D&D General 2nd edition player handbook class examples.


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Doc Savage. Tarzan. John Carter. Sherlock Holmes. Fantomas. Conan. Fafhrd. The Grey Mouser. Elric. Corum. Cohen. Sparhawk. Belgarath.
:)

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My only complaint for their stats narratively is the high wisdom on both. Maybe I would put the Gray Mouser as CN, but alignment is so subjective that N can work.
 

Yeah I feel that a lot of the given examples for a class are not the best. Especially for Magic Users seeing as how Vancian magic does not conform to how magic worked at all in Myths and Legends.
 

The irony of course was that several of those books were more interested in being historical guidebooks than RPG books, let alone D&D supplements. To the point several only let you play fighters and thieves. They were novel for their time, but I'd much rather have Mythic Odysseys of Theros than Age of Heroes.
A book with "Paladins" in the title, describing a setting in which you explicitly couldn't play a paladin, FTW. Yes, I imagine there was some historical reason (behind the title, I mean), but that was really disappointing.
 
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This varied significantly by book, the vikings one is fairly full on D&D with some class exceptions (no mages but five specialist wizard classes allowed and a new runecaster class plus rune magic for everyone, no paladins but a new berserker class allowed, no clerics or druids but all the Norse specialty priests from Legends & Lore). I remember the Roman one being magic restrictive, it allowed wizards but no sixth level wizard spells or above and fairly curated available spell lists.
I will admit it's been years since I looked at the green cover books, so my memory on exactly what was in them is faulty. I remember looking at them many years ago hoping to use ideas from them in my homebrew, and was extremely disappointed that they spent a lot of time telling you what wasn't allowed rather than giving cool things that were. (On top from the usual 2e balance issues, of course). They also apparently showed the classic 2e "let the freelancers do the balancing" issue endemic to 2e, which lead to each book being built on different assumptions of magic and characters options.

Again, for what they were, they were a bold experiment in making D&D emulate historical myth and legends. But it absolutely wasn't my jam.
 

I guess the success of the examples depends on what you think they are supposed to do. If you think they are supposed to represent the exact characters of their type you can make, then yeah that’s a fail. If you think (as I do) that they are just familiar figures to help broadly inspire people then they are fine.

Can you exactly be Merlin? No. But can you be a wizard/druid who advises kings and nobles? Sure!

Can you be exactly Robin Hood? Maybe. But you can definitely be a great archer who lives in the woods, resists the local sheriff, and who steals from the rich to give to the poor.

And so on.
 

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