Recent content by Paul Farquhar

As someone who knows a little history, that suggestion really grates. More like the strongest 1980s fantasy aesthetic was strongest in the 1980s. The shift to renaissance is actually a little more aesthetically authentic. Of course Volo was always a trend-setter!

Before or after Darth Competent?

Nothing wrong in putting yourself into your work, but I can't affor to work for nothing, it would leave me homeless and hungry. It's an insecure world, no one will provide me with food and shelter if I don't get paid.

I do - if you were to read an article or adventure written by me you might be exposed to liberal environmentalist politics and and anti-religious bias*. A good editor can scan for bias and at least make sure they conform to a house style so people know what sort of values to expect. But the...

You think D&D fans don’t have agendas?!

EN World is worth reading because it is open and honest about its commercial role as a shop window, plus it carries advertising. It doesn’t pretend to be free.

Which proves the point. In 1st and 2nd edition magic items were not incorporated into the rules in any kind of mathematical fashion. What you found is what you got. Trying to figure it into the game mechanics was very much a 3rd edition thing. 5e is like the earlier editions in that they are for...

So obviously it looked like 3e if you hadn’t bothered to read the rules! It plays just like 1st edition if you have only read those rules as well.

Speaking as someone with 3e experience, you are very wrong. 3e is rules and jargon heavy, combat is incredibly slow, and roleplaying rather squeezed out by focus on min maxing builds. It’s a game of build optimisation. 5e is much loser, flexible, free of jargon and combat less slow, leaving more...

When Perkins described 5e as the successor to 2e he didn’t mean it was all that similar to 2e, any more than 3e is similar to 2e. He meant that 5e ignored a lot of the evolution through 3e and 4e and took the game in a different direction.

That wasn’t really an issue in 1st edition, since paladins didn’t get their spells til level 9, and DL1 was 4-7. A at least one of the Solannic Knight orders got cleric spells in any case. Mostly it was to sell books. There where alternative versions of wizards and clerics in that book too, even...

Yes they were. Paladins were added to the game in the 1st edition AD&D PHB in 1978, Solomnic Knights (as a class) were added in Dragonlance Adventures (1987). Soth appeared before then (around 85), but with a Deathknight monster stat block. I think they may have started to notice that the...

Insufficient cynicism makes people vulnerable to manipulation by influencers, politicians, fraudsters, cults etc. It concerns me that people are so critical of cynicism. It's like vaccine denial.

Not just me then! A lot of it was recycled by Durlag's Tower in BG1 DLC.

1st edition was a toolkit. It was designed to be heavily modded to suit individual tables. Hence the word "advanced" in the title.