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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ganders" data-source="post: 7927327" data-attributes="member: 37815">Two other player roles that have gone away:RULES-GURU: Sometimes this meant a player who looks up rules in the book as needed.  But there's also a different version of this: someone who knows the rules well enough that he can answer the DM's rule questions quickly so the DM can AVOID ever cracking a book during the game.Best as I can tell, this has gone away because most groups, as a philosophy, just prefer to make things up as they go.  First, they just aren't interested in spending time learning (or memorizing) anything before the game starts.  But also, when people say 'playing D&D' they just mean a D&D-style game, they aren't referring to any specific setting or set of rules.  And even if a specific set of rules is chosen, nobody expects the DM to actually remember or follow them in the heat of the moment.  Just like with pirates, 'rules' are really more like 'guidelines'.MONSTER GURU: Someone who knows (or can look up) monster and item stats.Let's not forget that once upon a time there were people who had actually memorized just about everything in the entire monster manual. (There were fewer books, and fewer versions, back then, it only added up to 100 pages or so, not many thousands as it would be today)  And same thing with the list of magic items: there were people who memorized every one.  There wasn't this notion of just recasting magic items (for instance making 'gloves of X' into 'boots of X', or inventing a type of wand that can only be used twice per day: that was once considered wrong, you weren't allowed to re-imagine things like that).I think this has changed because there's no notion of a common setting.  Once upon a time, everyone 'knew' and agreed that goblins were level 1 and dragons were much higher level.  But over the years, creative people have invented high level goblins, low level dragons, and everything in between.  The philosophy now is that any creature can be any level -- they are after all fictional creatures, imagine them any way you like.  It goes beyond just levels -- in some campaigns for instance, those poor prosecuted orcs aren't villains, they're victims of murderous adventurers.  They're not dumb brutes, they're just as intelligent and righteous as any other race.  There are good reasons for all of this... but it definitely has erased the common-culture from D&D, the ability to share stories of your adventures with other gamers and have them recognized and understood.  There is no longer a common, near-universal, understanding of what a goblin is, for such people to "know".This all is very related to the early notion that one's character could be moved about and played in many different games with different DMs (and bring his gear with him).  It's not done that way anymore, every time you join a new campaign you need a new character, one native to that DM's setting.</blockquote>

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