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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8869650" data-attributes="member: 18">I looked into it and this is basically right. One key difference demi-humans have actually-powerful abilities unlike in all later versions of D&D. Dwarves are Fighters and can advance to 6th, but take 50% damage from large or clumsy monsters (!!!), and have saving throws as if they were 4 levels higher, as well as stone sense (no check, they just auto-notice a bunch of stuff, including traps). It's hard to parse the Elf text but it seems to be saying they're essentially dual-classed, not multi-classed, they pick 1 class per adventure (not session), I guess adventures were more defined back then, and they get to use abilities from both classes for the levels they've earned. They have an absolute ton of special abilities, including moving silently and being "nearly invisible" (no check associated!), doing extra damage with magic weapons, being able to split moving and firing arrows (apparently not normally allowed), wearing armour and casting spells (as long as the armour is magic), noticing secret doors (which unlike a lot of this, does involve a check) and so on. They can get up to 4th as a Warrior and 8th as a Mage.Hobbits on the other hand, kind of suck lol. They just get the saving throw bonus same as Dwarfs, and can "throw missiles with deadly accuracy", which just seems to mean they have a very long range when throwing rocks. They're limited to 4th as a Fighter.Two things are interesting here I think:1) We already see the inverse proportionality between power and and max level allowed. Elves get pretty wild abilities and can have a total of 12 levels. Dwarfs are less powerful and can only get to 6th, and Hobbits are not great and can only get to 4th.Again this is evidence that the stated motivation is not being achieved by the actual rules design, and no rationale is given as to why Hobbits have to get it in the face. I presume we are to read between the lines and understand that Gary is angry-laughing at you if you want to play a Hobbit.2) The actually-powerful abilities of Elves and Dwarves are of note. It's much easier here to see why people might have been concerned about trying to limit these characters, even if they went about it in a clueless way (to be fair, there was no-one to clue them in and it's clear D&D's designers were never big on goal-oriented design).Not directly related but Magic-Users are interesting because in OD&D they're explicitly described as "starts weak, gets strong, has to be protected". The entire idea seems to be they're deadweight initially but eventually they'll become awesome. I'm not sure who thought that was a good design but, like, it wasn't man.What I'd be really interested to read now is early commentary on what people were supposed/expected to do when they hit max level. My guess would be that PC death rates were so high it basically wasn't an issue for Elves, but seems like Dwarfs and Hobbits would get there pretty quickly.</blockquote>

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