[hunvagy]

Originally Posted by twillight

1) There are not enough scrolls for two mages in IWD.
2) It is not "powrgaming" to use minimal common sense.
3) The characters in question are not "statistically impossible". +100 thief skills compared to the maximum avaiable points (same level, same race etc.) for example is definitly "cheating".
4) What the *bleep* was that after "Fifth ..."?

1) Right, so who's metagaming then?
2) Min maxing is not minimal common sense. Please refer to that statistics crap up a few posts about 18 on two and 10 on everything else if you have a hard time understanding.
3) As said, DM option. Given that the devs had to be prepared for item hoarding soloing, metagaming munchkins, like a certain mage/thief min maxed and knowing all the enemies by heart. And no, will not get into an argument in this, your whole playthrough reports shows that. And for me, playing a game designed for a party of 6 alone is not a challenge or an achievment, since you can't do it without knowing the location of every loot and enemy. "I don't do the quests, because I don't need xp anymore, and the items it gives is shit" Yeah, no powergaming my arse.
4) This:

For those of you who never played an earlier version of D&D, a "demihuman" is an old (and nonexistant in 3E D&D) term for "dwarf, elf, half-elf, gnome, halfling, or half-orc," and demihuman level limits were limitations placed on the character level advancement of these demihumans. Dwarves were limited to about level 9 as fighters, elves were limited to level 11 as wizards, and so on (although every class has unlimited advancement as thieves, oddly enough, and yes, the rogue class was called the thief class in earlier editions).

So, if you were playing an elf wizard, and the rest of your friends were playing humans, the theory was that when your group got to 11th level, your character would stop gaining levels, but your human friends wouldn't. Even though elves were supposed to be naturally good at magic. Even though elves live ten times long as a human. But hit that 11th level barrier and you were stuck.

Enough people thought that this was crazy, and introduced rules where demihumans could advance a certain number of levels past their level limit if they were single classed and they had a very high ability score of the appropriate type. Which basically meant that if you were an elf wizard with a high Int (and if you were a single-classed wizard, why wouldn't you have a high Int back then, especially when the scores between 9 and 14 had very little difference in terms of game effects?) the level limits were irrelevant. Similarly for the high-Strength dwarf fighter, and so on.

The theory behind level limits was this (and it dates back to 1st edition AD&D): Demihumans get a lot of good stuff at 1st level that human doesn't get (bonus languages, infravision, weird special abilities or immunities, and so on), and to offset that advantage they were penalized later, so the humans could really shine.

This of course ignored the concept of ancient dwarven fighters who really kicked ass, or centuries-old elven wizards that could cast spell to protect an entire forest, and so on.

It also ignored two other things that have a direct impact on the game as it is played. One, the AD&D game rules (whether 1st or 2nd edition) really started to break down after level 10, which meant that most people stopped playing when the game got to that level (simply because the game got too broken). Two, most gaming groups restart their campaign (either in the same world or another) about every six to nine months, which means that most games never got to the levels where demihuman level limits would be a factor.

In other words, the demihuman advantages were offset by a disadvantage that almost never came into play. That's quite unfair to humans.