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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 4815771" data-attributes="member: 21169">Yeah. I know a lot of people see D&D as always having been a toolkit from which the DM is expected to pluck what's appropriate. The expectation is, I think, that, like my old Greyhawk DM, he would use a very reduced set of monsters and magic items, and maybe disallow the freakier classes like the monk.I never saw D&D that way because I was influenced by what I read in the scenarios and setting books, in the 80s that would have been Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms and Mystara. All these sources seemed to be totally wahoo in the sense that there were lots of different monsters and lots of magic items. The mainstream settings were never Tolkienesque/medieval in the way that Birthright was. I mean, seriously, the sheer variety and quantity of monsters in all the vanilla D&D settings is totally bonkers.Also the encounter and magic item tables in the DMG use the full range, suggesting the default setting is wahoo.I recently read Vance's Dying Earth books for the first time and I thought - that's D&D! It's a closer match for the D&D default setting than anything else in fiction imo. The world is a very weird place. Travel is insanely dangerous. Journey for a few hours through a forest and you meet four different monsters. There are tons of magic items.  Science and magic blend together. Cugel's rod that fires 'blue concentrate' seems clearly to be a technological item from an earlier era. It even runs out of charges like a D&D wand. (The concept of charges itself is technological rather than traditionally magical, no magic items in Lord of the Rings ever run out of charges.)</blockquote>

Verification