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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 9667135" data-attributes="member: 85555"><p>I don't think anyone is advocating that players be punished passive aggressively for playing non-human characters. The 1E DMG has a tone, and that is one of the reasons why people like going back to it for pleasure reading, but the reason people go back to that earlier material, is because a lot of us jettisoned traditional elements of the system, even had a mocking view of them by the 90s and early 2000s, but when we went back and looked at them again, we realized there was a lot of useful material there, that something being old, didn't make it bad for gaming. I've told this story before, but when I went back to the 1E DMG it was mostly because I thought it would be funny. I don't know if people recall but in those early days of 3E, it wasn't uncommon to view D&D as a steadily evolving system, and to see earlier iterations as clunky machines with ungainly features. I thought I was just going to go back to the 1E DMG and have a laugh at attack matrices. And then I got the idea of running 2E again, and it was honestly mostly because I thought it would be funny to run players using THAC0. In both cases, I saw pretty quickly that the baby had been thrown out with the bath water. With reading 1E, I realized there was a lot there that had been missing in my gaming both in the 90s but especially in the 2000s. And a lot of it had to do with how much more open to exploration the game was. When I ran 2E,  this time for Ravenloft, so I wasnt' running it for a sandbox or anything, just a moody horror sessions, I instantly realized that 3E, which I liked and still like, had been holding back the atmosphere for me. The game felt completely different. I had never been able to capture the feel of Ravenloft with 3E and I chalked it up to nostalgia. But once I ran it with 2E again, I realized it was the system, because suddenly the feeling came flooding back. It was due to a number of things, but one of the major reasons was you didn't have skills like Bluff, Gather Information, etc. The existing NWPs (which were optional anyways) didn't trod on roleplaying or interaction with the setting. So my monster hunts once again felt like the players were really interacting with scenario in a deep way. I also found features of the system we used to make fun of (like the fact that it has all these subsystems and no real central mechanic like d20), actually made different parts of the game feel different (in a good way). I needed up vastly preferring things like how initiative worked, the roll under for attribute and NWP rolls, etc).</p></blockquote><p></p>

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