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That's not my position: I deliberately argued above based solely on the published material. The web-posted lore clarifies some things, but it isn't necessary to understand this stuff. I don't believe any significant number of people do get that impression from reading the campaign setting book...

Nouns get formed into verbs when the concept is used a lot, so the verb 'levelling' connotes something that's frequent and routine enough to be abbreviated. '-ing' is usually used with a process that goes on continually -- digging, growing -- rather than one that's occasional. Language shapes...

The spirit of 3E D&D is different from that of earlier D&D games. If it seems different enough to a particular person, if the parts of the D&D spirit that were most important to them have been dropped, if it seems to be an abrupt shift in tone and philosophy, they might reasonably say that the...

The newspeak term 'levelling' goes along with it being a relatively frequent and routine event (the gerund makes it sound continuous), whereas 'gaining a level' is something more momentous. Someone could do a poll on how many sessions it takes to advance a level in people's current or latest...

HoMP is crossing the Atlantic to me. I'm not one for house rules, but would probably run it with AD&D in the World of Greyhawk. It would be handy to have an AD&D/C&C conversion (though probably not hard to do on the fly).

He said he wasn't aware of it, not that he'd looked into it and found it not to be so.

Do the pre-2001 sources indicate a good-NPC-dominated Realms? The magazine articles and web material certainly don't. The sourcebooks portray a consistent picture of stalemate in which good and evil both rarely strike a decisive blow against the other, as could be seen simply from the fact that...

OK, complex subject of Ed's Realms vs the published Realms. Why do you say 'little resemblance'? Fact by fact, dynamic by dynamic, most of what's true in Ed's Realms is true in the published Realms, and vice versa -- no? Apart from anything else, far more published Realmslore is outright by Ed...

Why are these imaginary DMs telling players what numbers they have to roll?

OK. But I see you're registered at Candlekeep.com, and I honestly expect that if you discussed this with Ed there you'd change your mind pretty quickly.

Because this is a matter of nuances and underlying structures and millions of words of lore, it isn't as simple to explain why this is a misconception as with some of the other canards about the Realms -- such as the idea that Elminster is a self-insertion 'Ed's favourite character' -- that are...

You know, I taught myself as well, and I guess Basic D&D counts as 'rules-light' here (it isn't in my personal spectrum). Picking up any medium from scratch is hard -- and the fact that the medium of roleplaying is new to most people (though much of what it consists of is not) is itself an...

I know for a fact that the underlying good–evil, law–chaos balance is there. I've come to understand it through the hundreds of Realms sourcebooks, novels, and magazine articles, in Ed's exquisitely wrought historical structures, in conversations with him and others. Stating otherwise is...

No, but then I've never seen that (stood by and let it happen) with a more complex system, either. Philosophically, though, storytelling is a basic human function -- stories are integral to every human culture. Complex skirmish wargames with dice are not. But my point was just as much to do with...

I don't agree with that at all. Inexperienced players who are introduced to RPGs as souped-up boardgames or videogames expect structure, and are frequently put off roleplaying when it comes in 300-page books which have no precedent in their experience. Inexperienced players who are introduced to...

Basically, a combination of the Code of Ethics, the situation in the Realms being complex and not laid out in any one place, the books department's dubious ideas about which characters to showcase, and Chinese whispers created a false impression among some that the Realms was good-dominated, and...

We've seen nobles' revels in several stories: in at least one of the tales in The Best of the Realms, Book II: The Stories of Ed Greenwood, in Elminster's Daughter (one in Cormyr), and we know that the forthcoming novel City of Splendors shows us 'the goings-on at two large revels' in Waterdeep...

In the Realms, a common set of potion symbols is given in Dragon #285 p. 88.

Each new version is made to suit a slightly different idea of what the game should be, which newly forged and old ideas should be included, who the players are and what they want from the game, how to achieve that game-mechanically, as well as political and business-plan reasons, to move it into...

Steven Schend has some recent d20 credits for Bastion Press and Green Ronin, and is working on a forthcoming Realms project. Frank Mentzer is working with Gary Gygax on an adventure called The Teeth of Braknash Nour to be published by Troll Lord Games.