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Message: <blockquote data-quote="roguish" data-source="post: 9633552" data-attributes="member: 7046843">It did name drop Robin Hood (as Ranger), Little John (as Fighter), Alan-a-Dale and Will Scarlett (as Bards), and Lancelot, Gawain, and Galahad (as Paladins). Not Arthur, Aragorn, or Conan though.I'm ambivalent about these examples, because on one hand they were really cool and inspiring, but on the other hand they were brazen lies. Player Classes weren't based on these figures! Player Classes were a patchwork of ideas mostly plucked from ~1940s-1970s American and British sword and sorcery. If mythology and folklore came into it, it was indirectly: it went through the wringer and came out wrong, changed, unrecognisable. And to be clear, that's fine! Adapting and remixing older material over and over is how civilisation works, we're not supposed to put that stuff on a pedestal and never touch it. However, namedropping mythical figures in the PHB set up some unreasonable expectations. Mages in myth and legend don't drop fireballs. You can't emulate Merlin, Circe, or Medea (2nd Edition's examples) with D&D rules. So imo, picking historical and (ah) public domain examples, only marginally related to the classes, while excluding recent fantasy material that was MUCH more relevant, created a dissonance, at least in some cases.There's also an issue with 2nd Edition's eurocentrism, but the PC examples are only a symptom, and I'm NOT getting into that. Just, you know. Let's not be blind to it, it's huge.</blockquote>

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