Search results

Again, the sources -- which I know quite well -- just don't bear that out. With the possible exception of 'knows more' (he is, after all, first and foremost a sage), I could list many, many characters who are 'more powerful', 'more sexy', or 'better' in multifarious other ways than he is, and...

No, it's Batman as Deus Ex Machina. The characteristic of 'powerful intervention' doesn't constitute any coherent sense of 'Mary Sue' I've ever read. He was told to do so by TSR, a fact that's well known by now. You haven't the least reason to think he's Ed in the Realms other than that it's...

That's the thing: Conan is a Mary Sue according to the ridiculously generalized vaguely-veiled-insult-to-the-author use of the term, and so are most protagonists of heroic fiction. You're thinking of Susprina Arkhenneld in FOR2 The Drow of the Underdark, one of his ex-apprentices. Realmslore...

With whom he's in a monogamous relationship for the decades of the Realms' published 'present'. What's the sarcasm for? You can easily verify everything I wrote if you care to look.

It's odd that Wizards did that with Eberron at the same time as they removed or downplayed the multiple framing devices that serve a similar purpose in the Realms: the discussion of given NPC levels as provisional possibilities in the DM's Sourcebook, the use of current clack rather than hard...

'Mary Sue' is used so vaguely that I'm not sure what you mean by that. Speaking of Ed's work, if you're referring to the core meaning of a perfect self-insertion egoboo character (originally and still primarily in someone else's world as a kind of one-upmanship), that's a long-ago-debunked...

---

They almost never appear in Realms scenarios; on the contrary, it's always been indicated, for instance, that by default, PCs who knock on Elminster's door will usually find he's just not in (he spends much/most of his time walking other worlds). Still, there's the play guidelines in The Seven...

Luckily, a lot fewer people are falling for that misinformation than some years back. Back in reality, Elminster isn't intended to be a protagonist of any kind, the sex thing simply isn't true by the sources (Doug & co. have apparently been fooled by the same randy old goat act that misleads...

Given that his main campaign's still going after 30-odd years. and the uniformly enthusiastic reports of both his regular players and those at convention and library games he's DMed, we know that his players enjoy his DMing very much. You're blowing that one tiny, mischaracterized aspect out of...

What's 'real' in an RPG is what's in the shared imagined experience of the players and the memories that come from that. The rules have always been an adjunct to help the GM come up with judgements quickly and consistently. Elevating them from an adjunct to the game's defining focus would only...

RPGs have often implicitly or explicitly presented this idea that roleplaying is something difficult or advanced that you add on after mastering the rules. I think the opposite is true -- imagination and storytelling is a basic human trait, while following game rules of the complexity of...

People commonly fail to realize both how large these worlds are and how local it is to live there, even for adventurers. This is partly caused by the need for base setting works, which don't know where your campaign is set, to give continental overviews and maps that wouldn't be available to...

Ed's Castlemourn setting also has such a booklet; it's always been a sore lack for the Realms. Although Ed prepared 'what you know' handouts for his players that could have been adapted for print, the 2E 'player's guide' is a novelette with lore sidebars and the 3E one is a rules update with...

Krynn and Oerth, say, are more different in substance -- mid-20th-century swords and sorcery, wargaming and medievalism against sweeping sagas and Tolkienesque high fantasy and Mormonism -- than most of the settings that are superficially, gimmickily different are from them. Thus they have...

Eh? Both those things are strongly at odds with the Realms. The Knights of Myth Drannor, the model of PC advancement, are low teens in level after 30 years of play, while most high-level non-player characters are in their thirties at the very least. 3E's easy magic item creation and selling also...

A few other points: Undermountain was the 'tentpole megadungeon' that Ed Greenwood's first campaign was created around along with the city above, that of the Company of Crazed Venturers. For more on its origin, see the top of this page. It's an environment rather than a single scenario: it's...

This Sage Advice reply is one of the best descriptions of what a D&D ranger is in the original conception, and thus in settings like the World of Greyhawk. The civilization/borderlands/wilderness dynamic is one of many old D&D ideas that was always assumed but never spelled out all in one place...

I'd have thought an RPG fight getting boring and repetitive would depend on players and DM failing to do interesting things and describe them evocatively, not whether they fail to use as many different rules as possible. Not a good comparison, because RPG bells and whistles have to be operated...

This is the first 'price of RPG books' thread I recall where most people acknowledge inflation and that they aren't 'much more expensive' than they used to be.