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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orius" data-source="post: 7949868" data-attributes="member: 8863">Never played it.  Closest I've come is 2e, which isn't too terribly different.  I have looked at a good bit of the rules though, and there are some impressions I've gotten of it over the years.People can say what they want about the humanocentric approach, but I think the reality behind it is much simpler.  Gary did not like LotR, but he certainly liked the idea of Tolkien fans playing his game.  I think it's telling that halflings, the most Tolkien demihumans of all, get the hardest restrictions.Gary generally balanced things to his taste, but I don't think he really explained his rationale BitD.  The conversations with him here and over at Dragonsfoot might have some of his reasonings, but of course those came long after the fact.  So some of the restrictions seem arbitrary and strange.  However, some of the restrictions make some sense if one really examines things.   It didn't help that Gary tended to responded poorly to criticism or look down upon ideas he didn't like.Balance by rarity, such as one gets with powerful classes is fake balance.  If a player legitimately gets something powerful from good rolls, the power issues still exist, and at times this leads to nonsense like asinine catch-22 ethical dilemmas for paladins.  There's a number of fake balance issue like this in the older versions of the game.The rules are kind of messy and occasionally contradictory, and Gary's rather unique prose doesn't help matters either.But there's still a lot of good ideas in the rules, and the best survive even today.  Earlier 1e material is pretty evocative and vivid, while late 1e and early 2e gets dry bland and dull, mired in irrelevancies.</blockquote>

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