D&D General Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast the First Magic Missile: Why Gygax Still Matters to Me

[mamba]

I could be mistaken, but I thought it was because to make AD&D a "different" game than OD&D (so Gygax didn't have to give Arneson royalties on AD&D books).

would not rule that out

 

[jayoungr]

i would like a good Mesoamerica setting, not sure one exists

I thought the short Ixalan "Plane Shift" document had some really interesting stuff in it. Maybe if they expanded on that (yes, I know the MtG settings are controversial).

 

[occam]

The Tian Xia World Guide would be pretty useful for systems other than PF2e since there isn't a lot of mechanics in it, I would avoid the Tian Xia Character Guide if you don't play PF2e since it's more focused on character options for PCs. And you're right, they worked with both Asian-American creators and consultants that reside in the Asian cultures they were drawing inspiration from to make sure they were being respectful of their cultures. As a white guy, no idea how well they pulled it off but the biggest controversy I remember hearing when it was released was some grumbling on reddit about the lack of samurais and ninjas so I'm guessing they did ok.

For those interested in Tian Xia as an East Asian analog setting but not familiar with it, I can add some commentary.

In general, I prefer Kara-Tur as a base setting for my own use. Overall, its adaptation of East Asia to a fantasy setting is fairly straightforward, which I know is one of the problems some folks have with it. ("Oh, great; two fantasy Japans from different points in history? And two fantasy Chinas from different points in history? And fantasy Korea, Tibet, Mongolia, etc.? LAME!") I get that, but its relatively close adherence to real-world geography and history is part of its appeal to me, as someone who became an Asian history buff largely because of the publication of Oriental Adventures and the subsequent Kara-Tur-based adventures.

Tian Xia takes some steps away from identifying with real-world regions and time periods, while remaining recognizably East Asian. It does that by leaning hard into the D&D-ness of things, including the modern "Mos Eisley Cantina" atmosphere, as some refer to it. For example, you have organized nations of bird-people (tengu), snake-people (nagaji), hobgoblins, aasimar, oni and giants, locathahs, and pseudo-Japanese elves, and lots of other PC races/species without nations of their own (kitsune, wayangs, ratfolk, dwarves, gnomes, etc.). There's also a nation run by a kraken and its boggard (frog-people) and kappa minions. And, like most of the world of Golarion, to the extent that Tian Xia can be related to the real world, it's in what would be considered a fairly late-stage historical period for a D&D setting: there are well-established transnational organizations (such as the ubiquitous Pathfinder Society), regular contact exists between Tian Xia and the Inner Sea Region, etc.

Both Kara-Tur and Tian Xia have similar amounts of setting support, although Kara-Tur still has a greater amount of adventure material published for it. Of course, you can adapt non-setting-specific adventures for either, although sticking closer to the real-world historical baseline can make doing that for Kara-Tur a little easier. (For example, it's pretty easy to adapt a lot of Rokugan material for Kara-Tur by stripping out the Rokugan-specific stuff, while the analog of Japan in Tian Xia would require a bit more effort from the DM to make things feel like they fit.)

One setting presents a human-centric analog of feudal East Asia with a relatively light veneer of fantasy; the other is a cosmopolitan multi-species modernist setting with very prominent fantasy elements. Which one is preferred is a matter of taste.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Do it yourself

Had you read anything I'd written, you would know I already have.

And your comments defending the fetishization and exoticization of foreign cultures tell me I have little to gain from discussing the matter futher.

 

[Bacon Bits]

2E was, I think, handicapped a bit. The design was shaped by a couple of major factors.

1. A mandate from above to maintain reverse compatibility with 1E AD&D products, which prevented them from making bigger changes.
2. Some extensive customer surveying of existing players, which I think mostly captured the expressed desires of people who were already fanatically into the game. I think the mistake of making 3d6 down the line (as in OD&D and the Basic/Expert and BECMI lines) once again the default ability score generation system, but retaining the more demanding ability score charts from AD&D which expected a more generous system, was likely a product of these surveys. Hardcore players asking for a hardcore default version of the game. To the detriment of, say, new players.

#2 makes as much sense to me as anything. There has often been a tendency for DMs to complain that the game is broken, especially when (a) other people play differently than you, and (b) they're clearly having a ton of fun!

I still remember how genuinely surprised I was reading 1e and seeing that 4d6 was not only recommended, but that the game said you need two 15s to have a good character!

Could you clarify how 2E made multiclassing and spellcasters better, in your opinion? The biggest change I always think of there is that multiclassing Magic-Users got weaker because of the new armor restrictions.

I think elven fighter/mages and fighter/mage/thieves got worse in 2e. Spellcasting in armor was legitimately nuts.

However, I think every other multiclass option got much better because (a) the human-only specialty classes got nerfed (Ranger especially), (b) demihuman level limits went way up, and (c) the flexibility of Thief skills in 2e meant you could pick 2-3 and max them out fairly quickly. While I've often said that level limits are the kind of rule strictly enforced at session 1 and frequently ignored at session 30, the 2e AD&D rules increased the level limits so high that I genuinely don't think we ever encountered them anymore. Our campaigns ended before the PCs could reach them.

Here's the 1e AD&D level limits:

These are severe level limits that you're almost certain to hit in any campaign of any length. Clerics in particular are effectively unavailable except for humans. You have Half-Elven (5) and Half-Orc (4). The exceptions are half-elven druid, the Assassin class (which IMX never saw play because poison and PVP), and (specifically) elven magic-users with very high Int. Most elven fighter/mages you'd actually roll are limited to fighter 5/mage 9.

Then you look at 2e:

I mean, what? There's 15s and 16s all over that table even if we ignore that Thief is now capped. Like did you know half-elven ranger had a level limit? I don't know that I did until today. Ranger 16 is not really a "limit" in any real sense. Our elven fighter 5/mage 9 can suddenly be a fighter 12/mage 15. That's 13 more class levels you can earn. Are you ever playing the game to level 15? I can tell you that we did it once, and I think it only happened because we converted to 3e around level 10.

Also note that 2e buries this table in the DMG, where it also provides two optional rules to bypass the limit. If your prime requisite is a 14-15, you get +1 level. 16-17 is +2, 18 is +3, and 19 is +4. Or they offer slower advancement, requiring double, triple, or quadruple XP to advance. Sure, it would suck to have 1/4 XP progression past Thief 12 on top of already being triple-classed, but it's still progression. It's not the retirement black hole that 1e offered.

2E has the strongest Thief prior to 3E. Being able to get bonuses to your skills and to adjust/allocate points so you can specialize a bit and make yourself competent fairly quickly in a couple of them is an improvement over OD&D and 1E and the B/X and BECMI Thieves, IMO. But yes, despite the poor Thieves, B/X is probably the pinnacle of TSR-era D&D.

2e Thief could max a few abilities faster, making it better for focused and (especially) multiclass characters, but B/X Thief maxed out by level 14. It was just good enough by level 10.

BECMI took the 14th level Thief and retroactively smeared it over 36 levels, while the AD&D Thief kept similar progression, and then it introduced the real bane of the 2e class: armor penalties. That's why thief/mage was so good. You didn't have armor penalties and you got the skill points meant to compensate for that. Meanwhile, attack routines for martial characters were worse in B/X, spell selection was much worse, hit points were lower for everyone across the board, and nobody else had any thieving abilities.

It's not that Thief didn't suck. It always sucked in 20th century D&D. It just wasn't so far behind or out-classed in B/X.

Yuuup. Or things like "balancing" magic users by making them weak at low levels and overpowered at high levels. That's just unbalanced in different ways at different times. Or making demi-humans flatly better at low levels, that virtually everyone plays, and then bad at high levels which a small fraction of players actually play at. That's the same "unbalanced in different ways at different times" issue, except that 80%+ of the players only experience one of them.

Yeah, or "balancing" with roleplaying restrictions like kits and alignment. That doesn't work, either. The thing is... Gary knew the martial/caster divide existed in 1975. That's when they published Greyhawk, which included percentile strength and (IIRC) the improved Con bonuses for warriors. But like you say, the design was only balanced if everyone got god rolls.

 

[Professor Murder]

Lovecraft wrote a lot of stuff I disagree with. Much of it pointed at my ancestries as his racism wasn't the bog standard black/white racism we are accustomed to talking about from US history but a very North Eastern, elite type of racism centered on ethnicity, breeding and bloodlines. That said, as bad as some of the stuff he said was, I think people sometimes try to act like he was exceptionally bad for the times (which doesn't really make sense when you consider this was during lynching, segregation, the clan at its height, eugenics, the rise of Hitler, etc). We can reject his ideas but still enjoy his stories. If you read a lot of material from the past you are going to encounter ideas that run against the morality of the present age. Doesn't mean we accept those ideas. And you are going to encounter individuals with some bad ideas who made good art. Everyone has to make that assessment for themselves. We also run into the issue or reducing everything he wrote to being about race (which I think has become itself own issue).

This was one of the more nuanced takes I have seen on it in recent years:

Intro to Lovecraft Live: The Great Old Ones History

My Lovecraft Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRXGGVBzHLUcMoc_ZljrDbgrRi3x_CLYDSupport Quinn's Ideas: https://www.paypal.me/quinnsideasFollow...

www.youtube.com

I wasn't being cute. The man literally wrote a racist poem. I can't even give you the title here. It will be flagged.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I wasn't being cute. The man literally wrote a racist poem. I can't even give you the title here. It will be flagged.

I know. I am aware of that poem

 

[FrogReaver]

Gygax wrote and spoke at volume (and with as many syllables as possible) for quite some time; if you look long enough, you will always find that he wrote something that contradicted what he said earlier, sometimes within the same paragraph.

Do the words of the Mighty Gygax contradict themselves? Very well then, they are in contradiction. (For High Gygaxian is verbose, and contain multitudes.)

Twas just his way of handling rules lawyers. When the rules contradict themselves everywhere, ain’t no lawyer is going to beat the judge.

 

[the Jester]

I'm confused by what you mean here. When you say "That's not what D&D is," are you referring to the fact that most monsters are from European-based folklore? If so, there's no reason you can't add new and different monsters--in fact, that's been expected ever since the early days.

A fair number of dnd monsters are drawn from non-Western sources, and a fair subset of them were around before e.g. Oriental Adventures or Kara-Tur were.

 

[the Jester]

The subs were often misleading. And we didn't know the source material because most of the source material for things like 70s Shaw Brothers wuxia films hadn't been translated into English .... [snip] .... But there is a sequence where I believe one of the masters is meditating and maybe reciting a sutra. But the english dub has him say the lords prayer instead because they didn't think an American audience would get the cultural reference.

Oh man, I once got a four pack of Hong Kong kung fu dvds. One of them was given different title on the box than on the surface of the disc, and its plot was basically nothing like the box claimed. It was dubbed and also had subtitles (which were always on, not like these days where you can turn them on and off at will); there was probably about a 50% alignment between the basic meaning of the two, and sometimes far less than that for a few scenes. It was, er, interesting.