FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1088624072[/unixtime]]
Of course, the entire concept of level limits for player races was pretty sketchy. In AD&D there was an optional rule that eliminated them, and I have literally never seen anyone not use that optional rule. As far as I know, in 2e using the level limits was the optional rule, and noone played with it. In short, I have never seen a game being played which had level limits for halflings.
Back in the day, when I played 1e without any conscious sense of irony, we at least paid lip service to the idea of level limits -- it wasn't unusual to see them exceeded by a level or two if you picked up a Wish or did the right favors for a god or whatever, but it was rare that we discarded them altogether.
The 1e games I've played in in the past half-decade have all adhered to them religiously (along with other things like the "elves cannot be raised from the dead" rule), because, after all, part of the fun of deliberately using an antiquated set of rules is abiding by them. Which led to the expected result: hardly anyone played demi-humans except for single- and multi-classed thieves, for whom adding a half-dozen wizard or fighter levels was a heck of a lot more worthwhile than speeding up a level progression that was mostly meaningless after 10th level anyway.
One of the interesting things we discovered about 1e in the process is that, while it's an astounding rattletrap of a game system, it
does work without becoming completely, grossly unbalanced
if you follow the rules as written. Or rather, it works for a while. It still gets fairly crazy at high levels (and it gets crazy even faster if you allow the Unearthed Arcana rules instead of banning them outright), but some of the craziness is muted due to the existence of actual risks and costs for some of the more notorious 3E tactics (getting killed and resurrected as a strategy, long-distance teleport ambushes, constant use of haste, etc. etc. etc.), the brutally hard spell acquisition rules for wizards (you still have a 15% chance to fail to learn a spell if you max out your intelligence, and you generally only get one roll EVER), and so on.
Of course, some of the craziness is not muted at all. And some of it is worse. And "following the rules as written" is easier said than done because just about everything in the game has its own unique rule or special case ... but there you go.
The dilemma the BoVD stuff faces is that it wants to be more worthwhile than regular stuff in exchange for a cost ... at a time when there are increasingly few costs that players actually care about. So either the BoVD stuff is just as good as other stuff, but has a meaningless cost that's essentially flavor text, or it's substantially better or worse with the same. I don't need to have my flavor text written for me for spells that are just as good, I don't want spells that are better than the norm and balanced largely by flavor text, and nobody will use spells that have costs that they can't minimize or evade. That means my use for the BoVD mechanics is limited, and none of the non-mechanical content is all that inspiring.
--d.