View source for Publication:World of Warcraft: The Role Playing Game/Races

== Racial Levels ==
Some races tend to be more powerful than others.
The average tauren, for example, is much stronger than
the average human and generally just better overall.
This disparity creates a problem in game balance. The
first edition of the Warcraft RPG incorporated level
adjustments to address this issue, but no more. This
edition uses racial levels instead. No race includes a level
adjustment.

Racial levels allow members of some powerful races
to take levels in a special class — their racial class. A
tauren can take levels in the tauren racial class, and a
night elf can take levels in the night elf racial class. This
ability represents members of these races becoming more
in tune with their natural spirits, developing their inner
potentials, focusing on their traditions and attaining the
ancestral powers of their cultures and societies. Not all
members of such a race take a level (or two or three) in
their racial class, but many do.

Racial classes work like normal classes in most respects:
they grant Hit Dice, skill points, increase the hero’s total
character level, and the like. Characters never suffer
experience point penalties for having levels in a racial class
(see Chapter 3: Classes, “Multiclass Characters”). Heroes
do not need to take levels in other classes before taking
levels in racial classes; thus, Forsaken, high elf, Ironforge
dwarf, jungle troll, night elf, orc and tauren heroes all
have the opportunity to start with a racial level.

Obviously, characters cannot take levels in a race to
which they do not belong. Even a character polymorphed
into a member of another race cannot take racial levels in
her “new” race; racial classes represent millennia of history,
culture and legacy that infuse a new member of the race at
birth and reverberate within her consciousness forever.

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