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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9678426" data-attributes="member: 7052563">On the rare occasions that we tried to do something with our characters that was not already covered by the rulebooks (which was sometimes considered cheating by the strictest DMs!), the matter would often be decided with a d20 roll-under ability score check.  None of us realized that the rule seems to have appeared in the Moldvay Basic Set and only there.Today I am absolutely convinced that the simple consistency of the B/X D&D ability score system was vastly superior to the muddled mess of AD&D ability scores. Percentile STR did not make Fighters competitive with Mages, it just incentivized fudging during character creation.I actually got interested in AD&D first, because a guy two years older than me had lots of RPG stuff: AD&D, Gamma World, Star Frontiers, Warhammer, etc. We were generally TSR snobs and I only knew about T&T, RQ, Judges Guild, and Traveler from reading Dragon.  I learned D&D rules from the B/X sets, played and ran B/X modules as DM for a while, then started playing and running AD&D once I got the books.  My AD&D groups were mostly my age or a few years older, but we also played Trek-based war game Star Fleet Battles with a guy who was about five years older than us.  He had pretty much everything available for that game at the time.  There was another guy who ran AD&D and occasionally GURPS or Paranoia.Elves were very popular because of LOTR, +1 sword & bow bonuses, multi-classing, etc.  One of my favorite characters was a Grey Elf Fighter / Mage.  I was the only one in our group who ever played a Dwarf (Mountain Dwarf Fighter) or a Gnome (Illusionist / Thief).  No one in our group ever played a Halfling in AD&D, which was a mistake - they had great thieving bonuses and +3 with all missile weapons. I actually think one element in that reluctance to play the short folk was teenage insecurities about height and being cool.We were pretty lax about dice rolls during character generation.  I imagine that if someone is in a stricter game and manages to roll up stats which qualify for a rare class, then most people would want to play that class at least once. Most of our group played CRPGs like Wizardry which motivated players in the same way - click that RNG one more time to roll up a rare character (“Come on, NINJA!” <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🥷" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f977.png" title="Ninja    :ninja:" data-shortname=":ninja:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />).That all sounds like it would be fun to try some time with the right group and GM.I never saw anyone play a Half-Orc, not even once.  We were all LOTR fans who cut our D&D teeth clearing out the Caves of Chaos, so the game told us in no uncertain terms that Orcs and other “humanoids” (you sure can see the pulp horror and sci-fi roots of D&D in early game terms) were dirty, smelly, ugly, stupid, vicious, bullying mook minions who get merced by Our Heroes™.  So why would any of us want to play half of one? When I start running games again I am going to play up the old fey roots of the Goblin types and maybe turn Orcs into a slightly comical “proud warrior race” reminiscent of TNG-era Klingons.Nobody ever played a Half-Elf either, for a completely different reason.  We did not know the term “sub-optimal build” back then, but we did realize that since we swapped out demi-human level limits for XP penalties, there was never a situation in which an Elf was not the better choice.Long before the first Tiefling or Dragonborn, there were people who would only ever play overpowered rule-bending monster races.  One guy we played with had three recurring PC types:(1) Dual-wielding Dark Elf Ranger - wonder where that came from? <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😁" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f601.png" title="Beaming face with smiling eyes    :grin:" data-shortname=":grin:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />(2) Krynn Minotaur (20 STR) - even though we were not playing Dragonlance...(3) Half-Ogre (19 STR) - contributed by none other than Gary Gygax himself, as we saw earlier in this series; I am half surprised this did not make the cut for inclusion in Unearthed Arcana.</blockquote>

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