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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
The Dueling Essays of Arneson & Gygax
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<blockquote data-quote="Aldarron" data-source="post: 7810731" data-attributes="member: 89291"><p>David Megarry does not claim to have invented the thief <em>character class.</em> He says he played the first thief character.</p><p></p><p>You are conflating two different things and it is going to simply confuse any uniformed readers. In the Blackmoor campaign, the players took on roles. They could be a wizard, and there were rules for how wizards advance in various levels - up to twelve that we know of. Or they could be a non-wizard - basically a fighter who could go from Flunky to Hero to Superhero to Lord.</p><p></p><p>These non-wizards could play any type of profession they liked - what in todays 5e world would be called a character Background. So, there was an inspector general (John Snider), a Dwarf (Ross Maker), a Merchant (Dan Nicholson) and yes a thief to thwart the merchant played by Megarry.</p><p></p><p>These "backgrounds" eventually became codified as classes in D&D, but in Blackmoor they were mechanically all the same. The thief class as an actually class with its own rules was invented by Daniel Wagoner in Aero hobbies as has been pointed out already.</p><p></p><p>Oh, one other thing, "Arneson transcripts" is simply confusing. There are a lot of various materials, like the Corner of the Table fanzine, letters, or the character sheets I've shown on my blog, which is I guess what you mean, but there is no unified body of transcripts per se.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Aldarron, post: 7810731, member: 89291"] David Megarry does not claim to have invented the thief [I]character class.[/I] He says he played the first thief character. You are conflating two different things and it is going to simply confuse any uniformed readers. In the Blackmoor campaign, the players took on roles. They could be a wizard, and there were rules for how wizards advance in various levels - up to twelve that we know of. Or they could be a non-wizard - basically a fighter who could go from Flunky to Hero to Superhero to Lord. These non-wizards could play any type of profession they liked - what in todays 5e world would be called a character Background. So, there was an inspector general (John Snider), a Dwarf (Ross Maker), a Merchant (Dan Nicholson) and yes a thief to thwart the merchant played by Megarry. These "backgrounds" eventually became codified as classes in D&D, but in Blackmoor they were mechanically all the same. The thief class as an actually class with its own rules was invented by Daniel Wagoner in Aero hobbies as has been pointed out already. Oh, one other thing, "Arneson transcripts" is simply confusing. There are a lot of various materials, like the Corner of the Table fanzine, letters, or the character sheets I've shown on my blog, which is I guess what you mean, but there is no unified body of transcripts per se. [/QUOTE]
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