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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Storm Raven" data-source="post: 3261651" data-attributes="member: 307">Actually, if you read that section, one of the reasons he gives for players not playing "monsters" as PCs is that they will be driven to behave too much like monsters - the player of the gold dragon will, because he is playing a gold dragon, seek to have his PC hoard treasure and live alone and so on. Not that the player could not play the role, but rather that the role did not lend itself to playing in the context of a party oriented dungeon delving game.There was also a question of game balance alluded to - those who want to play monsters as PCs, in Gygax's writing, are assumed to want to do so because of the power boost that doing that would grant. However, if the game is otherwised balanced to allow for such characters, this issue would seem to pretty much solve itself - if playing a gold dragon means that I'm a 1st level character while everyone else is a 17th level human or demi-human (or whatever the appropriate adjustment would work out to be), then the power seeking issue goes away.But, on the main topic, the problem with class and level limits is that they don't do the job they were intended to do. I don't think anyone would deny that the array of special abilities gained by nonhuman races in Oe/1e/2e were, in general, superior to the race based special abilities gained by human characters. The question is how do you create some sort of equity so that playing an elf is not an obviously superior game choice to playing a human? The method Gygax chose was race and level limits. But that doesn't do much to solve the problem. Before level 8-10 or so, it provides no balancing effect at all, and at levels higher than that, it simply imposes a hard cap, which doesn't provide balance either - it just means that demi-human characters retire, having never been hampered in their in-game use to compensate for their array of benefits. In effect, it tries to achieve a goal by imposing a rule on something else entirely. Level limits are sort of like you town council saying "everyone has to mow their lawn, and if they don't, we will make these orphans eat broccoli for dinner every night." It is a "cure" that has no relation to what it is trying to remedy.I think that the 3e methodology - making all PC races more or less balanced against one another a priori - is a better solution. Then, if you want to impose race and level limits as a setting element (or not), the system remains more or less equitable, since the races were balanced to begin with.</blockquote>

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