Racial Level Limits: Did you Use Them?

[Niccodaemus]

My elven Fighter, Magic-user, thief said bring on the limits!

And it is awesome to have one of them in a party. But not a party of them!

 

[Stormonu]

Some early 1E games, I used the hard limits. But by 2E, I just made the requirement of needing double to 5x the normal XP to advance beyond the limits, depending on humanocentric I wanted the world.

 

[Ron]

We always used them but they were hardly a problem, as we found out we didn't enjoyed the game much at higher levels that, at the time, meant about ten.

 

[Pilgrim]

We used them in most games, ignored them in a few here and there. More often than not we used the modified levels adjustment options where available.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

We didn't hold to the level limts. Oh we tried a few times but when we reached them and were in position to exceed them it just seemed too arbitrarily cruel not to allow the player to continue.

What we DID observe quite faithfully (a very few singular exceptions) were the allowed classes and multiclass combinations. It's one thing to be told, "Don't even start." It's quite another to be told, "Now that you've come this far and are still having fun - STOP."

Add in that we hardly ever reached the level limits and that's the way most of the groups I played with did it. But I voted 'I don't know where to place my mark' because not all of them did it exactly that way. And some games used various work-arounds. (Higher limits, 2x XP, etc.)

 

[DnD_Dad]

We use limits, and the optional 2x xp per level to go beyond.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Interesting results up to now: no real "winner" but a number of factions of roughly the same size.

As I'm at work right now I'll let the matter drop until the evening. Keep on voting!

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

I always thought the limits were ridiculous. So, you've hit your limit... now what? Retire and start a new character? Usually if we did that we'd restart the campaign, otherwise the level disparity would be too great (and what would be the point of letting them come back in with a character at the same level...)

In other words, it was just a bad rule.

In order to balance demihumans, I imposed XP penalties... 20% for elves and 10% for dwarves, gnomes and halflings. Humans also received some new abilities- multiclassing instead of dual-classing (any two classes from different groups- Warrior, Rogue, Wizard, Priest, Psionicist), and two free NWPs, or one free NWP with a +5 bonus.

Then came 3e, and we said goodbye to all that...

 

[Dice4Hire]

Wow, that is a long time ago to try and remember...

I am pretty sure I never played a game that lasted that long so it never came up.

If it had I probably would have ignored it.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I voted that we didn't use them, as was the case in about 99% of our games.

However, we very rarely reached those limits to begin with, so it's somewhat moot. Campaigns which didn't end prematurely (due to TPK or whatnot) usually wrapped things up between levels 5-9. That was probably 6 months to a year of play though, since leveling was much slower back then.