Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6767477" data-attributes="member: 42582">Initially I think this was because, as a very early example of RPG publishing, there wasn't a robust sense of what the range of meanings might be, and why that would matter, and how it might be described.I think that by now, though, this ambiguity has been a way of maintaining appeal to a wide range of at least somewhat contradictory tastes. Especially in 5e, which is at least in part a reaction to 4e, probably the least ambiguous edition of D&D in respect of these key elements of the system.For me personally, here and now, with a wealth of RPG options on my shelves and at least passing familiarity with more systems than I am ever going to get the opportunity to play in a serious fashion, that makes sense.And it's equally true for Lifepath as for Classed games: the PC generation tables in Classic Traveller, for instance, or the LPs in Burning Wheel, very strongly imply a particular setting that other elements of the game can then build upon,.But I don't think that such an approach can be assumed to be the default for D&D, which (for better or worse) presents itself as a fantasy RPG for everyone, flexible enough to cover a wide range of settings and possible stories. And which, probably more than any other RPG system, is played by players who are one-system-only people.For 5e, which is deliberately being light on new classes and PC-side mechanical expansion in general, I think that is even more the case. The likelihood of getting a "martial artist trained by a talking animal" class published by WotC is pretty close to nil. (Contrast AD&D, with all those wacky classes in Dragon; or 3E, where every second splatbook seemed to have some new class or other.) So if I want to include that sort of character in my 5e game I'm going to have to use the monk to build it, even if that means ignoring the flavour text about monasteries.</blockquote>

Verification