Part the Second of my re-reading of the 2e PHB. At some point I started assuming those who might read this either had access to a copy or had already read it at some point. If you don't fall into either category and are skeptical of my statements, you can take my word for it that what I've read is actually in the book. Besides, I can back it up with screenshots if need be.Player Character Races
- The introductory paragraphs for the player character races chapter emphasize that the racial descriptions are broad generalities to which players aren't necessarily bound. It then gives a table for racial minimums and maximums to which your character must conform before modifiers, and then says that races other than human have level restrictions and/or can't be members of certain classes.
- I imagine class and level restrictions exist for non-human races because humans are intended to be the vanilla baseline for those races; every other race is better than humans. I don't think we ever played with racial level restrictions. They do not matter until, at minimum, level 8, and then only if you're a halfling cleric. What level do the majority of games start at? I'll probably go into this later.
- Halflings can't have exceptional Strength. The Strength penalty might have something to do with it, but what happens if they increase their Strength beyond their initial score? Something tells me I'm gonna have to read the DMG again.
- Dwarves can be clerics, fighters, or thieves. They can be fighter/clerics or fighter/thieves, but not cleric/thieves. Why? Because.
- Elves have five different branches: aquatic, grey, high, wood, and dark. Elven PCs are assumed to be high elves ("the most common type"), but can choose to be another type with the DM's permission. Choosing another type confers "no additional powers", until the players get a hold of the Complete Book of Elves, one of the more popular (and arguably broken) splatbooks because it dared to give players meaningful options.
- According to my copy, elves can't be multi-class clerics or rangers. Rangers I can kinda understand, since they're already fighter/thief/druids on their own, but I don't understand the cleric bias. There's actually something of a campaign hook hovering here underneath the surface, I think.
- I remember gnomes being beneath our notice during our Grand Age of Gaming that was middle school. Except for Steve - not that one, the other one. I knew enough Steves for it to be confusing. Anyway, gnome Steve had a fascination with, of all things, gnomes. He always played one, without question. The only one I really remember eventually became something that was pretty far from a gnome if I recall correctly. In that game, we were playing characters who'd been exposed to a meteorite and got random (I can't emphasize this enough, there were charts and everything) mutations. Steve's character eventually had black skin, four legs, and a spiked tail. He was like a xenomorph. It was crazy.
- Okay. Explain to me why gnomes can be illusionists - which are defined as specialist wizards - but can't be mages. You can't use the phrase "yeah-huh" as part of your explanation. While we're on the subject of classes, I may have been reading the multi-class restrictions wrong. The elf entry refers me to the end of the classes section for more information on multi-classing; neither the dwarf nor the gnome have this reference. The gnome entry says they "can have two classes, but not three," implying there's more choice in the matter of multi-classing than the previous two entries indicated. Were these entries written by different people, without an editor?
- Gnomes are dwarves that aren't as cool, and that's saying something. In fact, they're nearly identical, save for their class selection, ability adjustments, and what pool they can select languages from. They even have the dwarvish magic-resistance abilities, yet can be (a type of) mage(s).
- "Half-elves are the most common mixed-race beings." Thus far they're the only mixed-race beings. It's stated pretty plainly that once you go human you never go back; if a person has even one human ancestor, they're a half-elf at best. Half-elves have none of the strengths and all of the weaknesses of their parents, though they multi-class well. They have no racial ability adjustments, and only two-and-a-half elf abilities. Half-elves look to be the worst race to pick so far; human is probably worse, though.
- Halflings are hobbits with the serial numbers filed off (though someone forgot to rename the halfling types something other than hobbit surnames). For the average D&D player, if they wanted to play a fat, hedonistic midget, they could probably just stay home and roll a joint. They don't become cool until 3e, at which point they become arguably the best race choice (tied with humans, oddly enough).
- Halflings have to roll to see if they get a racial ability every other race (except humans) gets by default. Is this like Paranoia, where you roll to see if you die during character creation? It probably leads to the same result: abandoning that character for something else.
- Humans suck unless you're planning for the long haul or are starting a game at 15th level or higher. I shouldn’t have to explain why.
- My first D&D character ever was a 7th-level elf ranger with an 18/96 Strength, 6'6" tall and weighed 76 pounds. To this day I have no idea how those stats came to be, except Roland told me what to do and I just chucked the dice. I got a sweet +2 spear out of the deal, only because Roland's character had one she wasn't using. I think it was a she, anyway. I've never been weirded out by people playing characters of the opposite sex - this may be because I modeled my ranger after Alan (Ail) from Sailor Moon (R), who was pretty close to begin with.
That concludes my write-up on PC races. Next time: Observations, Part 3: Classes, Part 1!
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