Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 4849563" data-attributes="member: 80487">The number was only three (Cthulhu, Elric, Nehwon) -- versus 13 traditional sources: American Indian, Arthurian, Babylonian, Celtic, Central American, Chinese, Egyptian, Finnish, Greek, Indian, Japanese, Norse and Sumerian.Proficiencies were clearly labeled optional, and the following text applied: All proficiency rules are additions to the game. Weapon proficiencies are tournament level rules, optional in regular play, and nonweapon proficiencies are completely optional. Proficiencies are not necessary for a balanced game. They add an additional dimension to characters, however, and anything that enriches characterization is a bonus.Moreover, they did not really dictate anything. It was still up to the DM to determine a reasonable probability of success. 3E offered more tools for the DM in making such assessments, a guide to what the game factors were meant to represent in a game that covered the spectrum from ordinary humans on up to demigods. That's an enterprise plentifully familiar from the 1E volumes' cornucopia of advice (and many magazine articles).Movement to a new ethos was really a player-initiated movement, in the course of which it came to be that "everyone knows" things about the rule books that are false.In themselves, those are just tools for DMs -- on par with the dungeon level encounter tables and treasure tables in old D&D (but expressing more plainly what the designers had in mind). It was players who decided that characters of Level X should always have Level X encounters or else the DM was "cheating". Even the 4E DMG recommends a range of encounter levels. It was players who made a fetish of optimization for combat and "balance" on that basis; the 4E team merely designed a game around that existing ethos in the new game culture.They also threw out the "simulation" emphasis that had prevailed in rules development right into 3E. That's another thing that makes the rules heaviness tiresome to me. The basic, classic D&D framework is dissociated enough from details of the imagined world; I don't need or want a lot of complications to make it even more so!I am no fan of the (to my eyes silly) renaming of demons and devils, much less of the later wholesale replacement of real mythological inspirations with proprietary "product". However, that's a pretty small part of the 2E core -- about on par with the expurgation of explicit Tolkien references starting with later printings of the original D&D books.</blockquote>

Verification