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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Terramotus" data-source="post: 3918792" data-attributes="member: 7220">Have you actually tried that with a game?  It SERIOUSLY warps the game, especially as it goes higher in levels.  It doesn't just lower the class of enemies they can face - it makes whole huge swaths of enemies unfightable.  Even if you take out all monsters and have the party just face normal humans like themselves, it becomes a game of everybody hits everybody every single time, and Power Attack is the king of all feats.  Other issues are that many of the normal factors used to balance the classes such as Evasion, high saves, etc, become non-issues and skew the general balance of the game.  You also need massive damage rules or some variant thereof...  you're basically writing your own game.  There's a reason why Iron Heroes was popular - it filled a niche that D&D absolutely could not fill without major shoehorning.I would also submit that the reason why 2nd edition seems to work better for a wide variety of milieus is that it's actually little more than a skeleton of a game that is nearly flavorless except for the magic system and handles virtually nothing well through rules except combat.  For 1st edition, take out the word "well".  Of course it works well when everything comes down to DM fiat.  The balance is also little more than a Wild-Assed Guess, which does actually make it easier to omit the (many, many) parts that don't work or don't fit well with your world.  And that's cool.  I've got a fond place in my heart for both.  But if you're fighting against systems that are more rules-heavy, then you're fighting against most of the RPG industry.  After all, what reason do they have to exist if you've got everything you need in one pamphlet or a single book?  If you hate the way 4th Ed. is going, you might have more fun with an extreme rules-light system.  Because if you take out the magic items and spells of older editions, that's all they really are at heart.  I'm not saying that facetiously, by the way.  It's a genuine suggestion. d20, IMO, has no particular handicap as a game engine regarding other settings, but D&D 3.x is horrendously bad at it - and I tried really hard to make it work.  It can be forced to, but it's not elegant without a total redesign of everything but the most fundamental rules.  So I really can't see where you're coming from if you're going to claim that 3.x had that flexibility.  Older editions I can see, but that's mostly because of what rules they didn't have, rather than what they did.And in response to the idea of racial level limits...I find it far more palatable to simply say that, for instance, halflings have no cultures that produce Barbarians.  Or Elven Monks.  At all.  Level limits strike me as horribly arbitrary and don't even really work well.  If the game starts low and goes high, you have players whose characters become suck-ass losers while the others rise to astonishing heights.  That's no fun, and the players of such characters might as well kill them off and make new ones.  If the game doesn't reach the height of the level limits the restrictions have no effect at all.Not only that, but the traditional level limits were bizarre.  If we're using Tolkien as a measuring stick, they certainly don't support that world.  Elves were the most powerful magic users around - there were just very few of them.  Gandalf wasn't even human, so he's out of the equation.  Dwarves were tough fighters.  But second-class citizens thanks to those level limits.</blockquote>

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