[QUOTE=Frylock]
That doesn’t seem to address the important question: Why should it be that human bards often end up on adventures while elven bards do not?
-FrL-
[/QUOTE]
Hey, in 1st Ed AD&D the fact that Raise Dead doesn’t work on elves (or half-orcs) should be reason enough. Obviously a necessary play-balancer to make up for the fact that otherwise the demi-humans would be far too powerful.
Demihuman level limits were a silly idea too. At lower levels the limit is an irrelevance, at higher levels it’s excessive. As long as your first-level elf has enhanced dexterity, senses, language skill and combat bonuses, he’s a big jump ahead of his human counterpart; but when everyone else is fifteenth level and the elf is stuck as a seventh-level fighter, can’t hit anything for toffee any more and is way behind on hit points and saves, it’s long past time he retired. (Similarly, the first time the party gets bounced by a bad-tempered dragon and both the human and the elf get toasted, but only one of them is coming back after the party hies them to a temple or their 9th-level cleric gets busy, bye-bye balance.)
“But without the level limits, everyone will want to play demi-humans!” spake the great panjandrum. Incorrect. Without some compensating weaknesses, maybe so; but it doesn’t therefore follow that the level limits were the right compensating weakness.
A Dragon article came closer to addressing the question of balance generally (not addressing demi-humans) and 2nd Ed adopted a variation of it with a section on design-your-own character classes: Start with a generic experience table, with a multiplier that starts at x1. For every ability you want to have, increment the multiplier. So if you want d12s for hit points, the ability to wear plate armour, use big nasty weapons, cast spells as both magic-user and cleric, turn undead, cure by laying on of hands, elf combat bonuses and dwarven resistance to magic and poison, you’re good to go. Of course you won’t hit second level until you have about nine thousand experience points, but that’s your look-out, and if this is unacceptable, perhaps you could compromise on some of those key features you wanted.
I need to rank about the Monk shortly, but I’ll build up a head of steam first.
But yeah, some of the other ones didn’t make sense. Elves couldn’t be bards? Despite the many, many references in other AD&D books to the great “Elven bards” singing songs and telling tales? I can’t remember if Elves could be druids or not, but if they couldn’t, they should have been able to.
