Back in the day, I got a brief taste of AD&D 1E before learning how to play and run D&D from the Moldvay/Cook B/X sets. Although I now appreciate the lessons I learned from B/X, AD&D gave me a lasting preference for games with a wealth of options in character creation. This was just as well, since almost everybody I knew and played with back then preferred “Advanced” to “Basic”.
AD&D had a fair number of race and class options even if you stuck with just the PHB, and many more if the DM allowed Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures, or Dragon magazine “NPC” classes. We never formally banned any of the UA races and classes, but we tacitly understood that they were not really viable for our play style (UA barbarians can’t use magic items or associate with spellcasters? UA cavaliers must charge deadly foes and never retreat? LOL no
). I now wish we had used OA too, but somehow no one was really interested at the time.
It always seemed strange to me that given so many options, most people in my old AD&D group seemed to pick one or two character concepts and stick with them no matter what. One guy always played a female elf mage, another guy always played dual-wielding dark elf rangers and other overpowered “monster” types, etc. We always had plenty of warriors and spellcasters, but often I played a cleric or druid because no one else wanted to be the medic. I was the only one in our group who ever played a paladin, a dwarf (classic mountain dwarf axe fighter) or a gnome (surface gnome illusionist-thief). No one ever played a halfling, half-orc, assassin, monk, or that crazy 1E bard.
This may be armchair psychoanalysis, but to me it seemed that many people in my group built characters that appealed to their vanity or represented a particular teenage power fantasy. This might explain the popularity of humans and elves (tall and “hot”), and the unpopularity of “shorties” (dwarves etc), ugly and stupid types (half-orcs & gully dwarves), and religious classes.
I always wanted to try out new character options, and would have tried even more if our group had stayed together (we all graduated from school and moved away). So I never really developed strong favorites, although I did enjoy multi-class elves and/or wilderness themed classes like druids and rangers.
I am keen to try out some of the options that have appeared in newer editions of the game, such as sorcerers and warlocks, although it is a bit harder to get excited about stuff that does not quite feel like “classic” D&D to me (Dark Sun, Eberron, dragonborn, goliaths, psionics, gunpowder or steampunk stuff). Genasi and tieflings are a bit controversial with some grognards and OSR fans, but to me geniekin and half-demons seem like they could have fit just as well into the gonzo campaigns of the 70’s and 80’s as they do into modern games.
