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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PapersAndPaychecks" data-source="post: 3222140" data-attributes="member: 28854">Well, I disagree, actually.  Given the constraint (through game logic, the class has to start out weak and work up to the power of the heroes of literature), I feel the literary characters are quite well translated.They're unknown now.In the 21st Century, there are huge numbers of high fantasy books, series, novels, and particularly trilogies.  These have arisen from a resurgence in the popularity of fantasy which was, itself, at least partly fuelled by fantasy roleplaying games.  Most of these high fantasy books are in the Tolkein model, with quite a stereotypical plot in which the hero gets together with a mixed bag of characters, each with his or her own particular talents (the Seven Samurai or the Dirty Dozen) and embarks on a Quest to Save the World from a rather generic and poorly thought-out Dark Lord.The World, of course, is usually mapped out in detail and exactly the right size and shape to fit on a double-page spread of a standard fantasy paperback and almost every place on the map will be visited en route, even if the author has to muck around with time and distance in order to make that possible (yes, David Eddings, I'm talking to you).  Once the hero has retrieved the relevant Magical Thingumajigs or other plot coupons, and each of the Seven Samurai has had the chance to demonstrate his or her own unique talent or personal characteristic, the party can trade in their plot coupons to the author for a Eucatastrophe in which the Dark Lord is finally defeated and peace reigns, although there's quite often room left for a sequel.Obviously, this huge volume of predictable rubbish that second-rate authors and publishers sell has its devotees, and it's had an influence on the archetypes.  More people know about Drizzzzzzzzzzt or Garion or whoever Robert Jordan's forgettable hero is called than Cugel, so those characters are seen as more "archetypal" than Cugel or Rhialto.But writing in the early 1970s, Gygax & co. didn't have those archetypes to draw on.  They drew on the sources they had, and preferentially on authors they liked to read, which meant Anderson, Tolkein, Vance, to a certain extent Moorcock, Howard and Leiber, etc.So I think that relative to the time of writing, AD&D is based on archetypes.Nowadays, very few; see above.The druid seems to be drawn from idealised Celtic fantasies admixed with a generous dollop of Getafix.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  I think the 1e bard -- fighter, thief, poet, singer and wit, speaker of many languages, etc. -- is quite clearly Fafhrd.</blockquote>

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