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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9447514" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Which, of course, just makes the whole situation that much worse from a game design perspective.There are a lot of people who treat so-called "Tradition" as though it were the single most important thing about being D&D. But many of those so-called "Traditional" elements...were just off-the-cuff stuff, or something intended for one specific campaign context (e.g. the entire Cleric class), or entirely unexplained (e.g. the fact that armor was functionally a survival bonus with an XP penalty attached), etc.So we are now hamstrung as designers, because stuff that never had any design intent behind it at all is utterly immutable; to question it is to question the very heart of D&D. Yet, conversely, things that were just as classic and just as off-the-cuff--like the sci-fi elements of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks--are utterly verboten, never to be included except in their time-locked historical context.It's just incredibly frustrating to me as a player that a huge space of effective, productive game design is absolutely forbidden because a group of people did something on a lark 50 years ago, and now no one is allowed to question or displace it.Edit: And to be clear, I actually think Gygax had some pretty good design chops. Several of his off-the-cuff answers were much better than one would expect from an experienced DM today, let alone someone living at a time when TTRPGs were still in their infancy. But to have the TTRPG locked so hard into what it was 50+ years ago, never to be altered for fear of a fandom revolt--something the revolutionaries are all too keen to do, since it's now been proven to work spectacularly (for them)--is just so frustrating and saddening. Our hobby theoretically embraces the full spectrum of human imagination; so of course we concern ourselves only with one hyperspecific context (faux-medieval pseudo-Tolkienesque schizotech humanocentric Dung Ages settings with Maximized Fantasy Racism), with one playstyle (dungeon heisting with a light sprinkling of RP), etc.</blockquote>

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