Oh, the Humanity

One of the basic design issues with D&D is that demihumans get to do stuff, most notably see in the dark, that humans can’t. Given this, why would you ever play a human? This is a problem as a party that is mostly non-humans feels very high fantasy or even D&D eating its own tail, and not the grounded low fantasy of Appendix N sword and sorcery. It is one of many cases where too much magic makes the world feel less magical. A human trades the memory of her first love to an elf for a ray of moonlight is magical. A tiefling, a dragonborn, and a gnome walk into a dungeon is the aftermath of a sale at Spirit of Halloween.

So, how can games keep this in check and ensure they have human PCs. Or more to the point, what rules can you have around race (or as they now call it, kinship, ancestry, or species) with this aim?

Just say no to demihumans

The most direct approach is to just say all PCs are human, period. There may be non-humans in the world, but they are NPCs. This is the approach you see in some Sword and Sorcery games. Hyperborea does this, as does the 3e/PF/5e setting World of Xoth. However even in this genre there are exceptions as Crypts & Things has two race-as-class non-humans (beast hybrid and serpent people).

Likewise in some other games strongly grounded in non-Tolkien, pre-D&D genres, you also see human-only PCs, as with Beyond the Wall, which emulates genres in which Fairy is just on the other side of reality from the village.

Just say no to darkvision

If the strongest buff of demihumans is infravision/darkvision, then a simple solution is to eliminate infravision/darkvision from the game, at least for the PCs. This is the approach of Shadowdark and Five Torches Deep.

Level limits and class restrictions

Gygax tried to reconcile his own preference for “humanocentric” sword and sorcery genre conventions with the high fantasy Lord of the Rings craze by allowing demihumans, but giving them class restrictions and level limits. Want to play a paladin or a druid? Better be a human. Want to get above level 8-11 in just about any character class? Better be a human.

On the class restrictions, excellent, no notes, great mechanic.

The level limits though are really bad design. Good design should have nerfs that are moderate at all times, not nothing and then severe. Level limits are a nerf that’s nothing, nothing, nothing, fuck you. This makes it so you should play a demihuman for one shots or short campaigns but a human for long campaigns.

People (appropriately) make fun of 3e and Pathfinder for essentially requiring players to plan a feat tree from day one for benefits that will only pay off after several months of play but this is essentially the same thing. A skilled AD&D player will either not play a demihuman or be sure to play a multiclass demihuman.

Nerf the demihumans

Another approach is to give the demihumans a notable nerf. Probably the best version of this is that Dungeon Crawl Classics makes elves allergic to iron. This is a strong mechanical nerf and plays well into the fiction of fairies/elves hating iron.

Another version of this would be to have a role-playing nerf where demihumans can see in the dark but everyone hates them and so they aren’t welcome in taverns or whatever. This would of course clog the emergency rooms with WotC sensitivity readers and RPG.net mods having strokes. Moreover, gaming culture has shown an inability to sustain role-playing nerfs. Hence the paladin was the original mechanics buff / role-play nerf class, but in 5e now has subclasses for Oath of the Don’t Wait for Me to Go to the Bathroom, I Will Torture the Orc Personally.

Buff the humans

The 5e approach is to buff the humans with the variant human class, which gives an extra feat. If you read 5e forums like r/dndnext, you will see people complaining that the variant human is too good not to take even though they’d rather be a half-tortle / half-roper.

XP penalty for demihumans

In games with variable XP, which is most OSR games, one simple solution is to use XP as a balancing mechanic, which is already how these games balance weaker vs stronger character classes. This is implicit in B/X and BECMI race-as-class. In B/X, a dwarf is a fighter with infravision (buff), a few mining-related senses (buff), and the inability to use longbows and two-handed swords (nerf). Their XP table is similar to fighters + 200 XP*level. If we assume that the mining buff and the longbow nerf cancel out then effectively the dwarf is paying an extra 10% XP for infravision.

This is in fact the strategy taken by Basic Fantasy RPG. In BFRPG, humans earn 10% more XP. Whether 10% is the right amount is debatable but in principle an XP buff is a great balancing buff as it’s moderate and applies consistently across levels. This is also one of the human buffs Gavin Norman has floated for Dolmenwood. The main downside is it won’t work at all with modern D&D milestone leveling and/or unified XP charts.

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  1. Anon

    The level cap mechanic is less problematic if you are playing multiple PCs in a campaign. Demihumans are good starter/helper characters, and provide big boosts for low level parties, but all players will want a human PC for high level play.

    In this sense demihumans are sort of training wheels for players and parties, and the goal isn’t balanced races throughout all levels, but a world in which the ultimately important actors are humans.

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  2. Owen Kermit Edwards

    This misunderstands the way level limits work into AD&D as a game and the ludic purpose of demihumans, different classes, multiclassing, etc. Low level ability rocketing and character stables are vital to Gygax’s conception.

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  3. Justin Todd

    Preface: This blogpost was shared in a highly pro-AD&D space so you are receiving multiple comments specifically interested in defending demihuman level limits.

    The concept of short campaigns or endlessly slumming it at low levels in AD&D makes no sense. That’s not what the game is for. AD&D expects a large number of players who may come and go within a never-ending campaign world of the DM’s devising. In this environment, any given player might be perfectly happy to take on the role that a demihuman plays in a given party. That role does not last forever as it will eventually be supplanted by spells, magic items, and so on. In general, AD&D is much more role-based than corporate D&D; the latter for various reasons is afraid to let characters have distinct roles.

    That said the DM should be certain to convey to players that demihuman level limits will be enforced.

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    1. GR

      Figured it was something like that but didn’t see a link in the “1e like it’s 1983” Discord. Whatever forum it is, please add a comment to it saying I am approving critical comments, but there may be some delay.

      On the substance, I am familiar with the idea that running character stables is the intended play style of AD&D. I have two responses to that.

      1) Character stables assume an intense time commitment. It takes a _lot_ of sessions to get even one character to 10th level, especially if you’re using RAW rules like “if you’re a crappy role player you have to pay 1500gp x level x 4 for training.” This made sense in 1978 in a Wisconsin basement when a player might play 10+ hours a week. Nowadays most of us play about 3 hours a week.

      2) I still don’t think level caps are a well designed mechanic for that purpose. Mechanics that actually would encourage stables would be things like downtime mechanics (which AD&D has a _lot_ of). If I wanted to create a mechanic specifically to encourage demihumans only as part of a stable, it would probably be demihumans need more downtime. So you’d have things like “I’m running my 2nd level human cleric this week because my 5th level elf wizard has to frolic in the glade for 1d4xlevel weeks to level up and my 3rd level dwarf fighter is almost done with his mining school sabbatical for the same reason.”

      And ironically, AD&D has other mechanics that implicitly _discourage_ stables like monthly expenses.

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      1. Anon

        I don’t think the point of level caps are to encourage stables, I think the existence of stables make level caps feasible. The point of level caps is to ensure that overpowered demihumans exist primarily as supporting characters, not as protagonists.

        With respect to monthly expenses – they are (like training expenses) minor for higher level characters, and higher level characters have ways of generating “Non-XP Gold” from landholdings etc.

        The ill-suitedness of some aspects of AD&D design to low-time-commitment play is fair though.

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