Low-level casters sucked, with or without cantrips (which didn't do anything useful in combat when originally introduced, IIRC, in Unearthed Arcana). But at le

Low-level casters sucked, with or without cantrips (which didn't do anything useful in combat when originally introduced, IIRC, in Unearthed Arcana). But at least they eventually leveled up. Or…not, if they were non-human and hit their race-specific, often single-digit level cap. Yeah, come to think of it, old school AD&D rules did leave plenty of room for improvement. Demihuman level caps were even more annoying in the old school AD&D computer games that enforced them, as it's hard to role play a party of permanently underleveled characters in a high-level area of a brutal, combat-focused, non-level scaled CRPG as anything other than a pile of corpses.