It’s lunacy. I’ll see at least one thread on every BD&D (or LL) forum where the topic starter gets on a rant about how ’stoopid’ races as classes are in the game. You’ll usually hear them whine something along the lines of: “But I want to play a dwarven thief!” and then ask all the regulars for some advice on porting the class/race system from AD&D into their own games. This annoys me immensely. How would I look if I jumped on an AD&D forum and asked the reverse? “Uh, yeah guys. I like your game and all, but I don’t like the fact that a halfling can be a cleric, so I just want all the demihumans to be classes like they are in BD&D. Can anyone help me come up with some conversion tables?” Sure, there are charts at the back of the Rules Cyclopedia to convert a character from an AD&D game to a BD&D game, and vice versa. I don’t believe they were meant to encourage anyone to run a hybrid game though. It was a handy table for a player with an existing character who joins a new group, or for a group who decides to make the jump from one system to another.
These discussions shouldn’t bother me as much as they do, because house ruling is a fundamental part of not just D&D and it’s kin, but damn near all role-playing games. Hell, it goes well beyond RPG’s. There’s an untold number who mess around with the rules to games like Monopoly, right? The amount of money you get at the beginning of the game, whether you have to go around the board once before buying anything, monies paid to the bank going into the center of the board for the ‘Free Parking’ space, different rules regarding auctions (or simply ignoring them altogether), and about a hundred other little changes you can make that I’ve probably forgotten. I truly believe that by abandoning the simpler dwarf-elf-halfling classes you’re changing such a huge chunk from the core of the system that you’re not only going to lose all the flavor of that game, but you’re going to cause all kinds of problems and inconsistencies with the rules. It’s like creating a rule for your Monopoly game where houses and hotels do not exist.
To me at least, I feel like you just don’t get it if you want to play BD&D but you want separate races and classes. There’s no doubt about it: races as classes is an acquired taste. It’s not for everyone, I completely understand this. So if it’s not for you, why not play AD&D instead? That is essentially what you’ll be playing anyway if you import dwarven clerics and elven mage/thieves into your campaign. Don’t delude yourself into thinking you’re playing some sweet hybrid of BD&D, because as you go on, you’ll be forced to import more and more rules from AD&D into the game, and then what have you got? An abomination, that’s what. I mean, if demihumans can multi-class, then it’s only fair that humans can dual-class, right? What about level limits? Oh, well, I guess you’ve got to scrap BD&D level limits and go with the AD&D ones, wouldn’t make sense for a halfling thief to stop at level 8 when he can go on to level 15 in AD&D (2nd edition at least). Spell levels aren’t exactly the same, so you’ll possibly have to address that at some point. Then perhaps your players who want human characters are upset because the demihuman PC’s have clear advantages, so they want you to bring in paladins and bards and rangers into the world to give them more options. Other players counter that lizardmen and half-orcs and centaurs should feature as playable races, oh, and what about the proficiency system, Mr. DM? We using the sub-tables under each ability score? In BD&D, it’s just a simple +1 to hit and for damage, but in AD&D, it can be a +1 for hit probability and a +2 for damage. And let’s not forget that the demihuman races in AD&D, while they do share some of the same abilities, also have some completely different abilities than the racial classes in BD&D. So are we taking the elf abilities from this book or that book? Congrats, you’ve just completely unbalanced your game and turned it into a train wreck.
This rant is not intended to be a form of the old Basic vs. Advanced argument. I like them both in their own ways. All I’m saying is, it’s probably not a good idea to cross the two games. If you hate race as class that much, simply move on to AD&D. It’s much easier to convert a module, say Keep on the Borderlands, into an AD&D campaign than it is to tweak the AD&D rules into a BD&D game. While they do have quite a lot of things in common, there are many differences, some of them irreconcilable without abandoning large pieces of one or the other. Jamming BD&D and AD&D into the same system is like trying to make a cocktail with beer and wine. It ain’t gonna taste too good.
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August 29, 2008 at 18:43
apotheon
. . . or, if you do a surprisingly good job of combining the two systems, you might just end up with D&D 3.5.
At that point, you might as well just skip over all that and go directly to Pathfinder RPG.
August 29, 2008 at 21:05
Matthew Conway
Actually, at that point, I would consider hanging myself a better option.
August 29, 2008 at 21:13
James Maliszewski
I think elf as race vs. elf as class debate will never go away, as it has its origins in ambiguities within OD&D itself. Both approaches are reasonable interpretations of the rules as written, so it’s not as if one is the “right” answer and the other one wrong.
None of this is to say I don’t share your frustration with those who want to change the Moldvay-descended games rules to be more like those of AD&D.
August 29, 2008 at 22:35
Matthew James Stanham
I am going to go with over reaction on this one. I see the rules of BD&D and AD&D as not far enough apart to worry about mixing parts of one into the other. In fact I would go further and say that a good proportion of people who move from BD&D to AD&D preserve enough of the former for them to be not “really” be playing AD&D.
The devil is in the detail, of course, but BD&D/AD&D 1e/2e are all broadly similar enough for me that it doesn’t at all bother me when people turn up to a forum looking to incorporate rules from one into the other.
September 1, 2008 at 14:15
RandallS
It’s relatively easy to homebrew rules for BD&D where races are not classes. If people want to do so and it suits their group, more power to them.
To drop racial classes all you have to do is decide what abilities come with each race, decide which human classes are available to each race, maximum levels for each race in those classes, and what experience penalty to give each race. Compared to many of the changes I’ve seen made to D&D, these really aren’t that hard work up, especially as you have OD&D and AD&D serve as examples.
Why not just play OD&D or AD&D? Perhaps because the players like more of BD&D than OD&D or AD&D so playing BD&D requires fewer rules changes to get it right for their group than would be required to use OD&D or AD&D rules.