Reject Race-As-Class

Watching this week's episode of Biggus Geekus, a little bit past the hour mark race-as-class gets brought up. 

In case you don't know what race-as-class is, in older editions of Dungeons & Dragons when you rolled up your character you didn't choose both a race and class. Instead, dwarves, elves, and halflings were for some reason relegated to their own distinct classes, suggesting that every single demihuman of a given type functioned in a monolithic manner.

For example, though the sparse flavor text for elves in Rules Cyclopedia at the least implies that elves should be able to devote themselves wholly to the arcane arts, they are constrained to a fighter/wizard archetype. This means, in older D&D at any rate, that no elf was ever a warrior or thief, and, assuming elven gods were even present in prior editions, none of their gods ever deigned to bless their creations with divine powers.

Just imagine rolling up an elf that had to grow up on the streets, and despite spending his formative decades stealing--or attempting to at any rate--in order to survive and not only being unable to learn and refine these necessary skills, but instead somehow, possibly literally magically blossoming into a capable warrior and wizard without any sort of instruction or training.

Again: none of this is even suggested in the elven description. Nowhere does it say that elves have some instinctive knowledge of martial and magical arts. The book just says that if you want to be an elf, you're essentially a fighter/wizard whether or not you like it or it even makes any sense at all.

Dwarves on the other hand were unable to break out of the mold of being basically fighters with some extra features sprinkled on top, such as infravision and being able to detect traps in stonework (but unable to delve into any of the other larcenous arts). Halflings were in a similar boat, overlapping the fighter class with some halfling-specific special abilities on the side. You'd think halflings could at least make passable thieves but, nope: they rigidly adhere to the three C's of comfort, cooking, and, obviously, combat.

But none of this is particularly surprising. After all older editions are responsible for other equally bizarre mechanics such as XP-for-gold and training to level up. And just with those, there are people that still bother to defend race-as-class in their own very special way, typically by muttering something along the lines of "that's the way we did it back in the day" or declaring that you're somehow a power gamer because there's no tangible argument based in either mechanics and/or flavor why a dwarf can't be a thief.

I can only chalk it up to blind nostalgia, so while I no longer play Dungeons & Dragons proper, I suppose I should be thankful that I started really playing in 2nd Edition, where each of these were already wisely abandoned. Would have been nice if they'd also scrapped pseudo-Vancian magic and devised something that at least partially made sense.