Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8866149" data-attributes="member: 18">The sort of DM who enforced hard level limits was not the sort of DM who was "cool with that", and I say that with the extreme confidence of a Veteran of the Psychic Wars, er... I mean the veteran of a million of discussions of exactly this from 1992-1995-ish.Yeah and let me be clear: they thought like this because they were fundamentally bad at game design.That's not entirely their fault - they were pioneers. We walk on the road of corpses their dumb decisions laid down. But let's not celebrate bad and fundamentally ill-conceived game design where the goals of that design are unclear and certainly unmet. If we're going to celebrate that, let's all cheer for Synnibarr or RIFTS: South America 2 or something!This was a key problem in the early AD&D phase of game design, and in a lot of '80s game design generally, which often was not goal-oriented, but merely people stumbling around in the dark making rules for the sake of rules, and without no holistic conception of how those rules would impact the game.Also, let's be real here, there was direct anti-correlation between the power of nonhuman PCs and their level limits.That is to say, the more powerful, the more outrageous a nonhuman PC was, the HIGHER their level limits were. The weaker, the less impressive a nonhuman PC was, the LOWER their level limits were.Again I would say this is fundamentally because they were not good at design. On top of that, some classes weren't limited much - so it was fine to be an Elf Ranger, but not an Elf Cleric - even though Elf racials synergised with Ranger far better.So I think maybe we have to reject the "power" thesis to some extent, especially as we can see how much more focused on "theme" the limits seem to be. Especially with the optional rule where a high stat meant a higher level limit lol. An 18 will get you +3!</blockquote>

Verification