This is a Very good game and i cant believe under the test process how they could not see Obvious problems.

1. LVL draing is bugged in every way and it does not help that you are Spammed with LvL 7 Cleric Restoration that you need to carry around because a Cleric never get to lvl 7 (as you do not have enough bag micro managment as it is). How on earth did this get through testing..

2. For God sake put a Bank in the City for Currency and i would really like to see very expensive equipment for once in a city in a RPG that is not instantly replaced by a dropp. Why so much money and so litle to buy (goes for all RPG games i played). You could easly but a Magic set, Plate set, Cleric set and so on at a price of 40 000 platinium feks that is better than drops or just as good as the best drops, then there is a point of getting all those tressures, there is carrots in the end!.

3. Dont just Spam the game with D&D spells that is not even usefull in the game and its Always - Magic Missile first then you wait for the Fireball when getting fire ball its just fire ball all the way. Ateast in this game Sleep and Stinking cloud is pretty usefull and that is breat of fresh air, but as usuall Lighting bolt is all over the place (but this as always been the other Spell a Mage could use, but its never better than Fireball and its to easy to get in that AOE).

4. The game should tell you about the lvl 6-7 cap and suggest you build characters wiht multiple skills Fighter/theif and so on before your start. Im just in midle game+ and already my characters are at max lvl.

On the very bright side Pool of Radiance finaly made Thief very usefull, i did not play my cards right but if i used my thief in a well earlier (thats thief only, found out the hard way that that Ring of Feather falling do not work at all!), he could then make a deal with other Theifs and steel a part of the treasure that you where supose to deliver. This is Exactly how i thief should be used in RPG games, no other games does this right and a Thief is just a gimick, and this is one of the first RPG games, what happened ... go figure.

My only Question is - What is the best way to avoid that LVL drain?, does Pray help etc ?.

You cast the Restoration spell directly from the scroll. A Cleric of any level can do it.
Make sure you Restore your character before being hit by a second level drain, since that can lead to bugs.

And yes, the level caps can be annoying, which is one of the reasons why multi-class characters rule. Another reason is having much more Sleep and Cure spells.

As for the money, the only thing you really need it for is the Fine Longbow or what it's called. You can safely discard most of the money you find, since you will never have a use for it.
The game follows the old edition pen&paper rules too closely, where you get most XP from finding treasure, so to get much XP from killing Giants they need to carry obscene amounts of money.

Found out the hard way when i saw 2 of my characters was lvl drained 253 lvl. As the Cleric never hit lvl 7 you must also carry around those clerric scrolls so i am actually thinking i will just reload, i think i am at the end of the "Ghost" map either way. All my characeters is at lvl cap so i tried to go to trainging to change my characters to multiple but i could not change, so i ques i am stuck.

Yeah i already bought to bow, but i have no bow user, i have a ton of money i am ready to spend on a Cleric, Mage or Fighter set for that matter but there is no store for it. But Many RPGS have this problem, and i dont understand why (in all RPG games you always find a better dropp seconds after buying, there is no reason for it to be this way, they only need to put a very high price tag on the epic equipment)

Keep this in mind about level drains, as well: when you cast restoration it brings you back to the minimum experience needed for the old level. So if you were nearly to level 6, for example, you lose a lot of experience, and there is no way to fix this. Level draining is much too powerful, considering the implications, but those old games were cutthroat in that way. I know, I played pen & paper back then. The philosophy towards harsh penalties like this has changed.

In PoR and other games of this class, save frequently, and restore if you get level drained. You'll be happier. Only rarely do you encounter multiple level drainers are a time, and if you can't usually take down one level drainer before it gets you, you might not be ready for that area of the game.

Level draining also happens way too early. Wizardry and Bard's Tale save their level draining for much later in the game (and in some versions of Bard's Tale, after having your level restored you're given the minimum XP for one level above your old level, making intentional level draining a good way to get XP, especially for high level Wizards/Archmages). Elminage Gothic, which is a rather brutal game, complete with enemies instant-killing your party as early as the second dungeon, with resurrections carrying a stat penalty and a chance of failure, doesn't throw level draining enemies at you until around mid-game.

(By the way, Wizardry doesn't let you follow that strategy of saving and reloading; it's the one thing I dislike the most about the early games in the series, and is one thing that Bard's Tale did better.)

Incidentally, level draining, depending on the game, can be used to your advantage. In particular, I could see two possible reasons to be level drained on purpose in Pool of Radiance:
1. Learning new spells; if you've reached max level, are missing a spell, and can't find a scroll for it, just get level drained. When you earn the level back, you should be given another spell pick (unless there's something I don't know about the game).
2. Hit points; when you gain a level, you get a random amount of HP. When you lose that level, you lose a random amount of HP. So, you can get level drained on purpose, reload if you lost a large amount of HP, get the level back, and reload unless you gained a lot of HP, and come out ahead. However, from what I hear there's the risk of your HP overflowing; if your HP would go above 255, it will be 256 less than it otherwise would be, and that is not good. Not to mention implementing rules that it really shouldn't have, like racial level limits (not too much of an issue in this game, but in Pools of Darkness, it ends up making non-humans non-viable) and the gender bias in strength caps. Also, the slow rate of healing, to the point where the fastest (real-time) way to heal your party is to rest for weeks of game time (And again, maybe they should have saved the level draining monsters for later in the series, if they're going to include them at all.)

According to Gygax, racial level limits existed because otherwise no one would want to play humans. Or something. Because non-humans had certain advantages (like resistance to sleep & charm for elves, advantages vs. giant-kind for dwarves, and similar). Later editions of the P&P game addressed this by giving humans certain starting advantages the designers considered comparable.

The gender strength limit was based on the fact that, in reality, women are weaker than men. They have less muscle mass. But... that is on average. One could take the equally valid position that a woman who adventures is an extraordinary specimen and could be as strong as a man, and this is essentially what happened; like racial level limits, gender based attribute limits disappeared. There are still racial attribute modifiers, however.

TSR wanted the games to be as close to the published rules as possible for cross-marketing reasons. And back then if Gygax said it you were not supposed to question it. People did, creating all kinds of house rules (and even publishing them in a few cases), but SSI couldn't because they had an actual contract that said they couldn't. ;)

Except that this ends up not working well, for a few reasons:
* In lower level campaigns (which, to my understanding, were the majority), the racial level limits never came into play.
* In higher level campaigns, the level limits basically make non-humans completely non-viable, and hence not fun to play.
* Essentially, non-humans may get minor benefits at the start, but later on are punished to the point of being completely unusable.
* There's also the fact that the table of level limits is in the Dungeon Master's Guide, which players aren't supposed to look at; hence players aren't able to use that as a basis to decide what race to play.

I could also note that Baldur's Gate (entire series) and Icewind Dale did not implement these level limits, and I am pretty sure that was intentional (imagine Throne of Bhaal with racial level limits). There is a difference here; the racial attribute modifiers are at least intended to be a trade-off. You get a bonus to one stat, you get a penalty to another. The gender bias, however, is not balanced; female characters have a limitation that male characters do not, but there's nothing to counter-balance it, so female characters are strictly worse mechanically than male characters.

The way I see it is that both racial level limits and female strength limits serve solely to limit the player's choices, and that is not good game design.

(Another thought: In 2e and earlier, Dwarves can't be Mages, but it looks like, in 3.x, Dwarves are one of the better options for Wizards (but not Sorcerers) due to the Constitution bonus.)

By the way, I hear there's been some recent talk about racial stereotypes in D&D, and how Wizards of the Coast has announced that they may do something about racial attribute adjustments in an upcoming supplement. Did TSR get less strict in their later years? I can note the following:
* In the Dark Sun games, healing spells can be used at range, and resting, which can only be done at specific locations, fully restores your party. Also, only some of the psionic rules are implemented; there's no critical success or failure with them, for example.
* As I mentioned, the Infinity Engine games did away with racial level limits. We also see the change to real-time with pause, which is clearly *not* how the table top game plays in any edition.

You are preaching to the choir. I did not say I agreed with his reasoning. He came to RPGs from a wargaming background, and one thing you do there is try to balance the sides. You even do that if the sides weren't actually balanced in the game you're simulating lest people don't want to play it.

Since even low level games usually aspired to be high level games, the level limits also constrained player choice, since players who think ahead wouldn't take those slight advantages for the possibility of being limited later.

My solution, back when I ran, was a table you could roll on of minor advantages, and even humans got to roll on it. And I did not impose level limits. I did, however, suggest to players of non-human races that their "racial learning" made them more likely to have certain advantages (like vs. giants) - they could either roll, or choose from the advantages of their "upbringing". Humans always had to roll, though. ;) And they've been gone from the P&P versions for close to 20 years now. I agree.

While balance and fair play are good goals, one must not lose sight of the fact that games are to entertain. If you frustrate players they won't be entertained. Also, when considering matters of balance you have to be ready to re-evaluate those choices as play continues: are they bad in general? At low levels? At high levels? And you have to be willing to change them depending on the honest answers to those questions. That's harder to do in printed, published material, but that's what Dragon was for. :) I hadn't heard about that. If you have or chance across a link I'd like to read about that. By the time Dark Sun came out as a paper ruleset I believe Gygax was gone from TSR. Not 100% sure. If you are not familiar with his history you'd do better to search online because I honestly do not remember the details. There was a divorce, some boardroom politics, and a woman who took over who really didn't know what she was doing. TSR was eventually in such bad shape that the rumor is Adkison got it for a song. I don't know; he could have paid a lot since Magic was by then such a smash hit he was swimming in cash. Now, of course, Hasbro owns all of it, and probably throws darts are Ryan Dancey pictures. :)

A Google search for "dungeons and dragons racial stereotypes" yields a lot of results (at least for me).

In any case, I found an article on WotC's official website about their approach to this issue:
https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/diversity-and-dnd Correction: Players who know about the level limits and think ahead wouldn't take those slight advantages.

Remember that the level limits were not printed in the Player's Handbook; they were only in the Dungeon Master's Guide, which players weren't supposed to look at.

Thanks. Depictions of the evil drow as universally black-skinned always kinda gave me the willies. Even though in most illustrations their skin is actually black, not the (sometimes very) dark brown which is the darkest human skin gets. Plus it is inconsistent with what actually happens to life that lives entirely underground.

Orcs, though, was a surprise. There's no human group anything like them. Salvatore, in one of his numerous Drizzt books, did take a swing at a more nuanced orc culture and explored racism through the eyes of their traditional enemies, dwarves, but I don't know how popular that was. True, players weren't supposed to look at it, but I don't recall any prohibition against DMs sharing, particularly relevant facts. It could be tacitly assumed, of course - but every DM I knew, including me, warned players about things like this.

It also bothers me that the one major matriarchal society in AD&D happens to be evil.

In this case, I believe you and the other DMs you knew were nicer than Gary Gygax intended you to be.

(In any case, I would rather play with a nice DM rather than a strict one who keep things like this a secret.)

(Then again, if I were running a 1e campaign, I would probably get rid of level limits, and I would definitely get rid of female strength limits (and refuse to play with any DM who doesn't remove the female strength limits).)