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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 8963612" data-attributes="member: 6799660">I think the Thief-Acrobat was when I realized that maybe the devs played a different game than I. It made me look back at the core rulebook and how much admonition there was towards not letting a player 'get away with' things, and that every time they introduced a new player option, it was usually by taking away something I'd thought all PCs should be able to do (minus some caveats like not tightrope walking in armor) just to give it back as a special option you could take. When the Dungeoneer and Wilderness Survival Guides came out in '86 and included skill proficiencies letting PCs do what I'd always thought they could do anyways, I was unsurprised.I suspect the order is reversed. Barbarian first showed up in Dragon #63 (1982 ), cavalier in Dragon #72 (1983), and thief-acrobat in Dragon #69 (1983), so there was likely a notion that these were up-and-coming classes for the game. Thus it would be a good idea to include them in the upcoming show, promoting new products instead of old (always find new ways to sell more of the core books having not yet become a primary market strategy). Given what we know about the financial state of TSR at the time, I doubt there was a real plan. Cash was tight and there was existing writing that fit semi-naturally into the book, so they did so and shoved it out the door to keep the lights on. That said, as a pre-teen when the cartoon came out, I certainly felt like the 1E devs were shifting tone to start talking to me -- the core books being from back in the 70s and having harlot tables and admonitions not to let players get away with anything and paladins (whatever those were) and assassins was giving way to lots of options for making He-man barbarians, cavaliers (a more obvious knight-in-shining-armor), leaping acrobats and other things that fit alongside me and my friends still running around the playground pretending we were Superfriends or whatever.</blockquote>

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