Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mokona" data-source="post: 4563989" data-attributes="member: 24891">I look forward to these characters.  However the main point of iconic characters (for Wizards of the Coast at least) is that they're stereotypical.  Also, Enemies and Allies describes the iconics for 3rd edition as "characters whose images appear throughout the D&D core books".The main iconics have always been the characters whose illustrations were with each character class.  In 3rd edition thos were Krusk (barbarian), Devis (bard), Jozan (cleric), Vadania (druid), Tordek (fighter), Ember (monk), Alhandra (paladin), Soveliss (ranger), Lidda (rogue), Hennet (sorcerer), and Mialee (wizard) + Nebin (illusionist).  For marketing reasons most of those characters are human because all players are human.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  The infamous Regdar is an iconic despite not showing up in the fighter entry of the Player's Handbook because the marketing department used him in everything (they wanted a human fighter as the point man of the brand).By the brand standards I'd guess that the true iconics for 4th edition should be human cleric, dragonborn fighter, half-elf paladin, elf ranger, halfling rogue, tiefling warlock, dwarf warlord, and eladrin wizard.These races do not have to be the ideal "game mechanic build" for each character class because iconics are about appearance and not about rules.  Furthermore the issue for marketing focuses on playing to expectations.  Thus we get an eladrin wizard because that is the iconic (based on it being half of the elf stereotype) race for magic in D&D.  Dwarf isn't the best race for the Warlord class at all but Wizards used a dwarf illustration with the warlord because the stereotype for a dwarf is a melee fighter.  I can only assume that dwarf wasn't chosen for fighter because dragonborn was an even better fit for fighter than warlord.  Dwarf basically plays second fiddle here to the needs of the dragonborn race.Halfling (rogue), Elf (forest ranger), and Tiefling (hell warlock) are highly stereotypical.  That just left Human and Half-Elf to split the probably arbitrary decision between Cleric and Paladin.  At that point the decision probably came down to game mechanics as a tie breaker.</blockquote>

Verification