@atcdave Yes, but if level restrictions are so important to the players, why aren't they in the Player's Handbook instead of a book who's introduction reads: "Discourage players from reading this book, and certainly don't let players consult it during the game. As long as players don't know exactly what's in the Dungeon Master Guide, they'll always wonder what you know that they don't." If a player decides they want to play a Gnomish Cleric, why not tell them directly that they have a level limit instead of relying on the DM to remember to inform the player?
@Kilivitz You're absolutely right that there's a fundamental shift between 2e and 3e. I would characterize it less as "stripping the DM's power and fostering player entitlement," and more as increasing the DM's accountability. Transparent rules make it more obvious when the DM is exercising his discretion to deviate from them (or when the situation is one which the rules do not cover at all), which gives the players an opportunity to evaluate whether they consider that deviation to be fair. There are pros and cons to each approach. Some DMs rankle at the thought of being under scrutiny and some players would honestly rather leave the rules to someone else and not worry about it. Some DMs like the idea of someone being able to catch them if they unwittingly make a mistake or a bad call, and making the "DM's craft" more visible to the players makes it easier for a player to take up the mantle of DM, just to give a few examples.
@atcDave sounds like your players are really slow. Or you're underestimating them. I'd say any person who "wouldn't understand 3E" - or any edition of D&D - is of very little mental ability.
They're definitely not slow! And I clearly said, some care about the rules, some do not. The players who do not are there for the story and the role playing. They are often the ones who solve major plot and story elements. While the more serious gamers are the ones who immediately know all their initiative modifiers and what they need for their next three levels. There are all different sorts of gamers who like all different aspects of the game. It actually strikes me as more limiting if you expect all your players to stay on top of the rules.
@atcDaves I get it. It's just the way you said the wouldn't understand the rules. They would if they took the time to. Everyone's free to care about the rules as much or little as they want to.
And as far as "awful" explanations go, any RPG needs to be played to be understood. It's the nature of the beast.
How is that a retort? I have seen plenty of forum responses where experienced players wrote a much superior explanation of thac0 than what you find in official sources. Where people didn't understand thac0, then they read those good explanations and they did.
The only way playing even relates to it is if you mean having a new player play with an experienced one who can explain to their better than the pnp books do. If this isn't what you meant then please elaborate.
I'm not looking to retort anything. But yes, I've only ever seen new players introduced to the game by playing along side more experienced ones. Of course, since I was only a rookie myself one time, and I started with a more experienced group and DM, that pretty much has to be true. I have, a couple of times, started all new groups where I was the only experienced gamer. No doubt that adds to DM workload. But eventually, you find a couple players in the group who like rules and catch on quickly. They become a big help in combats and with character management. While other players take more to the role playing and story telling. But my point was just that AD&D never set out to "explain" the basic game mechanics. It was never considered an introductory sort of game. TSR had a completely different product called "Basic D&D" that set out to introduce complete rookies to the game mechanics. Basic only went up to 3rd level, and it simplified races and classes much further than AD&D did, and it used two much smaller books. But it went to great pains to explain armor class, to hit rolls, saving throws... all the game basics. It was actually quite well written as an introduction.
@atcDaves I get it. It's just the way you said the wouldn't understand the rules. They would if they took the time to. Everyone's free to care about the rules as much or little as they want to.
My point was only that not everyone cares to or needs to understand the rules.
Kaigen I would respond to that with three things; first, when a player starts exploring non-human characters a DM absolutely needs to share that relevant information with them. That is actually something I've never seen a DM skimp on. Although in many cases it is truly no big deal. In PNP, many games will never see characters above 5th level or so, and the DM typically knows going in that the game is of a limited scope or duration, and higher levels just don't matter. So quite often the DM may withhold information they know to be irrelevant. Second, I've never claimed that 2E is perfect or infallible, it isn't. It is a game system I enjoy a great deal, but I do a lot of tinkering with it. So my comment on the DMG stating players shouldn't look at it is just pure bull for me. I'm never worried about players who are interested in the DMG consulting it any time they want. I do restrict the various Monster Manuals during game play, but not the DMG. I have played with DMs who take that admonition a bit more seriously than I do, and INVARIABLY, their games do not last long. That is really an unreasonable restriction, and most players will recognize it as such. Finally, few core rules are disregarded or altered more frequently than racial level limits. Many players and DMs don't like them. I use a variant myself (now I do, I used to use the official rule) involving experience penalties that actually allows for non-humans to reach higher levels, eventually. As the intro to the Players Handbook states, all rules are starting points. The DM can always use, alter or ignore whatever they want. Its their world.
@atcDave And to be clear, I'm not trying to cast aspersions on anyone's games. I believe you when you say it's never been a problem in your experience. I believe in general that a good DM can take any rules system and run a fun game with it. But I also believe that a rules system can work with or against a DM. If they're good it'll be a good game regardless, but if the rules work with the DM's (or group's) style, the process becomes streamlined and everything runs more smoothly. If they work against the DM's style then it can create more work, either because of inelegant design, as with THAC0 and the inconsistent notation of bonuses and penalties, or because of a philosophical mismatch, as when the DMG makes the assumption that I will be obfuscating the rules for the players. I'm just pointing out areas in which 2e works against me, personally, as a DM, such as with race and class restrictions, or racial level limits.
It's not that I can't do away with level limits, it's that it's one more thing I have to remember for the players when they could just as easily attend to it themselves if the rules saw fit to inform them. And that's multiplied across the rules system because it is built with the assumption that I'm remembering most of the rules for the players instead of trusting them to know the rules themselves.
Kaigen you are exactly right about the DM's needs and rule set needing to be in accord. For me, one of the biggest selling points of 2E is just that I know it so well I can design and balance on the fly with very little use of the books. If say I want a group of bandits for an encounter, I can create something interesting and well balanced for almost any level and size party, with no use of references, in five minutes or less. I know the system and it completely works for me. Back in the early 80s one of my regular gaming buddies had written and published material for the old Traveler system. Well we got together at one point and designed a new game using our favorite elements of Traveler and D&D for a campaign where we would fake out the players; and have them think at first it was a fantasy setting, only to gradually realize it was more of a sci-Fi game. We had so much fun. I think it was a terrible game design, but the campaign was great and we had a ton of fun. Obviously it was very specialized, for a very specific campaign, but it let us do things neither game would have allowed on its own.
@atcDave the fact that *you* know 2E well isn't a benefit inherent to 2E, as you must realize
No but its a perfect reason for me using the system. I don't care if any other gamer likes it or not, but I find it a completely usable system, and I find many of the complaints about it silly. Again, I've never called it better than anything, but its not inferior to anything either. It is an excellent and flexible rules set that will serve anyone who chooses to use it very well.
I'll just toss a wildly out there opinion: the entire idea of "classes" is inherently terrible, restricts roleplaying, doesn't match fictional portrayals or any coherent narrative, and worst of all, leads to headache-inducing necessity of planning "builds" that resemble complex chemistry equations (something that was even worse in the generally more mechanically coherent 3e). Faugh and be done with them, a primitive game mechanic for a barbarous past.
I disagree. If you look a the (quintessential tolkienesque) Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is pretty much a Wizard class. Aragorn is a Ranger, Bilbo is a Burgler, Legolas is an Archer. Boromir and most of the dwarves are fighters and Radagast is a Druid. These are all 'Class' templates within what is essentially 'THE' narrative, the source from which most of the original ideas and content came from.
For me, I hate the fact that in later editions of the game any player can dip into any class and become a spell caster. In my vision of the world, casters should be a small minority of player characters, not a common accessory to every character. These are people who have trained in a profession. The ability to flip in and out of something on a whim (say to gain Charisma Bonus to saving throws and Epic Divine Might) just seems to cheapen individual class achievement in my view.
I'll just toss a wildly out there opinion: the entire idea of "classes" is inherently terrible, restricts roleplaying, doesn't match fictional portrayals or any coherent narrative, and worst of all, leads to headache-inducing necessity of planning "builds" that resemble complex chemistry equations (something that was even worse in the generally more mechanically coherent 3e). Faugh and be done with them, a primitive game mechanic for a barbarous past.
I disagree. If you look a the (quintessential tolkienesque) Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is pretty much a Wizard class. Aragorn is a Ranger, Bilbo is a Burgler, Legolas is an Archer. Boromir and most of the dwarves are fighters and Radagast is a Druid. These are all 'Class' templates within what is essentially 'THE' narrative, the source from which most of the original ideas and content came from.
Yes, but this is a case of a class being built specifically to evoke a character. Aragorn wasn't written as part of a "Ranger" class, the Ranger class was written to mimic Aragorn. The question is, how many characters (who weren't written as part of the D&D IP to specifically be Rangers) fit the Ranger class and everything it does (and doesn't) get?
Multiclassing dips is a whole other can of worms, and one I will readily agree was implemented very poorly.
Kits allow you to modify the fluff and playstyle of a class to better suit what your vision of what it should be, while still keeping the most basic role that base class is meant to fulfill. While most kits are just minor tweaks that shift access to certain abilities around and balance them with additional penalties, some can change the class pretty dramatically.
Sure BG doesn't do a good job of that, due to shoddy implementation of the kits, but if you read the descriptions at least the fluff elements are there.
Don't like the archetypical general fighter, who is a great man at arms who can utilize a broad spectrum of weapons and armor well...but lacks any real defining feature aside from their general mastery of all weapon types. This gives them a lot of flexibility, but little else.
How about a Kensai, whose natural agility grants them a protective bonus on par with light armor, and their specialization on a single type of melee weapon allows them to do things with it that a mere fighter can only dream of. But on the other hand their mobility heavy style prevents the use of most armor, and their heavy focus on a single weapon type only allows them to be barely proficient in other types of weapons.
The wild berserker that trades the Fighters refined specialization for an emotion-fuelled rampage that throws caution to the wind and goes fully on the offensive, under the assumption that the enemy will falter and break under the fanatical fury of a warrior with no apparent fear of death, with only the strength of their armor to protect them. But if that fury is resisted, they find themselves exhausted and vulnerable making such displays a gamble.
The savage, yet noble Barbarians, who due to their lifestyle living without the comforts of civilization have had to adapted a rougher style of combat, better suited to brief raiding or skirmishing, rather then protracted combat, but are also used to living on the lands with hardy bodies, keener senses, and long and respected warrior traditions to inspire them, if temporarily, to feats of true greatness.
A wizard slayer, a particularly devoted warrior, who due to revenge or simply a deep desire to protect people from those who would abuse magic to oppress others (or any magic in general, for particularly fanatical examples), who trades deeper understanding of martial techniques to under go special anti-magic training and rituals to instill within them powers to resist and destroy magic effects and their users (including creatures that normally require magical weapons to harm). But that power comes at a cost. As their strength against magic grows they become less and less able to benefit from it themselves. Most magical items cease to function if they remain in their possession for an extended period, preventing their use. And due to the nature of their power, even beneficial magic becomes less able to affect them over time
It's takes less experience points to level up in any given class if that class has non-human level restriction. Please refer to the dungeon master guide for specifics. It's all in the dungeon masters guide.
"humans can be any class, and advance more quickly to higher levels then other races" is the closest thing I've found to that statement.
Thus far the DMG has said.
Demi-human caps should NEVER be removed. If you feel that they are too restrictive, then disallow players from playing non-humans characters, or use some of optional demi-human advancement rules detailed later. Alternatively, disallow humans as a playable choice if your world is demi-human centric. These caps can be removed at the DM's option, but such changes should not be made lightly without consideration of other balancing factors.
1. Slow Advancement rule, non-capped (optional) - Instead of level caps, demi-humans can instead require normal xp until 10, x2 as much exp per level until 15, x3 as much xp per level until 20, and x4 as much xp for levels after 20. (Dwarven fighters, Elven/half-elven Mages, gnome illusionists, and halfling thieves suffer 1 less multiplier at each stage after lvl 10, due to racial affinity toward those classes).
2. Exceptional Advancement rule, capped (optional). Single class Demi-humans with exceptionally high stats in their classes prime requisites can slightly exceed their level caps. (14-15 +1, 16-17, +2, 18 +3, 19+ +4). Multiclass characters require too much focus to exceed their limits by this manner.
3. Delayed Advancement rule, capped (optional). Once a demi-human reaches their maximum allowed level in a class, they can continue advancing but at a greater required xp cost per level. (Minimum of x2, but up to x4 maybe be necessary depending on the campaign's needs).
4. Wish Spells - A Demi-human can use a Wish spell on themselves to raise their maximum achievable level in a class by 1 per Wish. Each Wish only affects a single class, in the case of a multi-class character.
5. Combined Rule - Combines Exceptional and Delayed advancement rules.
I disagree. If you look a the (quintessential tolkienesque) Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is pretty much a Wizard class. Aragorn is a Ranger, Bilbo is a Burgler, Legolas is an Archer. Boromir and most of the dwarves are fighters and Radagast is a Druid. These are all 'Class' templates within what is essentially 'THE' narrative, the source from which most of the original ideas and content came from.
Even with that, though, is Gandalf really a D&D wizard in any meaningful way? Does he have levels? Are his spells strictly regimented? Is he incapable of using a sword? Does he have to get a good night's sleep and memorise his spells every morning? Is he incapable of doing things that are generally magical but don't conform to any particular defined spell?
The answer is no, and while other variants of the game paper over most of these problems in various ways (cantrips, for instance), they still fail to really express a character as it is, despite the fact D&D was built primarily for people who wanted to play Tolkien-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off.
The situation gets even worse if you try to use D&D to play something that doesn't resemble Tolkien. For instance, Conanesque ritual magic doesn't fit into the D&D paradigm at all. Journey to the West causes even greater problems. For anyone wanting to play something that resembles their favourite Final Fantasy setting (many of which have fluid classes and are more equipment based, and have concepts of summoning magic highly dissimilar to D&D summoning magic, to name a few commonalities), D&D classes are horribly unsuitable. Many popular archetypes of fantasy aren't represented in standard D&D classes, or are represented by weird additions (like how rangers are tied into dual-wielding for no reason other than Drizzt).
This can all be papered over with more and more complex kits and prestige classes, or by tons of exceptions (like how the game bends over backwards to try and let you play sword-and-bow-and-armoured-but-also-wielding-magic elves in different iterations of D&D) but the fundamental problem of a class-based system is the reason you need to keep papering over the cracks in the first place. A class system defines a character before they make their first roll, and forces them into an archetype. If you like the archetype, or aren't too concerned about the non-stat-based parts of role-playing, that's fine (and there's nothing wrong with that, if it works for you and your group!). If that archetype doesn't fit your conception of a character, however, it becomes problematic. 3e tried to improve this by making skills a more central part of the system and introducing feats as a way to customise a character to an extent, as well as making multiclassing far more common, but it's still stuck within the central restrictiveness inherent to a class system.
For me, I hate the fact that in later editions of the game any player can dip into any class and become a spell caster. In my vision of the world, casters should be a small minority of player characters, not a common accessory to every character. These are people who have trained in a profession. The ability to flip in and out of something on a whim (say to gain Charisma Bonus to saving throws and Epic Divine Might) just seems to cheapen individual class achievement in my view.
I have no problems with restricting stuff based on setting (well, I might if I was playing, but I'd just not play if I didn't enjoy the setting the DM made). But nothing in the AD&D2e class system prevents every character in the party dipping into spell casting. It's pretty common for BG parties to include more spellcasters than non-spellcasters, in fact.
I do agree the flipping into a class for one level to get X benefit in 3e was a huge, gross, awful flaw in the system that goes a long way to ruining immersion, though. That's part of what soured me on classes altogether; even though it was better (for my tastes) in a lot of ways, many of its flaws still boiled down to being tied to the concept of classes. Plus, of course, by that point I'd played in lots of other systems that didn't use classes, as opposed to when I first played D&D 20 years ago and it was the only RPG I knew about.
Dungeon master guide version 2.5. Look in the section titled creating a new character class (optional rule). That section will not only explains how to create a new character class but how the standard classes were created. If you read that section all your questions will be answered in a way that any rule lawyer will enjoy. When I first discovered this section I made a dragon knight class. The possibilities are endless. http://www.cj-resources.com/Storage 1/AD&D -2E -Complete Set of 26 Books.PDF
Uh, is it okay to post links to pirated RPG books here? That aside, obviously you can houserule around it, and you can make custom classes to suit every variant of world and any type of character someone would like to play. But it's an awful lot of work compared to a robust system that doesn't have classes to begin with, where people can just take the sort of skills they envision their character as having.
(The corollary, of course, is it's harder to balance that so that there isn't just one obvious optimal build, which often ends up being "armoured battlemage". You also want the system to be flavoursome, and it's easier to put flavour in a defined class than in skill trees that theoretically anyone can take.)
@riyahhassett WotC recently reprinted a lot of the rulebooks for older editions, including 2e. Your FLGS can probably order them for you, or there's always Amazon.
Though, even if you cannot buy something legitimately, piracy is still illegal and tends to be frowned on by companies (and is absolutely forbidden in the site rules for that reason, so I'd edit out your original link to avoid trouble).
A. that doesn't apply to core classes, by the writing itself. ("this method cannot recreate the core classes, as they are designed to be innately superior to custom-classes and to be versatile across a wide variety of settings. This can however be used to create new classes to better fit your campaigns needs").
B. the 9 or less cap benefit (-1) cancels out the penalty for allowing demi-humans to use the class in the first place (+1), for a no net change to the xp required, while a 12 cap (-0.5), results in the in class actually taking longer to level up for demi-humans (since the xp required to level modifier is still getting +0.5 due to race, which results in more xp per level).
I disagree. If you look a the (quintessential tolkienesque) Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is pretty much a Wizard class. Aragorn is a Ranger, Bilbo is a Burgler, Legolas is an Archer. Boromir and most of the dwarves are fighters and Radagast is a Druid. These are all 'Class' templates within what is essentially 'THE' narrative, the source from which most of the original ideas and content came from.
Even with that, though, is Gandalf really a D&D wizard in any meaningful way? Does he have levels? Are his spells strictly regimented? Is he incapable of using a sword? Does he have to get a good night's sleep and memorise his spells every morning? Is he incapable of doing things that are generally magical but don't conform to any particular defined spell?
The answer is no, and while other variants of the game paper over most of these problems in various ways (cantrips, for instance), they still fail to really express a character as it is, despite the fact D&D was built primarily for people who wanted to play Tolkien-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off.
The situation gets even worse if you try to use D&D to play something that doesn't resemble Tolkien. For instance, Conanesque ritual magic doesn't fit into the D&D paradigm at all. Journey to the West causes even greater problems. For anyone wanting to play something that resembles their favourite Final Fantasy setting (many of which have fluid classes and are more equipment based, and have concepts of summoning magic highly dissimilar to D&D summoning magic, to name a few commonalities), D&D classes are horribly unsuitable. Many popular archetypes of fantasy aren't represented in standard D&D classes, or are represented by weird additions (like how rangers are tied into dual-wielding for no reason other than Drizzt).
This can all be papered over with more and more complex kits and prestige classes, or by tons of exceptions (like how the game bends over backwards to try and let you play sword-and-bow-and-armoured-but-also-wielding-magic elves in different iterations of D&D) but the fundamental problem of a class-based system is the reason you need to keep papering over the cracks in the first place. A class system defines a character before they make their first roll, and forces them into an archetype. If you like the archetype, or aren't too concerned about the non-stat-based parts of role-playing, that's fine (and there's nothing wrong with that, if it works for you and your group!). If that archetype doesn't fit your conception of a character, however, it becomes problematic. 3e tried to improve this by making skills a more central part of the system and introducing feats as a way to customise a character to an extent, as well as making multiclassing far more common, but it's still stuck within the central restrictiveness inherent to a class system.
For me, I hate the fact that in later editions of the game any player can dip into any class and become a spell caster. In my vision of the world, casters should be a small minority of player characters, not a common accessory to every character. These are people who have trained in a profession. The ability to flip in and out of something on a whim (say to gain Charisma Bonus to saving throws and Epic Divine Might) just seems to cheapen individual class achievement in my view.
I have no problems with restricting stuff based on setting (well, I might if I was playing, but I'd just not play if I didn't enjoy the setting the DM made). But nothing in the AD&D2e class system prevents every character in the party dipping into spell casting. It's pretty common for BG parties to include more spellcasters than non-spellcasters, in fact.
I do agree the flipping into a class for one level to get X benefit in 3e was a huge, gross, awful flaw in the system that goes a long way to ruining immersion, though. That's part of what soured me on classes altogether; even though it was better (for my tastes) in a lot of ways, many of its flaws still boiled down to being tied to the concept of classes. Plus, of course, by that point I'd played in lots of other systems that didn't use classes, as opposed to when I first played D&D 20 years ago and it was the only RPG I knew about.
Even with that, though, is Gandalf really a D&D wizard in any meaningful way? Does he have levels? Are his spells strictly regimented? Is he incapable of using a sword? Does he have to get a good night's sleep and memorise his spells every morning? Is he incapable of doing things that are generally magical but don't conform to any particular defined spell?
Yeah, If you don't see Gandalf as a quintessential Wizard, albeit not necessarily a D&D Wizard, I really can't help that. You may not necessarily see him go off to study with a master to advance levels, but if you read the passage where he takes on the wargs on the slopes of The Misty mountains with the dwarves up a tree and compare his level of magic use to what he does say against the Nasgul outside Gondor's gates, I think you will see "Progression". In comparison, the ability to use a sword can maybe be forgiven as the D&D rules won't have been written for another 40 years.
The situation gets even worse if you try to use D&D to play something that doesn't resemble Tolkien. For instance, Conanesque ritual magic doesn't fit into the D&D paradigm at all. Journey to the West causes even greater problems. For anyone wanting to play something that resembles their favourite Final Fantasy setting (many of which have fluid classes and are more equipment based, and have concepts of summoning magic highly dissimilar to D&D summoning magic, to name a few commonalities), D&D classes are horribly unsuitable. Many popular archetypes of fantasy aren't represented in standard D&D classes, or are represented by weird additions (like how rangers are tied into dual-wielding for no reason other than Drizzt).
This can all be papered over with more and more complex kits and prestige classes, or by tons of exceptions (like how the game bends over backwards to try and let you play sword-and-bow-and-armoured-but-also-wielding-magic elves in different iterations of D&D) but the fundamental problem of a class-based system is the reason you need to keep papering over the cracks in the first place. A class system defines a character before they make their first roll, and forces them into an archetype. If you like the archetype, or aren't too concerned about the non-stat-based parts of role-playing, that's fine (and there's nothing wrong with that, if it works for you and your group!). If that archetype doesn't fit your conception of a character, however, it becomes problematic. 3e tried to improve this by making skills a more central part of the system and introducing feats as a way to customise a character to an extent, as well as making multiclassing far more common, but it's still stuck within the central restrictiveness inherent to a class system.
I don't think things are as inflexible as you make them out to be. I think you might find in the opening pages of both the Advanced DMG and Players Handbook something to the effect that the rules are guidelines and little more than that. That the players should take what rules they enjoy and skip the rest. Add to that the fact that they actually came out with Oriental Adventures editions, and I really don't think that creating a campaign in either the Far east or in a more Conan based setting would be 'That' difficult for a dedicated DM. That is what house rules are all about. Taylor a few spell lists, alter some of the class limitations and hey-presto. you have a Hyborian campaign all set up.
I have no problems with restricting stuff based on setting (well, I might if I was playing, but I'd just not play if I didn't enjoy the setting the DM made). But nothing in the AD&D2e class system prevents every character in the party dipping into spell casting. It's pretty common for BG parties to include more spellcasters than non-spellcasters, in fact.
Um, huh? You say that nothing in the 2E rules prevents every single character in the party dipping into spell casting? what rules set are you playing? The rules set themselves clearly and specifically prevent Minsc, Kagain, Shar Teel (without some monkeying), Khalid, Coran, and probably a few I forgot to mention from casting spells. If they aren't human and their starting class isn't a casting class, they can't cast, ever. Even Kivan, Dorn, Ajantis and anyone else who have some limited casting into their class makeup only gets very limited magic. This is by no means what I mean. Laying on hands does not a spell caster make.
As for the last statement, how does having several casters in your party make every NPC in the game capable of being a caster?
When I used to play PnP, we would routinely have one arcane caster, one divine caster and some combination of fighter types beyond that. Pretty much any other combination usually ended up in death for the greater group. Even when I played at Gen Con, if you wanted to join a group that already had a caster, they would usually ask that you bring something else to the table. Not always, and it is certainly not set in stone that multiple casters in a group wouldn't work. Just saying that by and large, if you don't have instant and unlimited resting, having more casters and fewer fighters can really be a handicap, particularly in levels 1-8 where 99% of classic 2E games took place.
Forgive me for not reading the entire thread but I just want to say, restrictions are part of it. How or why do you want to play something if you don't respect their foundations and want to change it afterwards. Those who want things exactly their way should create their own plane/story etc. To me restrictions are part of the imersion. I don't care if some are based on tolkien or whatever, they make sense. The very reason we invented other races was to give them different traits, if you are playing one respect their lore. In modern games many restrictions are lifted and the result is that I play some "empty dif. sized avatars" which I know, can do whatever I choose independently of what makes sense, why? to please everybody. Pleasing everybody is not good.
I don't think things are as inflexible as you make them out to be. I think you might find in the opening pages of both the Advanced DMG and Players Handbook something to the effect that the rules are guidelines and little more than that. That the players should take what rules they enjoy and skip the rest. Add to that the fact that they actually came out with Oriental Adventures editions, and I really don't think that creating a campaign in either the Far east or in a more Conan based setting would be 'That' difficult for a dedicated DM. That is what house rules are all about. Taylor a few spell lists, alter some of the class limitations and hey-presto. you have a Hyborian campaign all set up.
That was precisely the sort of thing I was referring to when I said you can paper over the cracks by ever more classes, custom classes, prestige classes, and so forth. And pretty much every RPG says the players should take the rules they enjoy and skip the rest.
As far as Oriental Adventures go, not to hate on it but it's not, uh, very authentically "Oriental". Starting with the usage of the word "oriental".
That's all getting a bit away from the central notion of the restrictions of class systems though - the fundamental problem is that they place characters within a restricted archetype that doesn't necessarily mesh with the character a player wants to play.
I think the magic example was a bad one, on reflection. I'll try a different one. Let's say you want your character to have a wolf companion, a well-hallowed tradition in fantasy and one spotlighted in current fantasy flavour-of-the-decade A Game Of Thrones. Well, in AD&D 2e, that means you're playing a ranger, and also that you're not getting your wolf until higher levels. This isn't how "wolf companion" works in AGoT, or any other fantasy I can think of that uses a wolf companion, and almost certainly isn't what the player had in mind for the character.
Sure, you can make a kit to fix that (meaning you're going to have to houserule it, since otherwise you need a start-with-animal-companion variant for almost every character type), but this is papering over the cracks of the system - the problem wouldn't exist in a classless system where getting an animal companion is balanced as a perk of a character (bought in whatever currency the game uses for such things), and not locked away within a single, very limited conception of what kind of character can have a wolf companion even though it's a fantasy cliche.
That's why I say class systems restrict role-playing. It isn't necessarily about powergaming, or about being "different and special" (though, to be honest, that's a bizarre criticism of an RPG PC and even more so when you look at many of the popular fictional characters fantasy games look to for inspiration), but about the problems arising from one's conception of a character you want to play differing from what the strict class structure says they ought to be.
Um, huh? You say that nothing in the 2E rules prevents every single character in the party dipping into spell casting? what rules set are you playing? The rules set themselves clearly and specifically prevent Minsc, Kagain, Shar Teel (without some monkeying), Khalid, Coran, and probably a few I forgot to mention from casting spells.
I must've been unclear, sorry. The complaint was that the poster had a conception in their setting that magic was rare, and disliked how easy it was in 3e for any character to dip into casting ability. My counterpoint was there was nothing in 2e preventing an entire party from being spellcasters, and noting that many people play parties in BG that are 50% or more spellcasters. Let's say, having a sorcerous MC, Neera, Viconia, and Edwin in the same party (replaced Edwin with Xzar and I've actually played that, and I'd probably have put in Tiax for comedy value if I'd gotten that far in that game).
Actually not true.....you just have to buy the animal training and handling NCPs (part of the general pool). It's mostly used for taming and handling horses, but works for any natural animal including the training of guard/war dogs and the like. And you could technically start with a wolf, though it would come out of your starting gold (35 gold, for a basic trained wolf (same as a 2HD guard dog, but makes handling checks at +2 due to it's wild nature), to represent it's upkeep and any associated costs of basic training.
Rangers and druids just have an innate class feature that does the same thing, better, and a lvl 1 spell that can fully tame instantly, on a failed save. So..no..actually...you don't, rangers and druids just have an easier time, as they should. (And technically..a ranger doesn't get a true animal companion until at least 8, it requires the Animal Friendship spell (1st level), though they can tame animals via their animal empathy feature as early as 1)
I'd like to point out that no, anybody can't just dip into spellcasting all willy-nilly in 3rd Ed either, unless they have the stats for it (which is the same requirement as for earlier editions). You have to invest into the main spellcasting attribute to be useful at it, hampering your physical capabilities, as well as make the caster class your main class, in order to be any good or even useful at it. In fact, I'd say dipping out of spellcasting classes is a lot more useful than dipping into them. A 9/2 Sorcerer/Fighter is powerful and versatile, a 9/2 Fighter/Sorcerer is a fighter with two wasted levels.
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@Kilivitz You're absolutely right that there's a fundamental shift between 2e and 3e. I would characterize it less as "stripping the DM's power and fostering player entitlement," and more as increasing the DM's accountability. Transparent rules make it more obvious when the DM is exercising his discretion to deviate from them (or when the situation is one which the rules do not cover at all), which gives the players an opportunity to evaluate whether they consider that deviation to be fair. There are pros and cons to each approach. Some DMs rankle at the thought of being under scrutiny and some players would honestly rather leave the rules to someone else and not worry about it. Some DMs like the idea of someone being able to catch them if they unwittingly make a mistake or a bad call, and making the "DM's craft" more visible to the players makes it easier for a player to take up the mantle of DM, just to give a few examples.
I have, a couple of times, started all new groups where I was the only experienced gamer. No doubt that adds to DM workload. But eventually, you find a couple players in the group who like rules and catch on quickly. They become a big help in combats and with character management. While other players take more to the role playing and story telling.
But my point was just that AD&D never set out to "explain" the basic game mechanics. It was never considered an introductory sort of game. TSR had a completely different product called "Basic D&D" that set out to introduce complete rookies to the game mechanics. Basic only went up to 3rd level, and it simplified races and classes much further than AD&D did, and it used two much smaller books. But it went to great pains to explain armor class, to hit rolls, saving throws... all the game basics. It was actually quite well written as an introduction.
Second, I've never claimed that 2E is perfect or infallible, it isn't. It is a game system I enjoy a great deal, but I do a lot of tinkering with it. So my comment on the DMG stating players shouldn't look at it is just pure bull for me. I'm never worried about players who are interested in the DMG consulting it any time they want. I do restrict the various Monster Manuals during game play, but not the DMG. I have played with DMs who take that admonition a bit more seriously than I do, and INVARIABLY, their games do not last long. That is really an unreasonable restriction, and most players will recognize it as such.
Finally, few core rules are disregarded or altered more frequently than racial level limits. Many players and DMs don't like them. I use a variant myself (now I do, I used to use the official rule) involving experience penalties that actually allows for non-humans to reach higher levels, eventually. As the intro to the Players Handbook states, all rules are starting points. The DM can always use, alter or ignore whatever they want. Its their world.
It's not that I can't do away with level limits, it's that it's one more thing I have to remember for the players when they could just as easily attend to it themselves if the rules saw fit to inform them. And that's multiplied across the rules system because it is built with the assumption that I'm remembering most of the rules for the players instead of trusting them to know the rules themselves.
For me, I hate the fact that in later editions of the game any player can dip into any class and become a spell caster. In my vision of the world, casters should be a small minority of player characters, not a common accessory to every character. These are people who have trained in a profession. The ability to flip in and out of something on a whim (say to gain Charisma Bonus to saving throws and Epic Divine Might) just seems to cheapen individual class achievement in my view.
But then this is merely my opinion.
Multiclassing dips is a whole other can of worms, and one I will readily agree was implemented very poorly.
Kits allow you to modify the fluff and playstyle of a class to better suit what your vision of what it should be, while still keeping the most basic role that base class is meant to fulfill. While most kits are just minor tweaks that shift access to certain abilities around and balance them with additional penalties, some can change the class pretty dramatically.
Sure BG doesn't do a good job of that, due to shoddy implementation of the kits, but if you read the descriptions at least the fluff elements are there.
Don't like the archetypical general fighter, who is a great man at arms who can utilize a broad spectrum of weapons and armor well...but lacks any real defining feature aside from their general mastery of all weapon types. This gives them a lot of flexibility, but little else.
How about a Kensai, whose natural agility grants them a protective bonus on par with light armor, and their specialization on a single type of melee weapon allows them to do things with it that a mere fighter can only dream of. But on the other hand their mobility heavy style prevents the use of most armor, and their heavy focus on a single weapon type only allows them to be barely proficient in other types of weapons.
The wild berserker that trades the Fighters refined specialization for an emotion-fuelled rampage that throws caution to the wind and goes fully on the offensive, under the assumption that the enemy will falter and break under the fanatical fury of a warrior with no apparent fear of death, with only the strength of their armor to protect them. But if that fury is resisted, they find themselves exhausted and vulnerable making such displays a gamble.
The savage, yet noble Barbarians, who due to their lifestyle living without the comforts of civilization have had to adapted a rougher style of combat, better suited to brief raiding or skirmishing, rather then protracted combat, but are also used to living on the lands with hardy bodies, keener senses, and long and respected warrior traditions to inspire them, if temporarily, to feats of true greatness.
A wizard slayer, a particularly devoted warrior, who due to revenge or simply a deep desire to protect people from those who would abuse magic to oppress others (or any magic in general, for particularly fanatical examples), who trades deeper understanding of martial techniques to under go special anti-magic training and rituals to instill within them powers to resist and destroy magic effects and their users (including creatures that normally require magical weapons to harm). But that power comes at a cost. As their strength against magic grows they become less and less able to benefit from it themselves. Most magical items cease to function if they remain in their possession for an extended period, preventing their use. And due to the nature of their power, even beneficial magic becomes less able to affect them over time
"humans can be any class, and advance more quickly to higher levels then other races" is the closest thing I've found to that statement.
Thus far the DMG has said.
Demi-human caps should NEVER be removed. If you feel that they are too restrictive, then disallow players from playing non-humans characters, or use some of optional demi-human advancement rules detailed later. Alternatively, disallow humans as a playable choice if your world is demi-human centric. These caps can be removed at the DM's option, but such changes should not be made lightly without consideration of other balancing factors.
1. Slow Advancement rule, non-capped (optional) - Instead of level caps, demi-humans can instead require normal xp until 10, x2 as much exp per level until 15, x3 as much xp per level until 20, and x4 as much xp for levels after 20. (Dwarven fighters, Elven/half-elven Mages, gnome illusionists, and halfling thieves suffer 1 less multiplier at each stage after lvl 10, due to racial affinity toward those classes).
2. Exceptional Advancement rule, capped (optional). Single class Demi-humans with exceptionally high stats in their classes prime requisites can slightly exceed their level caps. (14-15 +1, 16-17, +2, 18 +3, 19+ +4). Multiclass characters require too much focus to exceed their limits by this manner.
3. Delayed Advancement rule, capped (optional). Once a demi-human reaches their maximum allowed level in a class, they can continue advancing but at a greater required xp cost per level. (Minimum of x2, but up to x4 maybe be necessary depending on the campaign's needs).
4. Wish Spells - A Demi-human can use a Wish spell on themselves to raise their maximum achievable level in a class by 1 per Wish. Each Wish only affects a single class, in the case of a multi-class character.
5. Combined Rule - Combines Exceptional and Delayed advancement rules.
The answer is no, and while other variants of the game paper over most of these problems in various ways (cantrips, for instance), they still fail to really express a character as it is, despite the fact D&D was built primarily for people who wanted to play Tolkien-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off.
The situation gets even worse if you try to use D&D to play something that doesn't resemble Tolkien. For instance, Conanesque ritual magic doesn't fit into the D&D paradigm at all. Journey to the West causes even greater problems. For anyone wanting to play something that resembles their favourite Final Fantasy setting (many of which have fluid classes and are more equipment based, and have concepts of summoning magic highly dissimilar to D&D summoning magic, to name a few commonalities), D&D classes are horribly unsuitable. Many popular archetypes of fantasy aren't represented in standard D&D classes, or are represented by weird additions (like how rangers are tied into dual-wielding for no reason other than Drizzt).
This can all be papered over with more and more complex kits and prestige classes, or by tons of exceptions (like how the game bends over backwards to try and let you play sword-and-bow-and-armoured-but-also-wielding-magic elves in different iterations of D&D) but the fundamental problem of a class-based system is the reason you need to keep papering over the cracks in the first place. A class system defines a character before they make their first roll, and forces them into an archetype. If you like the archetype, or aren't too concerned about the non-stat-based parts of role-playing, that's fine (and there's nothing wrong with that, if it works for you and your group!). If that archetype doesn't fit your conception of a character, however, it becomes problematic. 3e tried to improve this by making skills a more central part of the system and introducing feats as a way to customise a character to an extent, as well as making multiclassing far more common, but it's still stuck within the central restrictiveness inherent to a class system. I have no problems with restricting stuff based on setting (well, I might if I was playing, but I'd just not play if I didn't enjoy the setting the DM made). But nothing in the AD&D2e class system prevents every character in the party dipping into spell casting. It's pretty common for BG parties to include more spellcasters than non-spellcasters, in fact.
I do agree the flipping into a class for one level to get X benefit in 3e was a huge, gross, awful flaw in the system that goes a long way to ruining immersion, though. That's part of what soured me on classes altogether; even though it was better (for my tastes) in a lot of ways, many of its flaws still boiled down to being tied to the concept of classes. Plus, of course, by that point I'd played in lots of other systems that didn't use classes, as opposed to when I first played D&D 20 years ago and it was the only RPG I knew about.
When I first discovered this section I made a dragon knight class. The possibilities are endless.
http://www.cj-resources.com/Storage 1/AD&D -2E -Complete Set of 26 Books.PDF
(The corollary, of course, is it's harder to balance that so that there isn't just one obvious optimal build, which often ends up being "armoured battlemage". You also want the system to be flavoursome, and it's easier to put flavour in a defined class than in skill trees that theoretically anyone can take.)
Ebay'll work, too.
Though, even if you cannot buy something legitimately, piracy is still illegal and tends to be frowned on by companies (and is absolutely forbidden in the site rules for that reason, so I'd edit out your original link to avoid trouble).
B. the 9 or less cap benefit (-1) cancels out the penalty for allowing demi-humans to use the class in the first place (+1), for a no net change to the xp required, while a 12 cap (-0.5), results in the in class actually taking longer to level up for demi-humans (since the xp required to level modifier is still getting +0.5 due to race, which results in more xp per level).
As for the last statement, how does having several casters in your party make every NPC in the game capable of being a caster?
When I used to play PnP, we would routinely have one arcane caster, one divine caster and some combination of fighter types beyond that. Pretty much any other combination usually ended up in death for the greater group. Even when I played at Gen Con, if you wanted to join a group that already had a caster, they would usually ask that you bring something else to the table. Not always, and it is certainly not set in stone that multiple casters in a group wouldn't work. Just saying that by and large, if you don't have instant and unlimited resting, having more casters and fewer fighters can really be a handicap, particularly in levels 1-8 where 99% of classic 2E games took place.
Those who want things exactly their way should create their own plane/story etc.
To me restrictions are part of the imersion. I don't care if some are based on tolkien or whatever, they make sense. The very reason we invented other races was to give them different traits, if you are playing one respect their lore.
In modern games many restrictions are lifted and the result is that I play some "empty dif. sized avatars" which I know, can do whatever I choose independently of what makes sense, why? to please everybody. Pleasing everybody is not good.
As far as Oriental Adventures go, not to hate on it but it's not, uh, very authentically "Oriental". Starting with the usage of the word "oriental".
That's all getting a bit away from the central notion of the restrictions of class systems though - the fundamental problem is that they place characters within a restricted archetype that doesn't necessarily mesh with the character a player wants to play.
I think the magic example was a bad one, on reflection. I'll try a different one. Let's say you want your character to have a wolf companion, a well-hallowed tradition in fantasy and one spotlighted in current fantasy flavour-of-the-decade A Game Of Thrones. Well, in AD&D 2e, that means you're playing a ranger, and also that you're not getting your wolf until higher levels. This isn't how "wolf companion" works in AGoT, or any other fantasy I can think of that uses a wolf companion, and almost certainly isn't what the player had in mind for the character.
Sure, you can make a kit to fix that (meaning you're going to have to houserule it, since otherwise you need a start-with-animal-companion variant for almost every character type), but this is papering over the cracks of the system - the problem wouldn't exist in a classless system where getting an animal companion is balanced as a perk of a character (bought in whatever currency the game uses for such things), and not locked away within a single, very limited conception of what kind of character can have a wolf companion even though it's a fantasy cliche.
That's why I say class systems restrict role-playing. It isn't necessarily about powergaming, or about being "different and special" (though, to be honest, that's a bizarre criticism of an RPG PC and even more so when you look at many of the popular fictional characters fantasy games look to for inspiration), but about the problems arising from one's conception of a character you want to play differing from what the strict class structure says they ought to be. I must've been unclear, sorry. The complaint was that the poster had a conception in their setting that magic was rare, and disliked how easy it was in 3e for any character to dip into casting ability. My counterpoint was there was nothing in 2e preventing an entire party from being spellcasters, and noting that many people play parties in BG that are 50% or more spellcasters. Let's say, having a sorcerous MC, Neera, Viconia, and Edwin in the same party (replaced Edwin with Xzar and I've actually played that, and I'd probably have put in Tiax for comedy value if I'd gotten that far in that game).
Rangers and druids just have an innate class feature that does the same thing, better, and a lvl 1 spell that can fully tame instantly, on a failed save. So..no..actually...you don't, rangers and druids just have an easier time, as they should. (And technically..a ranger doesn't get a true animal companion until at least 8, it requires the Animal Friendship spell (1st level), though they can tame animals via their animal empathy feature as early as 1)