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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kennew142" data-source="post: 3972421" data-attributes="member: 18490">The difference is that the one concept includes the other. You can remove one ability from the new dryad, and you have basically the old one. No one is forced to create a new creature.How much time does it take to say, "I'll leave this one ability off?" It's much easier to leave something out than it is to create it out of whole cloth.Everything boils down to individual preference. The new look of the dryad is definitely to my preference. I'm certainly not saying that the old dryad was a bad design, but it was pretty useless in my games. I've used them as spiritual advisors for characters regarding all things woodsy and fey. I see no reason why I can't use the new version the same way - but when they get angry they can strike back.In classical mythology, dryads are seldom mentioned as anything more than background dressing. The few we do see exist to marry kings or to dally with the gods to produce quasi-divine offspring. In mythology they neither fight nor cast spells. They epitomize the wildness of nature, which the Greeks connected with the female principals of irrationality and a lack of civilization. [Ancient Greeks were somewhat misogynistic.] The word means unmarried girl, which in the Greek mind evoked the image of someone uncontrolled, needing to be tamed.The treatment of them in D&D is entirely arbitrary from a mythological perspective. As a classicist, it doesn't resonate in my mind with what a dryad is supposed to be anyway. If we are going to be arbitrary about their nature, I would prefer an interpretation that is more useful to me. This is the main reason that I prefer this more modern and (IMO) useful interpretation.As an aside, I have to leave things out of monsters, spells and other elements of D&D as often as anyone else. That is the curse/blessing of homebrewing. As one example, I will have to leave all the intelligent design elements out of the racial descriptions in my game. I don't have gods in my setting. I reduced the duration of the mindflayer's psionic blast because I felt it was too long. There are many other examples.</blockquote>

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