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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BryonD" data-source="post: 6544866" data-attributes="member: 957">I completely respect your opinion on the ability to play Gandalf as a cleric or druid or whatever.  But this is a great example of how your experiences and past seem to be trapped and isolated in a bubble.  You said "As was well discussed in the magazines of the time, you also didn't play a magic-user to play a Gandalf-like character. Gandalf was more often modelled as a cleric" and now you are referencing a single item from White Dwarf.  I wouldn't be surprised that with enough digging you could find a stray bit of support somewhere in Dragon.  But the presence of "Gandalf as wizard" was ubiquitous.   Just look at all the "wizard/ magic-user" minis from that time period.  Even today an absurd percentage of them are blatantly based on Gandalf.  With the mass produced options today there are a lot of alternatives, but in the 70s and 80s if it didn't look like Gandalf it was pretty likely it looked like Merlin.  (And yes, you can cherry-pick exceptions.  If you look at a lot of them , the trend will strongly be there)You assessment is cool.  In my group your would get a lot of credit for playing a Gandalf inspired cleric, and for clinging more closely to the LotR narrative as strict inspiration.  I don't dispute that merits of that model as an interesting take.But you turn around and try to present this as the truism of how the game was intended, designed, and embraced by the community as a whole.  And then you cherry pick examples to make your case.  That is just absurd.  And it makes you look closed minded and oblivious to the experiences and input of a whole lot of other people.  Just step back and think about it.   Are you just typing crap to see how much you can snowjob people?  If so then by all means, knock yourself out.  But if you want to engage in conversations and make people understand you and maybe even get a new thought from others, then you really need to engage from a perspective that is outside your bubble.I didn't get really heavily playing until the 80s myself.  But the wizard = Gandalf or Merlin expectation was assumed to be true early on.  Yes, people would play away from that type quite by design, all the time.  But the foundation was well understood.Your comments on the differences  between the mechanics and narrative are accepted without dispute from me.  But the implication that Gandalf *could* have charmed someone was never a stretch.  No one ever felt that an elf or archer could ONLY do those things that Legolas did and no one felt that a wizard could only do the things that Gandalf did.  (Halfings tended to be vastly better thieves in D&D than Biblo, and Frodo was not really a thief at all).  So the players "as Gandalf" would do the cool thing that they wanted Gandalf to do.  And they would not get hung up on "Hey, Gandalf never actually did that."    Pretty soon Fireball is the go-to spell.  The perception over just a few months of play evolves from Gandalf could have done this to my Gandalf inspired magic-user does this all the time.   The disconnect is there, and yet the understanding and satisfaction with that understanding and enjoyment of the game and *being Gandalf* was commonplace.If you want to communicate with people outside your bubble, you should start by recognizing there is a lot of reality outside your bubble.</blockquote>

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