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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aaron L" data-source="post: 3375556" data-attributes="member: 926">The Crystal Shard came out January 1st, 1988.  AD&D 2nd Edition was released middle to late 1989.  The Crystal Shard was immensely successful from the get go, if I recall correctly (I have heard lots of horror stories from my friends who were playing at the time of people wanting to play Drizzt clones all over the place), and with the (commonly assumed) attitude of TSR at the time of not bothering with market research and assuming that people would buy whatever they put out "just because the were TSR" (as is the common wisdom nowadays, and is held as the reason for TSR's downfall) and the attitude at TSR of doing it's best to distance itself from Gygax as much as possible (according to several sources), the dual wielding Ranger coming straight from Drizzt is the only logical colclusion I can reach, and a year to include the change in the upcoming game books seems like enough time to me, especially if there was a fan in the development team championing the change, which I believe to be the case.  The 2E Ranger is so drastically different from the 1E Ranger that it's almost staggering, with the two having nothing in common but the name and both having vague "favored enemy" rules (giant-class in 1E, species enemy in 2E.)  Considering that almost every other class in 2E was a direct port of the 1E classes (with the exception of the Illusionist where they were trying to make Specialist Mages more uniform), the drastic alteration of the Ranger, which coincidently made it a close match for the abilities and preferred methods of Drizzt, makes it very hard to believe that they weren't trying to remake the Ranger class in his image.  Otherwise it's a case of parallel evolution on par with the old Star Trek:TOS episodes where they would encounter planets that had developed exactly like Earth and had their own Roman Empires and such.  In other words, highly, highly unlikely.  I'll employ Occam's Razor and hold to my conclusion that Drizzt was the instigating factor in the change.   I've always assumed that they originally had a 2E Ranger much more inline with the 1E version, but ditched it at the last minute in favor of what was eventually put out in order to cash in on Drizzt's popularity... or perhaps someone at TSR at the time was a big fan of the character, and decided to remake the Ranger for 2E as one more way to distance the game from 1E.Compare the 1E Paladin and the 2E Paladin, and then compare the 1E Ranger with the 2E Ranger.  Whereas the Paladins have very little difference between them (discounting Unearthed Arcana Cavalier-Paladins), the differences between the two versions of the Ranger makes my eyes pop.  It went from stormtrooper-commando slayer-of-humanoid-hordes with survival skills for behind the enemy lines, to a mystical forest warden and hunter with animal empathy.  Now both are good concepts, and I don't want to disparage the later Rangers, but the 2 and 3E versions are just so different from the original conception of the class that I still feel it's loss.</blockquote>

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