NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 9102154" data-attributes="member: 5948">All very true.  There's fundamentally three ways of dealing with the situation when you have a legacy setting that doesn't line up with modern D&Ds class availability assumptions etc.  All of them have downsides.First is you can lean hard into the old canon.  Classes X and Y are banned, class Z is unavailable to races A, B, C, etc etc.  Downside of this is that it cuts down on player choice (obviously) but also hands much more work to to writers.  I mean, I'd allow a champion or battlemaster fighter in any DL game I ran with no question, or a samurai (hi Sturm!) or cavalier or whatever  - but a Rune Knight?  Similarly, an open hand monk would be fine, but Astral Self?  Do you go so far as limiting specific subclasses, or limiting certain subclasses to certain races?  You start getting a lot of pedantic fiddly rules text very quickly, at dubious gameability value.Second is that you just plain retcon it.  It's always been that way, the gnome paladins and dwarf warlocks were just well hidden or keeping themselves secret or hanging out with the Entwives.  Which solves your player choice problem. but at the cost of a certain degree of setting verisimilitude in places.  If dwarves had wizards, dwarf history would have been different in several ways which would have affected the current-day setting. Also, you kinda lose book-compatibility, and the novels have always been right at the heart of what makes Dragonlance Dragonlance for many, many people.  Third is that you write an in-world event that lets bards cast healing spells (or whatever), but this ties you to a point in history - no healing bards before day X of year Y.  And in a world like Krynn where EVERYTHING has already been novelised in the manner of late-80s and early-90s Star Wars books (Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina, I'm looking at you...) you absolutely are going to step on some established lore somewhere, especially if you try to insert your bard-healing-origin event early in the timeline like ... before the War of the Lance so your SotDQ bard can heal.  OR you can stick it in later in the timeline in some of the weird later-generation DL stuff but then nobody will care about it.There's not really a perfect answer that's going to work for everyone.  And personally I can see how I'd take all three approaches at times, to different bits of canon, if I was running 5e DL.</blockquote>

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