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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9649859" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm a 3.0e player though I have been playing since the early 80s and have some familiarity with the Basic/Expert and 1e AD&D versions of the game.It sounds to me like you have very specific opinions on how the game should be played, and accordingly it doesn't feel in your questions like you are looking for answers as much as you are looking for validation.  In terms of balance issues, 1e AD&D is wildly unbalanced and that's one of the reasons I moved my game to 3e.  The level caps on demi-humans in 1e AD&D and BECMI are basically kludges.  The 1e PH versions of these restrictions on level caps are IMO/IME too restrictive.  While the Unearthed Arcana is generally bad for the game and makes things worse, the level caps given for the more esoteric racial subgroups it introduced (like Drow or Gray elves or Deep Gnomes) are closer to the levels that should be used for the race as a whole.  Basically, every race needs the ability to hit 10th to 12th level in some primary class in order for there to be any reason to play that race outside of one shots.As for thieves the reason that unlimited levels in thieves isn't a problem is that thief is such a terrible and worthless class that allowing unlimited access to it hardly matters.  Taking the class is a trap and I say that as a long-time player of 1e thieves.  If you do the math, the class is worthless.  About the only reason you'd ever take it at all is if you were a demihuman where you'd multiclass into it just so you'd not hit a hard cap on your power quite so soon.  Not that levelling up at thief really gains you much, as the class is most useful at 1st and 2nd levels (and even then it's pretty questionable) but at least it is something.As for psionics, it sounds like you are using the 2e AD&D rules for them and worse you are using the Players Options: Skills & Powers of late TSR that is just entirely broken.  I never saw the point of Psionics as a separate idea from magic.  The 1e AD&D take on Psionics was that it was innate magical talents largely disconnected from your level as a character and not a class or something you learned.  It filled a niche that nothing else was filling.  That the rules were punishing in the extreme was hardly the point.  It was rare and hardly ever came up.  Balance was not something 1e AD&D cared about.  But at least 1e AD&D psionics had an idea of what it was trying to be, unlike every single other version of psionics in the history of the game. My advice to you is to move to OSR because cleaning this all up is just so much work you'll end up pulling your hair out.  Or, do what I did and port your game over to 3e with its much more coherent rules and play 3e in a more 1e AD&D style.As for elves vs. humans, D&D elves as I understand them don't stand a chance particularly if you assume like 1e AD&D does that it takes twice as much XP to level up to a class as it does to the next class.  Having 10 times as long to gain experience only results in maybe gaining two extra levels compared to a human over the course of an average lifetime.  This makes elves individually certainly quite powerful but also means that in practice elves will on average never reach old age, dying some violent death or of disease or famine owing to random chance and that low Constitution.  The greater capacity of humans to recover their population by having faster generations and producing new humans quickly more than outweighs the possibility of elves gaining more levels particularly when you consider the ability of humans to produce new heroes of high level quickly.</blockquote>

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