Older editions of D&D limit what classes non-humans can take and limit how far they can progress in those classes. The idea was that if you didn’t have these in place, demi-human characters would quickly overwhelm human ones, both because they have advantages at first level and because significantly longer lifespans meant that they should be able to continue advancing well after their human contemporaries have died, causing humans of significant level to be completely outnumbered over time. Of course, there were still players interested in demi-human characters and as far as I can tell these level limits were never that popular. So at first glance we’re left with a dilemma: retain level limits and the dissatisfaction they cause, or remove them completely and subordinate humans to other player character races.

Now, there’s no shortage of other options – perhaps the best-known is 3rd edition’s decision to give humans bonuses at first level to make them more competitive with demi-humans. That still didn’t solve the problem of elves continuing to level up at age 500, though. I think we can solve all that easily enough, though (and as a side-benefit the rules are short). Note that I came up with these with OD&D in mind, but I don’t see any reason they wouldn’t work with editions as recent as 2E – basically, anything with a notion of prime requisites (though in editions where race = class you’ll have to work up a progression beyond the listed levels, or let non-human characters switch classes on that – maybe I can get to that later).

The central idea here is that characters can be of any class regardless of race, and there’s no preset level limit for a character based on race; advancement is only limited by their ability to continue gaining XP.

1. Typical demi-humans have a 10% XP penalty (races with greater abilities than the classic dwarf/elf/halfling trio may have a larger penalty).
2. Any class outside those “allowed” (i.e. typical) for the character’s race imposes an additional 10% penalty to XP applied toward that class.
3. Once a character of any race has lived longer than a human can (100 years, say) they face an additional 80% XP penalty.
4. XP modifiers for high or low prime requisites apply as usual.
5. Multiple XP modifier percentages can apply at the same time, and are added up rather than multiplied. So an Elf over 100 years old faces an XP penalty of 10% (elf) + 80% (outside human lifespan) = 90% in general; for classes other than Fighter or Magic-User (only allowed Elf classes in OD&D) it will be 100% before adjusting for prime requisite scores.

The consequences of this are that demi-humans may still be slightly superior to humans in their earliest adventures (when simple class differences like Fighter vs. Magic-User means that balance isn’t too precise in the first place, and at any rate low HP totals place everyone pretty close to an early grave) and pay for their advantages over time with slightly slowed advancement. Characters that want to continue advancing after their human colleagues have aged out will best do so by sticking to the career paths archetypal for their race and those for which they have any particular talent (XP bonus due to high prime requisite scores); even then their advancement will be sufficiently slowed that the world shouldn’t be overrun by super-elves or what have you.

Charged items are an interesting sort of PC find. Because they have a cost, there’s generally some real benefit to using them, but because there’s a cost there’s also some motivation not to use them for every little thing. Also, because charges are generally non-renewable even unbalancing items tend to go away eventually. And they’re usually a lot more interesting than “+3 to some roll or other”. This all seems like a win except for one small detail: keeping track of charges is a pain.

It’s a pain because it’s easy to forget to do it, and because there’s a question of who should be tracking (players? do they know the exact number of charges?). It’s also a pain because different numbers of charges remaining can cause real changes in the way players use the items: a wand with 50 charges left feels almost inexhaustible; one with 3 charges left may be hoarded, even at the cost of PCs’ lives. To some degree this reflects the should-I-use-this-or-not interesting choice mentioned above, but it generally fails to emulate the way a character would act when feeling threatened, the tendency to keep pulling the trigger until ammo runs out. And of course it’s impossible for the PC to run out of ammo without the player knowing it’s about to happen, unless the DM is the one actually tracking charges remaining (as if the DM needs more numbers to juggle!)

Solve this by not tracking a definite number of charges, but by assigning each item a percentage that the next use will be its last. The percentage can be calculated by dividing 100% by the number of charges you’d normally assign the item, so for a wand with 50 charges that’s 100%/50 = 2%; for a staff with 8 charges it’s 100%/8 = 12% (actually 12.5, but let’s round down). There are of course a few items that should still have charges tracked explicitly, generally those in which charges are iconic and small in number (e.g. a Ring of Three Wishes).

The way this looks in play would be that a player would have their character use the item, then roll against this depletion chance; as long as they roll over the percentage the item remains usable (note that the percentage doesn’t change as the item is used); otherwise the item is used up. You can probably just tell players the depletion percentage for an item (or wait until they use something like Identify to get a sense of how charged it is), since this number doesn’t provide any definitive information on how many times it can be used – an item with a 4% depletion chance may fail after the first use, and one with a 25% depletion chance may be useful after a dozen invocations.

In short, this change reduces the amount of tracking that has to be done during the game, increases unpredictability, and tries to make players more likely to use items as charges dwindle rather than bypass them on character sheets until they’re forgotten.

A lot of people like the idea of being able to describe folks with the alignment system, to say that so-and-so is LAWFUL Good, but this guy over here is CHAOTIC Good and things like that, and that’s great…until you run into the issue of what alignment should actually do in the game. Because if all it does is take up space on the character sheet lots of players will just forget it’s there and the way they play their characters may bear no relationship to what they’ve written, at which point alignment has no descriptive power.

The solution is to make alignment mechanically significant – meaning that it affects how things happen in the game often enough to be worth noticing. That makes sense, but many players resist it – I think too many people remember alignment being a purely negative influence on their character, a bludgeon that required them to behave a certain way or be penalized by experience or level loss. That will generally drive people to become hostile to alignment (unless it’s refereed so loosely that it once again doesn’t mean much if anything).

My proposal is to make alignment an advantage for the character. There are lots of forms this could take, but for the moment I’d like to suggest the simplest one that comes to mind: make it a reinforcement of player choice. In other words, since alignment is meant to be a reflection of how characters act, let’s make it back that up by making it hard to force a character to act against their alignment. So you could maybe drug or hypnotize or intimidate or otherwise coerce a character into generally doing your bidding, but if you try to make them violate their alignment those specific orders might be resisted; additionally you might lose what hold you have on them.

Assuming your group has a solid consensus about what various alignments mean (if not see below), here’s an example of how things might work in a 1e-3e style game:

1. The DM keeps track of character actions, and based on how the character predominantly behaves has a current alignment for the character.
2. Any action that would cause a character to behave contrary to their alignment can be resisted with a saving throw, with a bonus (or other resistance roll); if a resistance roll is not normally allowed this is rolled without a bonus, but if one normally is allowed then there’s a bonus to the roll equal to the character’s level+1. Resistance rolls might encompass not only saving throws, but also morale, opposed skill rolls, etc.
3. The DM will determine if making one of these alignment-based resistance rolls compromises the effect overall (for example, a character ordered to do something opposed to their values may cause them to throw off a Charm Person spell, which operates by affecting their opinion of the caster; it probably won’t rid them of a Dominate Person spell since it simply attempts to control their actions).

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Older editions of D&D bring up the idea that some circumstances can cause the items you’re carrying to be destroyed. Rather than track HP for each of your possessions, this was generally handled by having the item make a saving throw under certain circumstances against whatever threatened it; in 1st edition at least, items had their own saving throw categories, distinct from those used by creatures, and with target numbers dependent on the item’s composition.

This approach seems OK except for a few things: first, the amount of dice-rolling and tracking that has to be done can get overwhelming fast (since for a given attack you have to figure out what items might have been affected and then have to go through and make saves for each), and second because it makes certain types of attacks (especially large area physical attacks like Fireball spells) even more devastating, as they’re likely to destroy at least some of your (magic?) equipment as well as injure your character. 3rd edition tried to handle this by only having one item targeted, and then only on a botched save; that’s a bit of an improvement but it comes up rarely enough that its easier to ignore the rule altogether, and since the character has already failed their save it still seems like adding insult to injury.

Here’s another idea: whenever a character has to make a save against something, they can nominate a piece of equipment that could reasonably (defined relative to the campaign setting) take at least part of the attack and thus help protect them from some of the trauma (armor might protect from a Fireball, a Ring of Protection from a death curse, a metal weapon might take the Lightning Bolt for you, etc.). If the DM agrees, the player rolls 2 saving throws; the higher roll is used for the character, the lower roll for the item according to however item saves are handled. If the item fails its save it is visibly ruined (the silver Ring of Protection that falls to a curse may instantly tarnish and even fall away into nothingness, the sword into which the lightning bolt grounds may become a useless lump of metal), but if it succeeds then no significant harm is done.

The effect of this rule is to give a player something for risking their equipment, which means you’re more likely to see items lost or damaged even as the character lives on (though of course it’s possible for both saves to fail…); similarly it encourages PCs not to resort to just blowing up the enemy lest some of their own future treasure be damaged. It also keeps the dice-rolling and accounting limited without hopefully making it so rare that the rule is totally forgotten. The one thing it doesn’t try to handle is keeping players aware of the fragility of their equipment in general – of how a fall into a pit may cause potion vials to shatter, for example.