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dorchadas
You know the drill by now.
In the original OD&D (sometimes called "white box D&D") there were three classes--"fighting man," cleric and magic user (quite utilitarian descriptions, yes?)--and four races--humans, elves, dwarves, and hobbits (later halflings once the Tolkien estate called TSR for a polite chat). At that time, though, the races had few rules bonuses or penalties, except that elves could be either fighting men or magic users (chosen before the beginning of the adventure). This was fine, because the famous abilities scores now associated with D&D (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma) didn't really do anything higher, except give you extra XP if you had a high enough one important to your class. Even then, non-humans had level limits.
Skip to BECM D&D, so-named after the groupings the rules were released in--"Basic," "Expert," "Companion" and "Master" (I actually have copies of the latter two sets, found in a garage sale about 16 years ago). The classes for humans were fighter, magic-user, cleric and thief. Druids and paladins were subtypes of clerics and fighters respectively, with some other bonuses as well. The maximum level limit was 36. Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings were classes, and had their own, much-lower level limits (10, 12 and 8 respectively, if I remember right). This trend continued until D&D 3.0, when the concept of level limits for non-human characters was finally removed.
So, why?
Well, I went over it a bit in my previous post. Both High Fantasy and Sword and Sorcery tend to be humanocentric. The second because humans are basically all that's around except for twisted horrors, and the first because the time of the elder races is over. There are practical reasons for this--it's hard enough to write a believable fantasy human culture, much less a believable fantasy non-human culture and have them come across as more than humans in funny suits--but the main reason reason in D&D is (was, since it's no longer a concern in later editions) to maintain the mood.
D&D pretty obviously got its ideas on races from Tolkien, as shown by the race list in OD&D, though there were significant elements taken from later sources like Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, which also provided the iconic D&D regenerating troll. In LotR, the dwarves have been driven out of most of their ancestral halls, the elves are fleeing westward and openly talking about their time is past, and the hobbits only live in one single area and, until Bilbo left the Shire, have basically no effect on the world. Other than orcs and trolls, humans are the ones who actually shape history.
Level limits are designed to emulate this sort of world. As the DMG says, "Demihuman characters are limited in how high a level they can achieve both to preserve internal consistency (humans are more flexible than non-humans) and to enforce game balance. A DM, however, can change or eliminate these limits as he sees fit. As with class restrictions, the consequences must be examined in detail. Given their extremely long lifespans, demihumans without limitations would quickly reach levels of power far beyond anything attainable by humans. The world would be dominated by these extremely powerful beings, to the exclusion of humans. Human heroes would be feeble compared to the heroes of elves and dwarves. Given their numerous advantages, demihumans would be the most attractive races--no one would play a human. Again, this isn't necessarily bad, but it's very different. The resulting game will be completely unlike the standard sword-and-sorcery milieu. You might need to set the campaign in an ancient age, before the ascendance of men (though given the situation, it's unlikely that men would ever become dominant)."
See, they even mention "sword-and-sorcery" by name there. :p
The big problem here is that while level limits do mechanically encourage it, they do so in a stupid way. The powers of demihumans are front-loaded--from first level, elves can see in the dark and detect secret doors, dwarves can resist spells and find out how far down they are underground, halflings can attack people with slings, etc. In contrast, level limits are back-loaded. While they sometimes show up relatively early (halfling fighters hit it at 7), it's typically in the 10-15 range. Add to that that demihumans can be multiple classes at a time and humans can only be one at a time (and if they use their special ability to switch, they lose their current class's abilities for a while), and it's obvious why demihumans are so popular even assuming the level limit rules were used, which they quite frequently weren't.
The other human advantage is that they can be any class. This gets pretty silly in some cases (no dwarf mages, okay, reasonable. No elf druids or bards, wat). This was less ignored than level limits, but a lot of people allowed banned classes within reason.
Again back to the DMG, we find, "If the only special advantage humans have is given to all the races, who will want to play a human? Humans would be the weakest race in your world. Why play a 20th-level human paladin when you could play a 20th-level elven paladin and have all the abilities of paladins and elves? If none of the player characters are human, it is probably safe to assume that no nonplayer characters of any importance are human either. Your world would have no human kingdoms, or human kings, emperors, or powerful wizards. It would be run by dwarves, elves, and gnomes. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but you must consider what kind of world nonhumans would create. Building a believable fantasy world is a daunting task; creating a believable alien fantasy world (which is what a world dominated by non-humans would be) is a huge challenge even for the best writers of fantasy."
As you might be able to see, this ignores a few things that can or could counterbalance this tendency.
Whether fluff or mechanical reasons are a better incentive mostly depends on your players. I don't actually mind if I end up with a game full of non-humans--the history of Forgotten Realms elves has a millennia-long period where they spent most of it slaughtering the shit out of each other, eventually killing off a double-digit percentage of their total population and banishing another double-digit percentage underground where they became the dark elves. They're different than humans, but still perfectly capable of hate, arrogance, mistakes, genocidal fury and all the other emotions that make a good RPG character. That and, as a wise man once said, fantasy races are based on Jungian archetypes anyway so it doesn't matter so much if they're similar to humanity.
So, that done, it's now question time. What generic fantasy race(s) do you prefer to play? Why? If you prefer to play non-humans, what would it take for you to play a human? Do you prefer fluff or mechanical benefits?
For me, like I said, I prefer elves. It's partially mechanical (I like playing multi-class fighter/mages, which are pretty much the iconic D&D elf because that's what the elf class back in BECM could do) and partially that it's fun to play the pretty people.
[1]: Note: Forgotten Realms elves do have super god magic capable of slaughtering entire armies. They don't usually use it because "balance of the world" blah blah hippie crap.
Next up--"Alignments, WTF"
In the original OD&D (sometimes called "white box D&D") there were three classes--"fighting man," cleric and magic user (quite utilitarian descriptions, yes?)--and four races--humans, elves, dwarves, and hobbits (later halflings once the Tolkien estate called TSR for a polite chat). At that time, though, the races had few rules bonuses or penalties, except that elves could be either fighting men or magic users (chosen before the beginning of the adventure). This was fine, because the famous abilities scores now associated with D&D (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma) didn't really do anything higher, except give you extra XP if you had a high enough one important to your class. Even then, non-humans had level limits.
Skip to BECM D&D, so-named after the groupings the rules were released in--"Basic," "Expert," "Companion" and "Master" (I actually have copies of the latter two sets, found in a garage sale about 16 years ago). The classes for humans were fighter, magic-user, cleric and thief. Druids and paladins were subtypes of clerics and fighters respectively, with some other bonuses as well. The maximum level limit was 36. Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings were classes, and had their own, much-lower level limits (10, 12 and 8 respectively, if I remember right). This trend continued until D&D 3.0, when the concept of level limits for non-human characters was finally removed.
So, why?
Well, I went over it a bit in my previous post. Both High Fantasy and Sword and Sorcery tend to be humanocentric. The second because humans are basically all that's around except for twisted horrors, and the first because the time of the elder races is over. There are practical reasons for this--it's hard enough to write a believable fantasy human culture, much less a believable fantasy non-human culture and have them come across as more than humans in funny suits--but the main reason reason in D&D is (was, since it's no longer a concern in later editions) to maintain the mood.
D&D pretty obviously got its ideas on races from Tolkien, as shown by the race list in OD&D, though there were significant elements taken from later sources like Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, which also provided the iconic D&D regenerating troll. In LotR, the dwarves have been driven out of most of their ancestral halls, the elves are fleeing westward and openly talking about their time is past, and the hobbits only live in one single area and, until Bilbo left the Shire, have basically no effect on the world. Other than orcs and trolls, humans are the ones who actually shape history.
Level limits are designed to emulate this sort of world. As the DMG says, "Demihuman characters are limited in how high a level they can achieve both to preserve internal consistency (humans are more flexible than non-humans) and to enforce game balance. A DM, however, can change or eliminate these limits as he sees fit. As with class restrictions, the consequences must be examined in detail. Given their extremely long lifespans, demihumans without limitations would quickly reach levels of power far beyond anything attainable by humans. The world would be dominated by these extremely powerful beings, to the exclusion of humans. Human heroes would be feeble compared to the heroes of elves and dwarves. Given their numerous advantages, demihumans would be the most attractive races--no one would play a human. Again, this isn't necessarily bad, but it's very different. The resulting game will be completely unlike the standard sword-and-sorcery milieu. You might need to set the campaign in an ancient age, before the ascendance of men (though given the situation, it's unlikely that men would ever become dominant)."
See, they even mention "sword-and-sorcery" by name there. :p
The big problem here is that while level limits do mechanically encourage it, they do so in a stupid way. The powers of demihumans are front-loaded--from first level, elves can see in the dark and detect secret doors, dwarves can resist spells and find out how far down they are underground, halflings can attack people with slings, etc. In contrast, level limits are back-loaded. While they sometimes show up relatively early (halfling fighters hit it at 7), it's typically in the 10-15 range. Add to that that demihumans can be multiple classes at a time and humans can only be one at a time (and if they use their special ability to switch, they lose their current class's abilities for a while), and it's obvious why demihumans are so popular even assuming the level limit rules were used, which they quite frequently weren't.
The other human advantage is that they can be any class. This gets pretty silly in some cases (no dwarf mages, okay, reasonable. No elf druids or bards, wat). This was less ignored than level limits, but a lot of people allowed banned classes within reason.
Again back to the DMG, we find, "If the only special advantage humans have is given to all the races, who will want to play a human? Humans would be the weakest race in your world. Why play a 20th-level human paladin when you could play a 20th-level elven paladin and have all the abilities of paladins and elves? If none of the player characters are human, it is probably safe to assume that no nonplayer characters of any importance are human either. Your world would have no human kingdoms, or human kings, emperors, or powerful wizards. It would be run by dwarves, elves, and gnomes. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but you must consider what kind of world nonhumans would create. Building a believable fantasy world is a daunting task; creating a believable alien fantasy world (which is what a world dominated by non-humans would be) is a huge challenge even for the best writers of fantasy."
As you might be able to see, this ignores a few things that can or could counterbalance this tendency.
- Favored Race
- Give Humans an Advantage
- Numbers
- Some people just like playing humans. Some people like playing elves (like me >.>). The ability to play a character they enjoy might be better than an ability score adjustment and a +1 to hit with a random weapon. This can't really be predicted beforehand, though.
- This is the route D&D 3.0 and later took, and what I'm trying to do too with my removal of racial level limits and class restrictions (within reason). If the problem is that non-humans have all the mechanical advantages, give humans a mechanical advantage.
- This is fluff reasoning, but it has its place. Dwarves have a 2 to 1 ratio of male to female births. Elves have one child maybe every 200 years, and it takes that child 100 years to grow up. Meanwhile, humans are popping out hordes of babies and overrunning everything (is why they always get condescension from the elder races. Elves are to humans as humans are to orcs? Maybe). Unless you have super god magic capable of slaughtering entire armies[1], being outnumbered 50-100 to 1 is a good way to always lose even if your warriors are individually far better.
Whether fluff or mechanical reasons are a better incentive mostly depends on your players. I don't actually mind if I end up with a game full of non-humans--the history of Forgotten Realms elves has a millennia-long period where they spent most of it slaughtering the shit out of each other, eventually killing off a double-digit percentage of their total population and banishing another double-digit percentage underground where they became the dark elves. They're different than humans, but still perfectly capable of hate, arrogance, mistakes, genocidal fury and all the other emotions that make a good RPG character. That and, as a wise man once said, fantasy races are based on Jungian archetypes anyway so it doesn't matter so much if they're similar to humanity.
So, that done, it's now question time. What generic fantasy race(s) do you prefer to play? Why? If you prefer to play non-humans, what would it take for you to play a human? Do you prefer fluff or mechanical benefits?
For me, like I said, I prefer elves. It's partially mechanical (I like playing multi-class fighter/mages, which are pretty much the iconic D&D elf because that's what the elf class back in BECM could do) and partially that it's fun to play the pretty people.
[1]: Note: Forgotten Realms elves do have super god magic capable of slaughtering entire armies. They don't usually use it because "balance of the world" blah blah hippie crap.
Next up--"Alignments, WTF"
no subject
Date: 2011-Apr-30, Saturday 08:29 (UTC)