Thursday, August 25, 2011

I've Been Sick...

...and I've been so dizzy that I have not been able to look at computer screen, let alone post anything. I am on the mend, and will hopefully be up and running soon.

In the meantime, in one of my fevered dreams, one of the major characters that took part was a halfling version of a centaur — half dog/half halfling. Besides being part of Greek Mythology (dog and deer centaurs co-exist with their more popular horse centaur brethren) has anyone seen something similar statted for D&D?

Finally, before I became too sick to see straight, I spent some time with my old AD&D books. As anyone who regularly reads my blog can tell you, I am far more interested in the decidedly non-"advanced" older versions of the game. If I am honest, even when I did play AD&D it was really Basic with Advanced bits added on. One of the reasons I so love Labyrinth Lord is that is a fantastic way to emulate this reality (using AEC). When I am ill; however, I generally pine for things nostalgic (like bad B-movies) and I decided to crack open my old books.

Therein I found this:
Only humans will normally have clericism as their sole class: thus they are the only clerics with unlimited advancement in level.
Herein is an interesting implication for all of those who don't like race-as-class. The reason that demi-humans have level limits is they are always multi-class. Therefore, it is theoretically possible for a demi-human to reach levels beyond their limit if they are willing to limit themselves to a single class. Given this reality; however, there would need to be some kind of limitation for demi-humans or advantage for humans otherwise why play a human? Two options come to mind:

  1. Demi-humans only have one class that they can reach unlimited levels in.
  2. Allow humans to multi-class (with their own higher level limits?)
I'd be tempted to do both, actually...

    5 comments:

    Alex Osias said...

    perhaps because from the point of view of the other races, they don't view things in terms of classes, unlike the humans. They're more holistic?

    FrDave said...

    @Alexander
    They're more holistic?
    This is why I prefer race-as-class...it better emulates the alien mind-set/culture of the demi-humans. The homogeneity of demi-humans vs. the diversity of humanity does this very nicely.

    Anthony said...

    After not liking it, I've come round to the idea of race as class (for non-humans) being a good thing. I think it was a suggested option in the Cyclopedia of giving druid spells to Elves, instead of MU spells, that flipped the lights on for me. It struck me as an easy way to put the "alien" back in non-humans.

    Regarding level limits, I've never really liked them; they always struck me as artificial and jarring. We played around with different methods in my AD&D games, and toward the end settled on doubling the EP's needed to advance to levels beyond the limits. (We'd worked out the tables, long since lost.) I honestly don't know what had decided to do with multi-class PCs, though.

    Hope you feel better soon!

    Anonymous said...

    Sickness is no fun. Glad to hear you're getting better, Fr. Dave!

    Anonymous said...

    I haven't seen a centauric halfling - dog before. However, there were alternate (demihuman based) centaur-kin statted up in the AD&D 2nd Ed Monstrous Compendium Annual Volume 2. The centaur-kin presented there were:

    Dorvesh (dwarf - donkey)
    Gnoat (gnome - goat)
    Ha'pony (halfling - pony)