Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6573398" data-attributes="member: 27160">Thanks for the flattering assumption, but by "18-year-old me" I meant  when I was 18 years old, which was a good deal more than 18 years ago!And, you know, the funny thing was that I kind-of-sort-of did have a pocket computer, then. For school I had an early programmable calculator. Sure, it didn't have what you might identify as an "operating system" and the range of apps available was limited to some key sequence listings in geek magazines. But it did computations, it fitted in my blazer pocket and it was mine.Sorry, I'm not buying it. Some of the time, maybe, but I have set out to do too many things where all we knew about its possibility at start was "well, you never know 'til you try!". Sometimes you're surprised by what's possible; other times you're surprised by what's not possible!Well, uh, no. Otherwise, RuneQuest would not have been such a big deal when it came along and DID give stats to "monsters".I think you have to realise where roleplayers were originating from, in the early days. I, and most roleplayers I knew prior to around 1980 or so, started out as wargamers. OD&D derived from a set of wargame rules. The troops - including the fantasy ones like orcs and elves - in Chainmail (the wargames rules that D&D came from) had just a combat die rating. The "great leap" taken by D&D was to tack on these "statistics" to give unique individuals that were designated to be played by the players in the game as their own "selves". The idea was that, instead of just jumping straight into the hero/general's shoes (commanders often got special characteristics, too, albeit different ones) you could start as a veteran grunt or a junior magic user and work your way up. This all meant that the idea that "monsters are people, too" really wasn't obvious or intuitive. Of course, once RQ had done it, everyone could see it was a neat idea. But just because an idea is neat doesn't mean it should be applied everywhere. Like peanut butter, there are some things that are really improved when you add it, but there are other things where your best move is to leave it out. Computers, for example.</blockquote>

Verification