D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Alzrius]

I agree with your point narrowly, that WotC saying "as the IP holders we must change this" does not imply that other depictions are bad and wrong.

That said, they could have done a better job of making this case. I think its reasonable to expect people who liked the older content to feel, "oh, are you saying that you think I'm a bad person? That my fun is bad and exclusionary?"

Particularly given the disclaimer put on the entirety of their back-catalogue of pre-5E products.

 

[Staffan]

As someone who--technically--had his very first exposure to D&D through 2nd Edition by way of video games using it (3e had only just been published, so I didn't have any of the books or even know it existed)?

No. THAC0 was incredibly difficult to grapple with. Especially because it was even worse than Minigiant said, at least in those deeply-beloved 2e-based games.

Some THAC0 bonuses are +X. E.g., "+5 Holy Avenger" means you decrease your THAC0 by 5.
Some THAC0 bonuses are -X.
Some THAC0 penalties are -X.
And some THAC0 penalties are +X, I specifically remember spells in Baldur's Gate II that referred to a "+N penalty to THAC0".

This seems like something specific to the implementation in Baldur's Gate. I'm like 95% certain that any attack modifier in the actually published AD&D 2e was added to the attack roll, not to THAC0.

 

[Mournblade94]

As someone who--technically--had his very first exposure to D&D through 2nd Edition by way of video games using it (3e had only just been published, so I didn't have any of the books or even know it existed)?

No. THAC0 was incredibly difficult to grapple with. Especially because it was even worse than Minigiant said, at least in those deeply-beloved 2e-based games.

Some THAC0 bonuses are +X. E.g., "+5 Holy Avenger" means you decrease your THAC0 by 5.
Some THAC0 bonuses are -X.
Some THAC0 penalties are -X.
And some THAC0 penalties are +X, I specifically remember spells in Baldur's Gate II that referred to a "+N penalty to THAC0".

So at no point, in the entire game, were they ever consistent about how any of this was presented. And I would like to be clear here, I'm no slouch with math. I won't toot my horn beyond saying that in pursuing a physics degree, I took a lot of math classes, and did quite well in them. But THAC0? It has always bamboozled me--and the rampant inconsistency with how it is presented simply made things worse.

Yes, maybe, for those people slowly and carefully initiated into the old ways, THAC0 would be no problem. But it is pretty much unequivocally better that we don't need that level of introduction in order to bring new people into D&D.

Yeah man. If you were playing BG1/2 or Eye that would be difficult. Nobody from 2nd complained about Attack Bonus. I certainly didn't.

 

[Mournblade94]

nah, they absolutely should. Stand for the things you want in society, if you don’t, you won’t have that society for long. There are always jerks who try to drag it back to the dark ages and are not afraid to speak their hatred and ignorance loud and proud

I'm saying companies that need to maximize their customer base. Disney's put themselves in quite the position now. I don't think it's good business. That's why Troll Lord Games stays Apolitical.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You see, in the good ol' days, new D&D players had to EARN the right to play. You know, to weed out certain "types".

Yes, I'm afraid I'm all too familiar with the...call it what it is. The gatekeeping and snobbery. The smug superiority.

That, too, is one of the reasons why I defend my preferences. Because there are quite a few people who do not even realize that they are being smug gatekeepers.

As someone who was bullied a lot as a kid, the very meanest people I ever met were in the nerd and geek crowd.

Unfortunately, being a victim is one of the leading causes of becoming an abuser. Generational trauma. When you've been powerless and hurt for a very long time, and you finally gain power? It is tempting, so, so, so tempting, to use that power to make sure nobody else ever gets the chance to hurt you again. To control everything, because then everything will be perfect.

And that very control makes monsters of men.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This seems like something specific to the implementation in Baldur's Gate. I'm like 95% certain that any attack modifier in the actually published AD&D 2e was added to the attack roll, not to THAC0.

Regardless: "added to the attack roll" means up is good, down is bad. THAC0 is about "down is good, up is bad."

The system, itself, was inherently speaking in opposite directions.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm saying companies that need to maximize their customer base. Disney's put themselves in quite the position now. I don't think it's good business. That's why Troll Lord Games stays Apolitical.

Sometimes I wonder how many companies actually need to maximize their customer base to stay profitable, and how many just care about maximizing profit.

 

[dragoner]

Oh, don't get me wrong, I am VERY happy I live in an era where my need for glasses doesn't make me half-blind, my need for asthma medication doesn't make me a pauper, and my allergies and sensitivity to illness as a child didn't result in my painful death. (I survived a case of strep throat that became scarlet fever. Had I lived 200 years earlier, it would have killed me.)

Re: Dyes, while the full extent of cloth-dye stuff that we have today is certainly way bigger than what they had back then, there were still plenty of natural dyes. They were just harder to use, and the best were almost always more expensive. But you'd have celebration days (e.g. May Day) that would get plenty of colorful flags and streamers and such. The idea that middle-ages life was uniformly drab and colorless is just as much an invention as the romanticization from the 19th century.

Or, as Blue of Overly Sarcastic Productions put it, "The 'Dark Ages' is a myth perpetuated by Big Renaissance to sell you more paintings." Obviously this is an intentionally comedic Hot Take summary, but the rest of the video is a comprehensive look at how our "Dung Ages"/"Dork Ages" view of medieval history is WOEFULLY inadequate and heavily incorrect. The Medieval Period had LOTS of things that sucked--and many of them sucked a LOT. But so did the Roman era that preceded it and the Renaissance that followed it.

After all, burning people at the stake for being a witch? Yeah, that's a Renaissance thing. Catholic doctrine was, and still is, that witches didn't exist, so it was heresy to accuse anyone of witchcraft. It was only after the Renaissance, and the publication of things like the Malleus Maleficarum...which the Catholic Church expressly rejected as heretical...that you started seeing the witch-burning craze. And most of that was at the order of civil authorities--since, again, accusing people of witchcraft was officially heretical, to the point that the bloody Inquisition itself opposed the Malleus.

I agree you are totally correct, for colors, they did have bright colors, though often without good ways to fix the dyes, so used for special occasions. Their whites too, likely a grayish color, as they didn't use bleach, or detergents such as we have. Burning people was heinous, I read 6,000 at some cities, as young as infants.

I have read articles by historians in favor of keeping the term "The Dark Age" as it represents a epochal break between late antiquity, and the early middle ages. The term lifted from chroniclers of the time, describing an actual event: Volcanic winter of 536 - Wikipedia which adding in the Plague of Justinian, and Gothic Wars is somewhat accurate, it would have seemed a dark age.

While one can fault the 19th century romanicists for being wrong, they did it in great style:

La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad
By John Keats

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Empress Theodora by Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant, 1887, via Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Most of 2e art and graphic design (and in particular planescape) didn't sit well with me.

Goddamn. I literally only passed A-Level art because Planescape's art was so astonishingly good it inspired me enough that I actually did my coursework despite my undiagnosed ADHD. Got an A even. I guess art is subjective lol!

It is but I've seen plenty posts where posters say Thaco was hard or complex and no one felt the need to tell them its relative, I guess only one side needs to hear this universal truth.

Relative to what?

I was literally at the best school in the country for math, getting As, have a certificate that "proves" I am in the top 10% of people at that age (like 14) who were doing maths in Britain, and THAC0 was slowing me down.

So relative to what? If you need to be smarter and better at maths than I was for THAC0 to not mess with you, then that is, factually, objectively, a problem. Not relatively. Objectively.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

People didn't though march into a room exclaiming how bad the stupid clown was. It was usually a reply to someone, an individual Twitter or post USING it as an insult.

I literally don't know what you're talking about lol but it sounds utterly wild! Were people like, attacked by a clown or something?