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While the term "tiefling" is a D&D invention, the idea of a person with a fiendish bloodline that makes them distinct from humans is NOT. In Arthurian legend, that was the explanation for the origin of Merlin's powers. . .his mother was seduced by a fiend and the inhuman heritage is where his...

I think the arcane/divine separation of magic is more a D&D setting presumption "sacred cow" that players expect than something required for game balance. It's like inserting Monks out of Wuxia/Kung Fu movies and Anime into a setting that otherwise mostly draws on medieval European...

In my personal experience, the D&D community has been very LBGT accepting for decades. Since I started playing in the late 90's, D&D players seemed to both be pretty accepting of LBGT people, and have a lot among them. I don't think it's a recent change, or at most it's an increase in a very...

I think the idea of eliminating classes was more that the game might be more broadly skill based than class-based. Most tabletop RPG's made in the last 30 years that are not in the D&D/d20 design lineage have moved away from games that have rigidly defined "character classes" in favor of an...

Tolkien wasn't using the word "race" wrong, people now just focus far too narrowly on one or two specific definitions of "race" that are obsolete. Except there are dictionary definitions of the term "race" that would apply to D&D character races. A quick search at dictionary.com shows the...

Or, that's what it means in a fantasy world context. The D&D usage of the word "race" is in the meaning that Tolkien gave it in his works, where he referenced humans, dwarves et al. as being different "races". Yes, if D&D were invented whole-cloth today, the term "race" might not be used...

The Far Realms are mentioned, at least in passing, in OGC. The Pseudonatural creature template is described as "Pseudonatural creatures dwell between the stars, beyond the planes as we know them, or nestled in far realms of insanity." It's also not in the list of things declared Product...

I always presumed that to be them focusing on pantheons that players would actually regularly use in games. Egyptian, Norse and Greco-Roman gods have more of a place in our culture, and are myths most players would be more familiar with and likely to want to use in a game. I've seen people...

Also in 2e: On Hallowed Ground, Planescape's entry into the subject, which addressed a huge number of real-world pantheons and discussed how they interact on the Outer Planes and how they interact with D&D-specific pantheons and how they all fit together in the D&D multiverse.

Yeah, it's my understanding that the official D&D canon is that Bahamut IS Marduk, it's just an alias of his. The same way that Tiamat is also known as Takhisis, or Tchazzar depending on where you go, Marduk is known as Bahamut (or Bahamut is known as Marduk) depending on what world you're on...

You need to cite them properly, but you can always mine the SRD's for ideas and convert between editions. There's a HUGE amount of material in the 3.5 SRD and the d20 Modern SRD that wasn't put into an OGL form for 5e, but you could convert it. There's also Unearthed Arcana for D&D 3.5, which...

Yes, system matters. That's why we have different preferences of editions, some of us play 5e, some play 3.x, some play OD&D, some play AD&D 1e, some play everything in between. However, I will say that there's a reason that D&D has been so widely adapted to other purposes. . .because while...

We have very, very different expectations and attitudes about D&D and setting expectations. I see D&D as something that should be a flexible toolkit that most readily lets a gaming group play a game set in a pseudo-medieval fantasy world but can be readily adapted to pre-industrial historic...

I saw them factor into pretty much every long-running game. If the game was one session or only a few weeks or few months, then it wouldn't come up. If it was a long-term game that would run a year or more, those level limits tended to appear, and tended to hurt, bad.

No, I don't see why they were there. There was a HUGE gulf between the setting presumptions that were written into AD&D and what most D&D players wanted, which was a generic fantasy game where "anything goes". D&D was always treated by players as a toolkit to play out the fantasy worlds they...

Yes, and it's still nonsensical. As I said, it was a profound flaw in 1e and 2e to put wholly arbitrary restrictions on classes like that. It was hard-coding very specific setting presumptions into the game, far more specific presumptions about the game setting than we have seen in later...

Even if it first came from the Dragon article, I think The Complete Book of Elves made the idea a lot more mainstream. I'm willing to bet a lot more people read about it in Complete Book of Elves than in a Dragon article from 1982. If anything, being repeated in Complete Book of Elves...

It was always one of the more nonsensical things about 2e. Elves are really, really nature oriented and have a supernaturally powerful tie to the land and nature. . .but they can't be Druids. Elves are really, really magical and have an innate understanding of magic that transcends anything a...

I miss it too. It was one of the very few magazines I ever subscribed to. Even when I didn't subscribe to it, I was always at my FLGS once a month to pick it up. Replacing it with a website really didn't count. Dragon, very sadly, is long dead. In a lot of ways WotC ending Dragon when they...

The 2e Monk I'm more familiar with was the weird one they introduced in Spells and Magic, and also reprinted for Forgotten Realms in Faiths and Avatars (and Powers and Pantheons and Demihuman Deities). That was a priest character that was essentially a cleric, but trading in their armor for...