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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Storm Raven" data-source="post: 3220460" data-attributes="member: 307">Except you seem to obsess over the second part, and gloss over the first. You seem to think there is some sort of "psychological element" to the classes in AD&D, which is patently false. In point of fact, AD&D was devoid of "personality mechanics" as part of the character creation process from a rules standpoint. That's why so many people say "you can take two AD&D characters with identical stats and play them as radically different characters".Or, as the class is written, it doesn't. You see, an example of a magic-user in the 1e AD&D system might be a teacher, but there is nothing in the class mechanics that drives it to that. The 1e AD&D magic-user could, just as easily, be the misanthropic hermit.You see, this sort of analysis tells me that you have absorbed too much AD&D to know what you are talking about when you talk about archetypes. Before AD&D, wizards often attacked with large swords, and wore armor. Gandalf carried a large sword. Numberous tales have Merlin wearing armor. It is an almost unique feature of AD&D (and D&D) that wizardly types eschew mundane protection and weaponry. Gwydion was a powerful wizard, and yet he wore aremor and used big swords.And if she comes into it cold, knowing "subconsiously" what a magician does, thinks, and what kinds of things it would never do", she's going to come into it with an entirely different set of assumptions than the AD&D magic-user/wizard class offers.Or, one could recognize that the 1e AD&D magic-user bears almost no resemblance to any but one, highly idiosyncratic, representation of a wizard. And none to just about every traditional representation of a wizard.Or, she would wonder why the wizards didn't wear armor, which literary and mythological wizards do all the time. Or carry sword, like Gandalf. or why woodsmen lways seemed to be able to cast spells - unlike someone like Robin Hood. And so on.Or she might actually see characters that resemble the ones she is familiar with through myth, legend, and literature. As opposed to AD&D classes, which are representations of singular, very obscure, individual characters.Yes, I see that you are framing your argument to come to the conclusion you want to arrive at. And not following the actual evidence at all, but rather coming up with pseudo-psychological arguments that bear no relation whatsoever to the actual AD&D character classes, or their literary and mythological antecedents.AD&D is only a human centric game in sofar as it tries to tell you so. Most AD&D parties I have played with were dominated by demi-humans, to the point where human characters were as rare has hen's teeth. And it entirely eliminates the 'archetype" argument to boot, no matter how "rare" they were supposed to be, since it dilutes the supposed roles even more. Of course, you can't address the dual classses either, which allowed switching between roles, or the bard, which was all the roles in one. Though the dual class mehcanic and the bard were badly executed.And the main problem is that your argument is unsupported by evidence. You keep trying to argue that everyone "knows" that the archetypes work the way the AD&D classes say they do. But they don't, either using your Jungian psychology argument which simply doesn't hold up because of the lack of a psychological element to the character mechanics, or the literary archetype model, since the classes just don't fit a literary archetype. You are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and it just won't work.Or, you could just accept that the AD&D classes represent nothing except the AD&D character classes. They are gaming elements, designed to work from a game mechanics standpoint. Nothing more.</blockquote>

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