NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9257284" data-attributes="member: 82106">I'm not sure there's really a 'rule', but overall it is pretty messy, actually. So, in Chainmail there were basically grades of forces, light foot, heavy foot, armored foot, and then light, medium, and heavy horse. Furthermore peasant/levy is a sort of subcategory of light foot (even worse). In D&D this got translated into hit dice, with 'peasants' being basically 1d6-1 hit points, and then 'normal soldiers' (veterans) having 1d6, and thus the 'heavy' types had to be 1d6+1. Fighting Men then got a d8 for hit points instead of d6+1 for whatever reason. The Monster Manual is an unreliable guide to ANYTHING because it was written BEFORE 1e AD&D, and thus we don't even know what a 'hit die' meant, it was defined later! So, is an AD&D 1e goblin basically a 0 level figure? Yeah, kinda. In the case of a dwarf we have no way of knowing, but AS ORIGINALLY ENVISAGED a 'peasant' has a 1d6 hit points, maybe with a -1 but we don't know for sure as D&D doesn't have ordinary people stats. At some point during the development of the Monster Manual hit dice were redefined to a 1d8 (presumably this marks the point in Gary's development of the PHB rules where Fighters got a 1d10 hit die). It is widely accepted that at this point 'zero level humans' (IE peasants) have a 1d6 still, but that's kind of an assumption AFAIK. I don't think the DMG or MM actually define 'zero level' as a thing. There's a section called 'typical inhabitants' on p88 of the DMG which lists hit points for various sorts of 'people', but mentions nothing about race, just that they are 'non-classed'. The combat tables have a column under the fighter matrix for level 0, and here is the only place where '0 level' is defined (in a footnote which is where your 'humans and halflings only' comes from). This same footnote explains that dwarves, elves, and gnomes are 'never below first level' but what this means, especially in terms of the 'ordinary inhabitants' rules, is never explained.</blockquote>

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