Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Delta" data-source="post: 4335333" data-attributes="member: 40269">I probably shouldn't reply, but:A huge number of the Dragon articles in the 1970's and 1980's dealt with the game-design topic of "realism vs. playability". People were constantly trying to add new rules to make D&D more realistic in perceived ways, and the main barrier was how many rules made it no longer playable. This was the primary game-design goal for 20 years until the "balance" fetish came on the scene.The general NPC population all through 1E, 2E and BXCMI were in fact all classless ("normal men"; per 1E DMG, only 1 in 100 humans could attain a PC class). Members of a given race did not have identical attributes -- hit points varied, specifications for leaders with more hit dice always appeared, etc. (something I loved about D&D as opposed to other game systems that really did have identical stats for a given race). Physical health certainly could decline with age if investigated closely (see Gygax's Dragon stats for Conan at different ages -- sure enough, his level & hit points go up to age 40, then decline after that).Frankly, there's a jaw-dropping amount of revisionist history going on from the 4E camp this year. Your kind of observations don't remotely match what I know of early D&D, nor the reactions of people that I introduce it to at this time.</blockquote>