Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="M.L. Martin" data-source="post: 4928855" data-attributes="member: 4086">If I recall some of the design columns from DRAGON correctly, backwards compatability is the reason we didn't have ascending Armor Classes in 2E. Serious question--did you follow the game during the lead-up and on-release, or were you a later arrival? Because the 'build' mentality, while an early arrival, is something that I seem to remember arising from the community around 3E rather than being highlighted in the books themselves. (Granted, there are 'builds' in the Hero Builder's Guidebook, but even those were designed for concept rather than charop, and were of a type that soon became superseded by Prestige Classes and, as of 3.5, new base classes.)This is part of a hypothesis I'm developing: For those who were following the 2E/3E changeover and got our first impressions of it that way, there's a greater subjective sense of continuity due to the strong apparent similarities in the texts. Those who joined later or otherwise weren't part of the 'changeover/early adopter' crowd, who came to know the game embedded in a community that had developed new approaches based on the 'emergent properties' of the rules, may have a greater sense of the discontinuity.</blockquote>