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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6269835" data-attributes="member: 27780">Best of Dragon Magazine 2part 4/6Humans and Hybrids: In which we get another example of how Gary's conservatism affected the game in the early years. While they did introduce a fair few new classes right away, they stuck with basically the same races until well into 2e, and those they did add had far lower class selections and level limits. Not until 3e would they truly open up monsters for PC play and add templates and bloodline levels that let you crossbreed racial lineages however you desire. Of course, he did have good reasons. Until they added proper balancing factors for the cool abilities nonhumans get, they couldn't make them too awesome, or no-one would want to play the standard races. Really, this just illustrates that system matters. For all that they say your imagination is the only limit, if you try to do certain things within a roleplaying game, some will work out far better than others, and what they are will vary widely. And D&D was not designed as a toolkit game, despite later writers adding on all sorts of things to try and make it so, there are still plenty of other RPG's that are far better at modular toolkit design and adapting to whatever genre you want to play. D&D was built for exploring places and killing things in tactical battles, and the farther you push from that, the more it pushes back. Books are books, games are games: Following directly on from the last column, Gary has to deal with the new players who try to play D&D like their favourite fantasy novel, and find it doesn't do that, much to their frustration. Of course, being the iconoclastic and often grumpy bugger he was, he puts a lot of effort into trying to get them to change their playstyle to fit the game, rather than changing the game to better support that kind of story. If your characters were as cool as the heroes of the books, they'd be unmanageable! Of course you shouldn't expect to have powers as awesome and flexible as theirs! Why are you surprised by this? Now there's an attitude that would prove pretty persistent in gaming, as we had plenty of modules where all the big action was done by the NPC's, with the PC's given <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=":)" /><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=":)" /><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=":)" /><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=":)" /><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=":)" /><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=":)" /><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=":)" /><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=":)" /> fetch missions or just left watching on the sidelines, because they had a metaplot they wanted to push rather than giving you the tools to tell your own story. This definitely leaves me annoyed, as this collection is turning into a lot of him telling us we're having badwrongfun for wanting to play D&D differently to the way he intended. What a thing to compile. Make-believe magic: Returning to the realism in fantasy topic again? Blah. Gary reminds us that in most fantasy literature, most wizards are actually less powerful than high level spellcasters in D&D, with extensive preparation and ritual needed to pull off big effects. The memorisation and erasure thing was pretty much unique to Jack Vance, and his spellcasters could maybe hold half a dozen at once. It's very much a system designed to keep them interesting and balanced when compared with other classes (over the course of a campaign), rather than emulate a particular novel, especially when things vary so widely throughout the fantasy genre anyway. I think the big problem here was making all spellcasters use the same system, since it seemed to go away once we had the mixture of memorisation, spontaneous casting, spell point psionics, lower power but constantly usable warlock evocations, etc etc that 3e brought us. (that and the people dissatisfied with D&D had moved onto other systems <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />) Once again this shows that the problems people initially complained about in D&D were solvable (although solving them created new ones) but the designers were too stubborn to do so for 20 years, and instead tried to tell us we were wrong for wanting something different. Looking at it from that perspective, is it any wonder TSR went out of business? Good isn't stupid: Paladins & Rangers: We covered the evil side of the law/chaos axis a few columns ago, now for the good one. Oddly enough, Gary takes a more relativistic view here, talking about how standards of good vary widely between cultures in the real world, and how losing your powers should be judged based upon the god you follow rather than a more abstract "good". When you consider that he was advocating all Lawful Evil creatures everywhere should try and serve the devilish hierarchy a few issues ago, this seems a little inconsistent. Also notable because this is where he advocates swordpoint conversions followed by immediate death as a way to ensure your god gets souls, which really doesn't seem like Good behaviour to me. It remains very easy to see why he caused so much controversy back in the day, because this just seems so counterintuitive. Why must morality be such a headache?</blockquote>

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