I have finished PoR and am about to try to start Curse of the Azure Bonds. My characters are over but I would like some advice regarding the suitability to go on with my current characters.

I have a Human Fighter, an Elven F/MU/Th, a half-elf F/CL/MU, a Human thief, and a Human wizard.

Now I'm probably up against the level limits for the Elf and half elf, more so with the half elf. Would I be better off to create a new Ranger character to replace the CL/MU/F? Note I'm new to PC games so I'm not sure I'm up to character editing my existing characters. Presumably if I did create a new Ranger, it would start with some experience. Thanks, I appreciate the advice.

Level limits for non-human characters will become an issue starting in this game.

For each of your characters:
* Human Fighter: OK, but you might consider replacing them with a paladin or ranger.
* Elven F/MU/Thief: You will be able to reach the maximum mage level in this game. This should work well, although your fighter levels will be capped. (Do, however, note that this character won't get any more mage levels in the next game, so CotAB is the last game where this character will be good.)
* Half-elf F/Cl/MU: Replace this character. You won't be able to get any higher level spells, and the cap on cleric levels is way too low, to the point where you can't even get the second healing spell with this character (and the first one is absurdly weak).
* Human thief: OK, but note that, unlike other classes, non-human thieves can reach the same levels as human thieves. (Also, I've heard that thieves might not be that useful in this series.)
* Human wizard: OK, you can keep this character.

One thing I would recommend is creating a Human Cleric, or alternatively having a Human Fighter dual class into Cleric after reaching level 7 (but no later than level 9). This is the only way to get 4th and 5th level Cleric spells in this game.

One warning: Don't dual class right away, as the game will trap you in an area with no town access really early, and when you do get to train again, you can only gain 1 level, with excess XP being lost. In the meantime, the character is functionally a level 1 character with extra HP. The way to do that is to use a hex editor, and look for the bytes corresponding to your stats. The file is not encrypted, and there's no checksum, so editing your characters is easy. (Do, however, note that the game may not behave as expected if you change values outside their normal parameters. I remember, in one of the games, setting a character's gender to "2" (displayed as Copper), which allowed them to get 100 Strength, which is not as good as it sounds.) Yes, your new character would start with some XP, but not as much as an imported character would have. My understanding is that this only matters early, as you're going to reach the level caps anyway.

First of all, thanks for responding. I do have a Human Cleric already, so I'm good there.

So at minimum, I should replace the F/MU/C with maybe a ranger new character. I can always just give her the same name, though after Pools I will probably create a male and just give it a female picture and icon if I can. But that character is going to be disadvantaged for a while. Too bad I can't just edit in her current experience points but first I'd have to find a hex editor that works on the Mac and I'd have to do some experimentation. Not sure it's worth the trouble.

And presumably if I go on to Silver Blades I'll have to replace the F/MU/T probably. I don't recall these racial limits in my early D&D game in real rpg games but maybe our DM just didn't use them.

I guess If I were trying to edit the files, I'd be more tempted to edit the Fighter into a Paladin but again I'm not sure it's worth it.

They were there, in the Dungeon Master's Guide. (Players weren't supposed to read the DMG back then, so this bit of information was kept secret from the players, which is a sign of player-hostile game design.)

Many DMs felt that the racial level limit mechanic was a bad idea and just ignored that rule, which may be why you never encountered it in the wild. (Also, particularly in 2e where the limits were increased substantially, most campaigns would not reach the levels where this would become a factor.) Bioware, I think, also found this mechanic poor, and didn't implement it in the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale games, either. Then, 3rd Edition got rid of this mechanic entirely, instead giving Humans some perks (an extra feat and some extra skill points) to make them worth playing over other races without making the other races effectively useless in high level play. There's also the terrible rule that penalizes female characters with a lower strength cap, without giving them anything in return. In fact, I consider this rule so sexist that:
* I would refuse to play in any campaign where the DM enforces this rule.
* If I ever end up DM'ing 1e AD&D, I would not enforce that rule, and would in fact house rule it away.

Fortunately, this rule is not present in 2e.

Should I ever get around to playing these games (and I may start with Secret), I am going to use a hex editor to give my female characters the strength scores that are normally reserved for male characters; the rule is so horrible that I *will* cheat to get around it.

Hey, I see that after I removed (not dropped) all the characters in Pool of Radiance, that 6 files were created in the directory -- <char name>.CHA. I'm assuming those are the characters. They are not there in Azure Bonds because even though I didn't start yet, I added them all to the party. I'll have to remove the C/F/MU and create a new one and then add that. But if I do remove characters, THOSE are presumably the files I could try to hex edit. Is there a document somewhere that gives the format? Even if I don't try to edit them, I might try to experiment and see if I CAN edit them.

I have the AD&D Player’s Handbook and the racial level restrictions are clearly listed on page 14. The problem with demihumans was they were just better than humans, so they put in level restrictions to give players a reason to play humans.

But it was quite poor from a design perspective when they could have just given humans benefits as well, as they had figured out in 3rd edition, instead of having demihumans still be too good at low levels and then useless at high levels.

3rd edition generally cleaned up a lot of nonsense from earlier editions. You could try the Gold Box Companion. It has a character editor and a built-in removal of level restrictions.

Level limits were a really poor mechanic.

* At low levels, when the benefits were most noticeable, the level limits didn't come into play.
* At high levels, the limit basically makes your character completely unusable. Imagine your Cleric being level 5 when other players are leveling into the upper teens. (The fact that both 2nd and 3rd levels lack healing spells doesn't help; the *only* healing spell you have is the weakest one, and healing is weak until you get Heal to begin with.)

(At least it's not FATAL, which is so awful that a discussion of that system would inevitably lead to content that would likely be against the forum rules.) Also changed the level drain mechanic so that one doesn't need to level down characters in the middle of combat, not to mention that Restoration became a 4th level spell rather than a 7th level one. Also, healing spells at every level (except 7th and 9th), and the ability to put a low level spell in a higher level slot (no metamagic needed to do this, but unfortunately CRPGs tend not to implement this rule).