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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RFisher" data-source="post: 3262489" data-attributes="member: 3608">I knew one player who absolutely refused to play human characters. He said he played role-playing games to take the role of someone different from himself, & that this was an important part of it.At one point, though, I got so annoyed by the imbalances created by Gurps Fantasy Folk that I declared (after this particular player had begged me to GM since the job most often fell to him) that you could create your own race, but everyone had to play by the same rules. e.g. You couldn't take the discount on attributes by using the Fantasy Folk rules. You couldn't take the racial discount on Toughness found in the Fantasy Folk rules. Basically, if something in Fantasy Folk duplicated something in the Basic Set, you had to pay the Basic Set price.He had a fit about that. It finally came down to me saying that this had been a problem when I GM'd before & we do it this way or he could take the GM chair back.I had a lot more respect for the guy who admitted he min/max'd than for the one who claimed his min/max'ing was all about playing a role. (^_^)Demihumans in Gurps (3/e at least) sometimes do have mechanical advantages, & sometimes our true motivations may be more than we are willing to admit, even to ourselves.I'm not really trying to disagree with you, SR. But your comments just reminded me of this anecdote.Not that I necessarily want to play the game the way Gygax intended, but my own gaming has been a lot more fun since I've made a concerted effort to try to understand how Gygax intended the game to be played, how he played it, & how he does play it.I don't think the race/class restrictions (which was the original topic of this thread) were so much for balance as for flavor. Gygax may have presented D&D and AD&D as generic fantasy rules, but he wrote them mostly as house rules for his own Greyhawk campaign. (Although, I believe Steve Marsh said he thought AD&D was more of Law Shick's house rules than Gary's.) To some extent it was gamish--option A opens up options X & Y while option B opens up options Z & Q--but I don't really think it was about balance.The level caps might have been about balance, but I agree from experience that they failed. For most of us, I also don't think they have any bearing on Gygax's stated intention of creating a human-centered world. How the DM describes & plays the world is what determines that, & he can depict a dwarf dominated world just as well with level caps as without them.Though, I am starting to think that there may be some truth to what Geoffrey said. The OD&D level limits were severe enough that they could have served as a sort of balance then. As time went on, though, perhaps Gary no longer cared much about that & so let the caps make their continual rise. He just didn't care to completely open the flood-gates either. (& Zeb--despite the many changes he did make--had a limit on how much change he wanted to make. I guess he saw bigger fish than the level caps. Although he did provide workarounds. As did Mentzer.)</blockquote>

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