On Classic D&D

In the “Basic D&D” a.k.a. “Classic D&D” rules I prefer, players choose from only seven classes: Fighter (or Warrior), Magic-User (or Wizard), Priest (or Cleric), Rogue (or Thief), Dwarf, Elf, and Halfling. (Yes, the latter three are races (or properly species) but also classes.)

DCC, Into the Unknown, Labyrinth Lord, Old School Essentials, etc. all have just four human classes plus Dwarf, Elf, and Halfling. (Third parties have written additional classes for all these games.¹) Obviously D&D 5e has many more classes, and separaces species from class.

I, however, prefer the simpler rules with “race-classes” for the following reasons:

• It encourages a human-centric world. In Classic D&D Dwarves are just Fighters with some added abilities, Elves are Fighter/Magic User hybrids, and Halflings are Fighter/Thieves who are very good at stealth. (In Original D&D they were almost an afterthought, Gygax’s concession to Tolkien fans.²) All the specialized and varied classes are humans.

  By contrast, in a typical 5e party you’ll get Dwarves, Elves, Tieflings, Half-Orcs, Half-Elves, possibly a Gnome or Halfling, and maybe one human (typically a fighter). If humans are the most populous species, statistically they should make up most of the adventuring parties, yes? But they’re the boring choice, so nobody wants to play them.

• Nearly every non-human species in D&D 5e has Darkvision.³ As the Shadowdark RPG has noted, that spoils the tension and terror of venturing into a dark dungeon and having to keep a torch lit. (Yes Darkvision / Low-Light Vision / Infravision aren’t as good as visible light if you read the rules carefully, but that’s the impression.) Again that just encourages dungeon-crawlers not to be human.

• Into the Unknown has a sidebar entitled “Humans in rubber masks?” (Book I, p 23). It argues that if the DM allows demi-humans at all players should portray them with truly alien mindsets: Elves are beings of Faerie, Dwarves are beings of stone and deep earth. That’s what the panoply of 5e demi-humans is missing: the strangeness of beings from the woodlands, or mines, or infernal parentage. RuneQuest does a better job differentiating human cultures than D&D 5e does demi-human cultures.

• Most of the great fantasy stories before D&D like Conan and Elric – the ones that inspired D&D especially – had humans or almost-humans as protagonists and often as antagonists. Crypts & Things, among others, manages to recapture the barbarian splendor of those old sword & sorcery novels … including humans striving against each other, with few non-humans, nearly all of whom were utterly alien and monstrous.

• One scene in Tolkien epitomizes why I’d like to get rid of “fantasy races” if I could: Gimli the Dwarf and Legolas the Elf competing over who can decapitate the most orcs. Most fantasy readers and gamers today reject the sort of biological determinism that says “elves good, orcs bad”. But the whole concept is problematic, and while fantasy roleplayers might like to imagine themselves as Tieflings or Half-Orcs or Dark Elves with outré skin colors and physiques, I wonder why we can’t just imagine a more phenotypically diverse “human race”.

  But players seem to like playing Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, and others, so I’ll have to make space for them. Just, well, not a lot of space.

Here endeth the rant.