OSRIC & Demihumans
While I am growing quite fond of OSRIC, and I remain quite fond of 1E AD&D, no game is perfect, even if the room for improvement amounts to little more than a preference for This rather than That. I didn’t start RPGs with AD&D. I started with the Basic D&D blue box, the rule book cover being depicted to the right.
In that version of D&D, humans were the only race that had a class. Humans could be cleric, fighters, magic-users, or thieves. On top of that, I could choose instead to be a dwarf, elf, or halfling. Dwarves, elves, and halflings didn’t have classes per se. Instead every dwarf and every halfling was very much like a fighter, and every elf was both a fighter and a magic-user. That was more choices in a slim book than the number of both UHF and VHF channel choices on the TV. What luxury!
I remain enamored of the race-as-class concept. My first D&D character was a dwarf. When we switched from Basic to Advanced, my dwarf came along for the ride. Since in Basic he’d been violent and larcenous, in Advanced he became a fighter/thief, but he firstly he was a dwarf. Fighting and stealing were means by which he expressed his dwarven-ness.
While reading OSRIC, jumping from section to section rather than progressing page by page in numerical order, the novelty of race-as-class returned. Could such a thing work in OSRIC? If so, how so? Well, I’ve already explained how I think ability score generation should go. Let’s now focus on dwarves, elves, and halflings, treating each race as a class. The other demihuman races could be treated in a similar manner.
When creating an OSRIC character, I might choose a race other than human. For the three that I’m focusing on, each class would be treated as a class/race combination but without me needing to worry about meeting the class ability score prerequisites. Instead, all I need do is meet the race minimums and maximums. Let’s review those:
Dwarf: STR 8/18, DEX 3/17, CON 12/19, INT and WIS 3/18, CHA 3/16
Elf: STR 3/18, DEX 7/19, CON 8/17, INT 8/18, WIS 3/18, CHA 8/18
Halfling: STR 6/17, DEX 8/19, CON 10/18, INT 6/18, WIS 3/17, CHA 3/18
Each race defaults to a specific class (or classes, in the case of an elf):
Dwarf & Halfling: Fighter.
Elf: Fighter/Magic-User.
(Nota Bene: Either an elf with an 8 Intelligence would be just a fighter since a minimum of a 9 Intelligence is needed for a magic-user to learn spells, or the DM could just treat an 8 Intelligence as a 9 Intelligence and keep the elf as a fighter/magic-user. I think I favor the latter option.)
For added variety, a demihuman might still multi-class. For example, a dwarf might be a dwarf/thief. In this case, the minimum prerequisites of the additional class would be in play. An elf would effectively add a third class, becoming, for example, an elf/cleric. Otherwise, each race would be treated as a either a single-classed fighter (dwarf or halfling) or a multi-classed fighter/magic-user (elf) in matters related to armor, weapons, level advancement, et cetera.
One campaign-level consequence of this idea is that the worst of human fighters would still be somewhat better than the worst dwarf. Due to my preferred ability score generation method, the lowest STR, DEX, WIS, and CHA scores a human fighter would have are 9, 6, 6, and 6, respectively. The dwarf would win out in Constitution, since the lowest Constitution a dwarf would have is 12 versus 7 for the human fighter. The same sort of thing happens when comparing the human fighter to the halfling.
A human magic-user compared to an elf lags behind in the minimums except for Intelligence, but the human magic-user is single-classed, whereas the elf technically has two classes and therefore must divide XP between fighter and magic-user. So, in many respects, the elf is the better magic-user, except for speed of advancement. When the human magic-user reaches 2nd level with 2400 XP, the elf is still 1st level with 1200 XP in fighter and 1200 XP in magic-user. By the time the elf hits 2nd level in both fighter and magic-user, the human magic-user has reached 3rd level.
And the lag would be even greater when comparing a human thief to dwarf/thief, halfling/thief, or elf/thief, especially in the last instance, since the elf would be dividing XP between three classes.
