A few little rule changes (2e AD&D)

[Digitalelf]

Well, quite.

Thank you for answering my question.

Can you say that the game is better because I made a human cleric to avoid the level limit, rather than the halfling cleric I wanted to make?

That would depend entirely upon the reason why you chose a halfling in the first place.

However, let's look at a hypothetical 9th level cleric...

First off, past 9th level, the cleric is no longer gaining any additional hit dice, just a meager 2 hit point per level, but then so is pretty much the rest of the party. So if you are stuck at 9th level forever, you're not missing all that much. At 9th level, the highest level spell you can cast is 5th, but then, unless your wisdom score is 17 or more, you can't cast spells of higher level than 5th level anyway no matter what level your cleric is...

But, since your hypothetical halfling cleric is 9th level (instead of just 8th), it would be assumed that the rules for exceeding level limits would already be in place, so if your halfling cleric can increase that wisdom score to 17, then your max level would raise to 11th, which gives you access to those previously unavailable 6th level spells.

My point is, when looking at the hard numbers in a 2nd edition campaign that has 14th (or even 16th) level characters; your 9th level cleric is anything but comic relief (and yes, I knew what you meant)...

Why were the level limits raised greatly in 2e, and then dropped forever after that? Does anyone miss them?

Off hand, I would say they were dropped all-together because that particular edition was made by people that did not truly understand (or want to) why Gygax and Arneson added them in the first place.

And they are missed by those of us that do actually get that these earlier editions were games created to be human-centric, and also followed popular fantasy tropes that the longer one lives, the more patient one becomes (e.g. the halfling that could potentially live to be 200 has nothing but time to worry about whatever he wants to); which is something that today's society of "instant gratification" wants to forget...

But honestly, it's your game and I am just some dude on the internet that is only trying to point out that level limits were not the demon-seed people make them out to be.