Sunday, January 8, 2012

Demihuman Level Limits?

There's some discussion out there in the OSR blogosphere about demihuman level limits. Some people, as has always been the case, hate them and refuse to use them. Others think that they are a necessary part of the game, and useful to emphasize the humanocentric nature of the sort of swords & sorcery fantasy that is the implied subject of most games with levels. Certainly, the increased numbers of players with demihuman characters in modern D&D games would seem to indicate that there should be some sort of factor to discourage their play. The question is, should that factor be something so seemingly metagame-y as level limits.

It's important, I think, to figure out just what character levels and experience points represent in the game. That is, what are they, besides a game convenience? The normal idea is that levels represent a level of skill and training. This is supported by the idea of training for level increases in the 1E DMG. However, it is countered by looking at what events garner experience points, and by examining some other issues. For instance, a 1st-level Fighting Man is not described as being in training: he is called a "Veteran" in the editions which used level titles. That is, he is someone who has already learned the techniques of his craft and had occasion to apply them in practice. He is a veteran, not a tyro. Similarly, as Talysman points out, the Magic User and the Cleric imply that the starting character has learned what he can from his instructors. And experience points are not given for training, or even for practicing skills. They are given for acquiring treasure and destroying (or defeating, in some formulations) foes.

So, why would a character have experience points in exchange for picking up some coins or for putting a sword through the heart of a goblin? I think that the answer is to be found in another game, Pendragon. In that game, an analogous quantity called Glory is the goal of the players. Glory is acquired for similar (though not identical) reasons as experience points. The amount of Glory gained represents the reputation, temporal power, and spiritual accomplishment of the character. Similarly, experience points (and therefore levels) seem to represent the success and worldly power of the character. That is, it is a concept very similar to the Polynesian, specifically Maori, concept of mana (not to be confused with the appropriation of that term in gaming to mean, merely, "magic points"; as an aside, I'm curious to know where the earliest use of the term in that capacity occurred). That is, it is authority and luck and reputation and power and confidence (both self- and that of others).

Now, given that, it becomes more obvious as to why demihumans, in a humanocentric, sword & sorcery world, have level limits. As Talysman notes, elves and dwarves and halflings are all seen as secondary to human concerns. Not many humans, in such worlds, will subject themselves to even elven kings, much less dwarven or (ha!) hobbit ones. Humans are the measure of all things in such worlds, and it is only they who can reach the highest realms of authority and power, not only in the realm of temporal power and politics, but in the more mystic worlds of arcane and clerical magic. This is further borne out by the later Thief class, which did not limit levels of demihumans, but which is the most mundane class of them all, with little interest in the rarefied realms of political, arcane, or spiritual power.

So, level limits seem important for both metagame reasons (discouraging the use of demihuman characters without artificial "balancing") and for reasons of simulation within the context of the material. It's only those games which didn't share that context that made the limits nonsensical (but, then, there are many other aspects of the rules which wouldn't then fit into those games). This is interesting to consider in context of the WRG Ancients RPG I am working on.

12 comments:

  1. OMFG THANK YOU!! I WAS JUST THINKNG TWODAY HOW WHAT TSR D$AND NEEDS IS A GOOD HASHING OUT OF DEM-IHUMAN LEVEL LIMITS AS I CAM COULD ONLY FIND 4,741 POSTS ON DRAGGIN-FOOTS !!!

    HEY, OSR -I AM NOT HAD ENUFF ALREDDY WITH A THIRTY YEAR OLD ARGUMINTS!!!1

    :p

    -NUNYA

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  2. Has it never occurred to anyone that level limits are there precisely because they're supposed to be there? I mean, Frodo will never slaughter hordes of attackers the way Conan or John Carter does, because he's 3 feet tall and no amount of combat experience is going to change that. There's an ass kicking hobbit in Order of the Stick...and it just seems unnatural...

    In real life, I think it'd be very generous to call anyone reading this a 2nd level fighter...as in, the equivalent to 2 fighting men on the field of battle. Yet does anyone doubt that they could kick the living crap out of Frodo in a throwdown? It'd be like fighting an 8 year old.

    In the LotR movies the elves and dwarves did okay but the hobbits were _useless_ on the battlefield. They have the lowest level cap of the three... it's not coincidence, it's design.

    @ NUNYA

    Not everyone in the world, or even the OSR, was alive 30 years ago. This stuff is actually brand new to me; I didn't read AD&D until Osric rolled into town.

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  3. Why are you so hot for humanocentrism? Because you see it in some source literature and you want to play out that lit as a game? Why then allow non-human PCs? Surely they're just not hero material?

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  4. richard: Yes, because people are either completely and utterly the pinnacles of heroism or they are mud-people of no interest to the true heroes. Try reading The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit sometime, followed up by Spinrad's The Iron Dream.

    I'm hot for humanocentrism with nonhuman options because that's what I like (not least because that's the way I started playing, though that's not the only reason by any means). If you like something different, play a game that allows you to do that different thing (GURPS does an excellent job, for example). Or else play a game which maximizes the nonhuman characters (such as D&D without level limits). Good on ya! My point here, though, is that the level limits concept is not irrational or "broken" (whatever that last actually means in terms of adventure games), as some have charged, and can be seen to be representative rather than metagame-y.

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  5. I understand the second paragraph of your comment, but I'm not quite sure what to do with the first - I don't know if you're being ironic.

    Mana is such a useful concept, it really belongs in every gamer's vocabulary.

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  6. Yes, I was being rather sarcastic there. I never know what to make of claims that this or that "race" is not "heroic". In Tolkien, hobbits are the least of the peoples of Middle-Earth, but they are also, as Gandalf repeatedly observes, the most remarkable ones. In reality, there are many people who, without intensive training or particular talent, act heroically.

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  7. Hmmm... if your fundamental argument here is that levels model heroic buffness and authority but should not be taken as an index of one's capacity for heroic acts (because, eg, Frodo saves the world despite being "lower level" than, say, Aragorn)....... then D&D might not be the best game to represent that distinction.

    I guess in some sense by mechanically representing halflings as underdogs, it simulates the hobbits' difficulties in pursuing their missions - nobody will take them seriously, they must face the Big Bad with nothing but their nerve, and they can't build up a buffer of hit points to carry them through hours of frontline fighting.

    On the other hand, the fundamental goal of the game, encoded in the rules, is to increase in level - mechanically you'd be suicidal to take on a dragon head to head at first level, but the game provides a way for you to grow into that situation, to the point where you could engage the dragon with confidence. Unless you choose to play a halfling, in which case you don't get to play that game. You just get to play "Dungeons."

    I agree with you that it's not necessarily nonsensical or "broken" - one can find a good-sounding rationale for the level limits as they stand, if you put a bit of effort in. But it is definitely perverse.

    (if you're also obliquely saying that the Nazis would've loved D&D had it been around in the 30s, although they might not have loved Tolkien so much or found him such a good fit for their ideologies, then I'd agree with you there)

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  8. HEY FFS JUST USE NON-SKILL BASED FEATS AND WHEN YOUR HALFMAN TOPS OUT IN LEVEL HE CAN STILL TRACK XP AWARDS AND GAIN FEATS..THEN THE PLAYER HAS SUMPIN TO STRIVE FOR AND HIS POINTYEARED CHARACTER TOO!

    :p
    -NUNYA

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  9. "the fundamental goal of the game, encoded in the rules, is to increase in level"

    OK, I see that we're playing two different games. For you, it's about the rules. For me, it's about what I want to do. The game is unique in that the goals are set by the players, not by the rules. Sure, there are some things the rules set up as explicit possibilities (the classic endgame, for instance, or, as you say, leveling), but the victory conditions are actually entirely personal.

    Secondly, I see the argument that it's necessary to have levels to, for example, defeat a dragon, but I reject it. Sure, at least a few levels are necessary (in Chainmail, only a Hero could even attempt to fight one), but it isn't mechanics that are important. Rather, it is ingenuity. Don't fight a dragon, collapse the cave it lives in. Hire an army to help you (sure, they're immune to normal missiles, but 100 men-at-arms get a lot of melee attacks, and even a dragon can't kill all of them at once; of course, there's the fear effect to consider, but there are ways around anything, given enough thought). Pull a Bilbo, and lure the dragon onto the weapons of someone else of higher level. And so on. Unlike computer games, you aren't limited in the things you can try to what the designer thought up. The GM is there to referee unusual actions, and it is expected that you will try some.

    See, I've discussed before that leveling is not essential to the gaming experience. Some games forego leveling entirely in favor of simply gaining money and using it to improve your character's equipment, and therefore his capabilities. In a game where magic items can be bought and sold (which is many, though I recognize not all, gaming worlds), a character that has hit the level limit can still get money to buy magic items with, or to hire mercenaries and such if powerful items aren't available at ye olde magik shoppe. So, sure, the character can (in games that include them) hope to gain new feats or whatever, but why should that be necessary? Gold still equals power, in some sense. It's up to the player to figure out how to leverage that power at the gaming table.

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  10. Sure, you can use any rule set for any style of play. I mostly play CoC and other kinds of investigative games, so I'm no stranger to the monster for which there is no premeditated or direct solution - in fact that's one of the things I like most about CoC: it has a clearly-defined problem space that specifically forecloses direct approaches. Perhaps that's why I regard DnD the way I do; because it's the only game I play that has levels.

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  11. ...that is, if I'm not looking for that nebbish-to-demigod experience then I play something with fewer problematic subsystems.

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  12. There's a lot to be said for that position. I'm particularly fond of GURPS for those sorts of games, for instance, and I like BRP/CoC very much as well. However, I think that there are some very useful aspects of D&D outside of (and I love this formulation, so thanks for that) "nebbish-to-demigod". For instance, it takes approximately 30 seconds to make a character in OD&D (roll 3d6 in order 6 times, pick a class and alignment, roll hit points, and you're done except for starting equipment and maybe spells if you're a Magic User). There are a few things to improve that (take max hp, or roll a hit die for 0 level as well and take the higher result, for instance, or get rid of alignments), but the process is simple by design. Other systems add other fiddly bits (skills in BRP/CoC, for example).

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