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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 4343525" data-attributes="member: 7635">No. The thing that wrecked it was the concept of "fun now, pay later" and its inverse "suffer now, win later". It suffered for every edition of D&D up to 3e. And you know what? It NEVER worked. You said it yourself. There were two things at work here: Level limits and multi-classing. Level limits was never (nor should it have been) a balance for multi-classing. However, that is what Gary (and Zeb later) did. And guess what, it didn't work as advertised. Why did people play elves? Well, elves were tall and thin and beautiful; something you couldn't say for the short-burly dwarf, the comical gnome, the pudgy halfling or the ugly half-orc. You could envision your PC a "human with Spock ears" and be perfectly fine. So elves were humans in funny earpieces to many a D&D player. No one actually played them Tolkien; detached and empirical and slow to act. They played them HUMAN. Often to no penalty thanks to the often contradictory fluff (slow and pondering, yet chaotic good?).Second, elves RAWK when you compare to a human. Infravision? Check. +1 to hit with swords and bows? 90% resist sleep and charm (the two "take you out of the fight" powers at low levels)? Secret Door Detection? Full movement? Immune to Ghoul paralysis (funny it never got mentioned in the racial section, just the ghoul section) and 4 hours of sleep to rest? What's the catch. Well, you have a -1 to con (oh noes!) and raise dead doesn't work on you (which is just as well, most DMs didn't allow frequent raising anyway...)And then there was mages. They were the only race capable of being a full-bodied wizard (not a crippled illusionist like gnomes). As you said: fighter mages got the best of both worlds. (Funny how 1e/2e multi-classing did that). Sure it broke the idea of wizards "you might suck at level 1 but you'll rip at level 9", but that was the bloody point![While we're on the topic; the 2nd edition dwarf fighter/cleric of the god of war often broke the game the same way as elf f/m's did. Only marginally worse was the mage/thief, or illusionist/thief combos, both of which ripped the still beating heart out of the single-classed thief. Both of these combos removed the need for single classed fighters and theives respectively.]Onto level limits. I rarely saw a D&D game go into name levels, let alone to limits. How was that at all a drawback? Its like buying a bunch of stuff on store credit and finding the store closed up before you could pay it off; all benefit, no payment. And really, who (even if you made it level limit) bought the idea that demi-humans peak early and NEVER learn another thing again? How boring! How almost opposite the spirit of a game that rewards adventure and risk with power (XP). Seriously, what was the point of HL gaming if half your PCs were perpetually stuck at 9-11th level and the rest had built in obsolesces (thief, fighter)? So the idea that you were awesome at level 1 (elf, dwarf, fighter, thief) and suck at level 15 (if you even made it) while those classes that sucked early (wizard, cleric) became the game-winners was IMHO a poor way of balancing D&D. That's not to spit on Gary's grave: he did a lot of great things with D&D, but it was a poor system to use to achieve some sense of "fairness". As a final thought: What REALLY broke the system was that little used human racial feature called dual classing. Oh Dual-classing, how you broke everything. A human began as a fighter and got up to @ 4th level. (8,000 XP). Now, he switched to mage. He kept his 4d10+con in hp (and most likely his exceptional str score) and advanced until he was a 5th level mage (which is 20,000 XP) At that point, for 28,000 xp, he has:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Thac0 16 (equal to a 13th level mage)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">better saves than a 4th level fighter (which will only get better)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Fighter weapon choices (longsword? longbow?)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">4-40 hp + con (at max, equal to a 10th level mage)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">exceptional str (if he had the score to do so)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">5th level wizard magic (which is only going to get better)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">proficencies of both a fighter and a wizard (fresh set for starting over)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Advancing like a regular wizard from then on out (no split XP)</li> </ul>Not a bad trade off for being only 8,000 behind a single classed mage, eh? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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