Dragon Reflections #103

RealAlHazred · 2026-04-11T20:28:45+0100

Starmaster said:
In my 1e campaign, clerics used to take lucerne hammers since clerics couldn't have edged weapons and they did more damage than regular war hammers. But then UA came out and we found out these were really pointy polearms instead of hammers.

Dragon had a comic that responded to this.

Flying Toaster · 2026-04-11T23:52:36+0100

I remember much of this issue. An EGG 2E would probably feature even more overpowered classes balanced by crippling roleplay restrictions. One thing I find remarkable about Gygaxian game design is how much of it is punitive, meant to push you towards playing the “right way” i.e. the Gygax way. Sure he would let you play a non-human or a wizard, but he would use lots of fiddly details and restrictions to make you regret it, until you relent and play the Conan or Fafhrd type of macho warriors that got EGG excited.

The centaur article was interesting, but I think you could only use them as PCs in a wilderness campaign that did not venture much into caverns or dungeons. Otherwise the centaur PC would periodically get stuck staying outside guarding the horses.

Back then I was a bit of a “young fogey” about D&D settings and disliked many of the changes made in Dragonlance, but I particularly disdained the kender, tinker gnomes, and gully dwarves, who seemed unfit even for comic relief.

I read at least one Sheri S. Tepper novel but do not remember anything about it. I read the first few Joel Rosenberg Guardians of the Flame novels because my friends did, but they were too gritty for my taste even then. Portal fantasy about RPG players getting sucked into the game was very popular in that era, and of course it was the frame story for the D&D cartoon. IRL Rosenberg became a gun rights advocate after receiving threatening letters from a neo-Nazi.

Flying Toaster · 2026-04-12T00:00:35+0100

Our group perused the UA errata, but I do not know if we ever actually used any of them in the game, and I think we assumed that they had been incorporated into the later printings that we had bought. Years later I was a bit shocked to read the UA Wikipedia entry only to find out that it never happened.

I never actually played Original Recipe™ late 70s / early 80s AD&D 1E. My group learned D&D from the red Basic and blue Expert sets but regarded them as the kiddie table of D&D, and the tamer content suggests that TSR wanted us to think that way. We eagerly took off the “training wheels” and graduated to the grown-up game with heavens and hells and naked lady demons.

We started playing Advanced circa 1986, so UA was already out and we never knew the game without it. We knew it was the latest book of D&D goodies, but at the same time we never actually used very much of it. The only things we used consistently were the new spells and magic items. UA was particularly good for rounding out the druid and illusionist spell lists, giving those neglected classes a bit of a boost.

We never really sat down and talked about exactly what UA content would be legal at our table, we just sort of intuitively realized that most of it was edge cases and minutia. Why did grey elves who inexplicably served a human mage ruling an isolated valley need to be a separate “valley elf” subrace anyway? Baffling. One of our group liked to play overpowered “monster” races so he would play dark elf rangers or half-ogre fighters (somewhat surprising that Gygax did not include his half-ogre in UA), but other than that we did not use the new races.

As soon as we saw that the barbarian could not use magic items or associate with spellcasters, we scoffed and dismissed it altogether, because we knew that magic items (especially magic long swords) were the main way to power up warrior PCs. I played a cavalier through a few low levels, but gave up because suicidal charges against invincible foes seemed like a dumb way to play D&D. Both classes could probably be salvaged with a bit of work. EN World user Celebrim has a thread about a revised AD&D thief class that adds the acrobat skills to the standard thief, and I like that idea a lot.

Flying Toaster · 2026-04-12T00:16:17+0100

David Howery said:
The discussion on polearms was historically interesting, but game-wise, you have to wonder how useful it was. How many players actually selected some of those oddball weapons over swords, bows, etc.? I did once run an adventure where all the NPC fighters used a bunch of them, just for the heck of it....

Just for fun I once rolled up a fighter who used only obscure UA weapons and armor, but wisely never tried to actually play him.

Flying Toaster · 2026-04-12T01:31:16+0100

Whizbang Dustyboots said:
Making gnomes a subrace of cursed humans was not Roger E.'s best effort. (Maybe that was Weis and Hickman first; I don't recall.)

Although I prefer forest gnomes to this day, industrialized gnomes can definitely work, but using them purely for slapstick, both on Krynn and Mystara, feels like a very lazy choice, especially several decades on.

I never liked Krynn tinker gnomes much at all. They always seemed like a one-note joke about absent-minded professors whose gadgets always blow up in their faces. I vastly prefer gnomes as forest-dwelling fey folk wearing pointy hats and pointy boots, confounding bigger enemies with magical tricks.

Fun fact: gnomes do not originate in legends or folklore at all, they were invented from whole cloth by 16th century German Renaissance man Paracelsus, who needed an earth spirit for his book on elemental alchemy.

I think this lack of solid fictional archetypes has hurt gnomes as a PC option for D&D. If you talk about gnomes, people usually think of garden decorations or advertising mascots who bake cookies inside hollow trees - and the movie Elf points out the obvious problem with that...

. OTOH there are also examples of gnomes as creepy little enemies, as seen in the Shannara novel series or the animated show Gravity Falls.

Pathfinder has a pretty good take on gnomes as fey beings whose ancestors got trapped in the material world long ago. They have to actively top up their levels of whimsy and zest for life by practicing arts and crafts, or by going adventuring and exploring. If they let themselves get stuck in a rut they risk losing their mojo and undergoing a horrible “bleaching” process.

A gnome illusionist-thief was one of my favorite AD&D characters, but no one else in my group ever played a gnome or an illusionist. I hope a hypothetical 6E does not take away gnomes or halflings as a player option, even if they seem a tad old-fashioned to some newer players.

sevenbastard · 2026-04-12T01:46:51+0100

Flying Toaster said:
IRL Rosenberg became a gun rights advocate after receiving threatening letters from a neo-Nazi.

I just read the Wikipedia on it. Between the death threats and a home invasion he went all in on guns.

Flying Toaster · 2026-04-12T02:23:54+0100

Riley said:
The 1e ranseur was a good multifunctional weapon with nice superpowers. Use it at the start of a fight, then drop it in favor of a trusty bastard sword.

My friends and I liked to pore over the books and quibble about the fine points of the rules (shocking, I know...), and we quickly noticed that most swords and some polearms were just about the only weapons that actually did more damage against Large sized foes than they did against Small and Medium opponents, and the bigger the sword, the bigger the bonus. During play we would try to use every fiddly rule advantage we had in order to succeed, because even in early editions of D&D it turns out the answer WAS on my character sheet all along!

But often it was hard to remember stuff like this at the table. I remember a combat against ogres or giants or something like that, and afterwards we realized that no one, player or DM, had remembered the L size damage rule.

We liked the idea of a versatile “hand and a half” bastard sword, and the fact that the name of the sword was what a dictionary would call a “mild oath” did not hurt either, but in practice it seemed to fall between two stools. Against size S-M foes it was no better than a long sword, and the two hander did more damage against size L.

We also noticed that multiple rules actively punished players who chose obscure weapons. Between the weapon proficiency system, the elvish racial weapon bonus, the random magic treasure tables, and the loot to be found in TSR modules, we found that short or long swords were always the correct weapon choice if your character class allowed them.

Flying Toaster · 2026-04-12T02:40:59+0100

RealAlHazred said:
I am in the minority that actually really liked the little mechanical modifications the various polearms introduced. I suspect that part of the motivation for Gary to include the chart with little modifiers based on "Armor Type" had to do with introducing edge cases, where one or another weapon was actually the "ideal" attack against a particular defense.

I agree with all of this, but we rarely had a chance to use any of it in actual play. I liked the way 2E removed the cumbersome weapon vs. armor table, and replaced it with three basic damage types (Slash, Pierce, Bludgeon) that worked together like rock - paper - scissors. It rewarded choosing different weapon types for use against different foes. I remember a fight against 2E skeletons which were strong against S and P damage but weak against Bludgeon.

The basic concept of damage types is now a major element of the rules.

Voadam · 2026-04-12T03:31:04+0100

Flying Toaster said:
The basic concept of damage types is now a major element of the rules.

It is actually only very lightly in there affecting anything under the rules now. Skeletons and bludgeoning vulnerability. Rakshasa vulnerable to piercing for the old blessed holy crossbow bolts one shot thing and treants resisting bludgeoning and piercing leaving them open to slashing axes (and swords). It is hard to find other examples where it actually matters whether you use a bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing weapon. AD&D and Basic had the cleric bludgeoning only, but in 3e and beyond that went to simple weapons so spears and daggers were fine. I remember 1e zombies having a thing about piercing only doing 1 point of damage but that was dropped from 3e and beyond.

Von Ether · 2026-04-12T15:16:28+0100

I think the visual for the Saurians species was inspired by an article going around at the time of what dinosaurs would look like if they had evolved intelligence.