, but there were so many to invest in that people specialized, and thus the entire thing failed.

[Jay R]

A few additional details:

1. In original D&D, there were no halflings. Hobbits could only go up to 4th level fighter. The game had hobbits (and ents and balrogs) until the Tolkien estate noticed.

2. The level limits starting going up pretty early. The first supplement (Greyhawk) upped the limits, and introduced higher limits based on the prime characteristics. It also introduced a class in which there were no limits for non-humans - the Thief class. In practice, this proved that the limits were necessary to avoid losing humans as the primary PC race, because I never met anyone who played a human thief.

3. The Dragon #3 had a vastly superior way to play a Dwarf Fighter, which we all went to immediately. It stopped at level 9, but it had significant benefits, and at level 9, the dwarf became a Dwarf King.

4. In practice, the actual limit on non-humans (who weren't thieves) is that it cost them their first Wish. All our high-level non-human Fighters and Wizards used a Wish to eliminate the level limit.

[Greylond]

4. In practice, the actual limit on non-humans (who weren't thieves) is that it cost them their first Wish. All our high-level non-human Fighters and Wizards used a Wish to eliminate the level limit.

Must have been a house ruling on a Wish because that never would have been allowed in any of the groups I played with over the years... :)

Level limits were there for a reason.... :)

[LibraryOgre]

Must have been a house ruling on a Wish because that never would have been allowed in any of the groups I played with over the years... :)

Level limits were there for a reason.... :)

And the rules, as of 2e, fairly clearly spelled out the effects of wishing for a higher level limit... it would give you 1 more level per wish.

FWIW, I tend to view the various humanoids as being like Indians in a Western. How you treat them depends on what era your Western was made... it can range from "Killing them is a good thing in all situations" to "They are people who a bit different."

[Jay R]

Must have been a house ruling on a Wish because that never would have been allowed in any of the groups I played with over the years... :)

Until 2E, ALL Wishes were house rulings. In original D&D, the actual rule on Wishes was "... the wishes granted must be of limited power to maintain balance in the game. This requires the utmost discretion on the part of the referre. Typically, greedy characters will request more wishes, for exampleas one of their wishes. The referee should then put that character into an endless closed time loop, moving him back to the time he first obtained the wish ring. Again, a wish for some more powerful item could be fulfilled without benefit to the one wishing ("I wish for a Mirror of Life Trapping!", and the referee then places the character inside one which is all his own!) Wishes that unfortunate adventures had never happened should be granted. Clues can be given when wishes for powerful items or great treasures are made."

It is very hard for people who never played it to realize to what extent the original D&D rules weren't a set of game rules; they were a framework to help a DM produce a set of game rules.


Level limits were there for a reason.... :)

Yup. So were wishes. And the primary reason for wishes was to make things happen that couldn't happen otherwise. I always though that the real disadvantage to playing a non-human was the automatic loss of a wish.

[Greylond]

Until 2E, ALL Wishes were house rulings.

Sorry but that statement is incorrect. For example on page 11 of the 1st Edition DMG is a limit on raising Attributes with a Wish.... ;)

[Jay R]

Until 2E, ALL Wishes were house rulings.

Sorry but that statement is incorrect. For example on page 11 of the 1st Edition DMG is a limit on raising Attributes with a Wish.... ;)

Red herring duly noted. Statement amended to:

Until 2E, almost ALL Wishes were house rulings.

[JustSomeGuy]

If i recall correctly (which is a bit of a ~15 year long shot), only nonhumans could dual class while only humans could multiclass - in addition to the level limits.

[Rhynn]

If i recall correctly (which is a bit of a ~15 year long shot), only nonhumans could dual class while only humans could multiclass - in addition to the level limits.

You remember it the wrong way around. (I guess you've just got the terms mixed up?)

Dual-classing (humans only) is switching classes. You need 16+ in your current class's prime requisites and 17+ in you new class's prime requisites. You lose access to your old class abilities until you get to the same level in your new class. (You could use them, but that lost you all the XP for that adventure.)

Multi-classing (demihumans only) is progressing 2 or 3 classes (combinations available based on race) simultaneously, and has no extra requirements. You split you XP 2 or 3 ways, equally. (Although personally I apply XP bonuses for high prime requisites individually to the XP earned in each class.)

[BWR]

Red herring duly noted. Statement amended to:

Until 2E, almost ALL Wishes were house rulings.

How is that a red herring?

[JustSomeGuy]

You remember it the wrong way around.

Yeah, that's what i say to meant!

[Jay R]

How is that a red herring?

Because the specific issue was level limits, in which all rulings would be house rulings. And while there are a few exceptions (I quoted Gygax's recommendations for what to do when somebody wishes for more wishes), in general, pretty much all rulings were house rulings.