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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 4335376" data-attributes="member: 11760">I subscribed to The Dragon during this period, and I really don't think that's a fair characterization.I'm not sure "hey, here's 72 more polearms" is really realism per se, so much as it was indulging a segment of the gaming community's love of super-obscure weaponry. Columns like "The Whole Half-Ogre" or the Cloistered Cleric added more options, but since neither half-ogres nor spellcasting clerics exist in our world, I'm not sure either qualifies as realism. There were seemingly endless attempts to remake the bard and druid, but they were aimed at the goal of being more fun, not being more realistic.(Which is, incidentally, where the "fetish" of balance comes from: Everyone at the table should have an equal amount of fun, not just be the sidekicks to the guy who got to play the super-awesome character. As a game design goal to sneer at, everyone having more fun is a pretty strange choice.)Other well-remembered articles, like "The 7 Sentence NPC" (reprinted in Paizo's wonderful Dragon compilation), the 9 Hells and the incredibly influential "_____ Point of View" series were about fleshing out the game world in a way that was, again, about it being more interesting and more fun, not more realistic. (The 7 Sentence NPC in particular doesn't worry about things like realism, so much as it's about creating cool and memorable NPCs on the fly.)In fact, in truth, I have a hard time remembering any articles from this period that were about more realism -- they certainly didn't make it into the Best of the Dragon anthologies -- and they certainly weren't a dominant design philosophy in the magazine.Which, as a realism example, doesn't work either: Where did that number come from? What was it based on? I don't know that any philosopher, historian or sociologist of note would come up with a 1:100 ratio, even if they subscribed to the notion that only certain people are capable of extraordinary lives.Also not realistic. Bullets do not have a harder time killing a general than they do a private.And that's certainly present through 3E. I haven't seen an age chart in the 4E books yet (I have an 11-month-old, so protracted reading time is mostly a memory for me at this point), and if it's not, it should be added back in, and I'm sure will be by third party publishers and maybe even WotC as well.I've been playing since 1979, and my dad had photocopies of all of the original booklets in the house before then (which I pored over, even if I didn't have anyone to play with at first), and your memories don't match mine, either.I think it's a little much to accuse others of revisionist history, based on your declarations of what sort of content predominated in the first 15 years of The Dragon.</blockquote>

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