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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercule" data-source="post: 6935394" data-attributes="member: 5100">Meh, kind of. Gygax was explaining how to play a game. He was also a very tactical thinker. Thus, he focused on the gamist and strategic bits. He was also more inclined to favor DMs creating home brew worlds, so he wasn't inclined to throw tons of coherent fiction at the reader.On the other hand, one of the things that a lot of us grognards miss is the "Gygaxian prose", which is filled with anecdotes and random fiction. Gary had a way of exciting the imagination that, quite frankly, doesn't exist in 5E. Instead, we've got a focus on a single, well defined setting. In 5E, you're asked which of the five factions do you want to belong to. In AD&D, Gary had breadcrumbs scattered all over the place that begged the participants to flesh something out. When comparing 5E to 1E, I still long for the pull I felt to create interesting new personas, just to follow a half-baked crumb that he dropped. While 5E is still a fun game, it replaces the vibrancy of the undiscovered with a staid list of options (roles, if you will) that can be recombined, but are generally known.As for the "I wear yellow and am afraid of spiders", those were the exact sort of traits I saw on 1E characters. I remember the anti-paladin who wore sky blue full plate, the necromancer who rode on a couch carried by zombies, the quarter-elf whose father was corrupted by an evil artifact, the pacifist ranger, the other ranger who was afraid of goblinoids, and 2nd level necromancer who had all the PCs convinced he was a lich -- through roleplaying his persona.The bolded part really confuses me. Are you saying that, because my character swings a sword, I'm now engaged in a "functional role"? I've read that line several times, now. I keep thinking I have to be reading it wrong, but I don't see any other way to take it.If this is, in fact, what you mean, I think we're done here. I guess I have to agree that roleplaying requires one (or one's character) to take functional actions.Agreed, which is why I said they can't really be separable. The interaction with the fiction only exists because of the persona.True. In that case, I still think of roleplaying as being about the persona. Any functional roles are purely a consequence of the persona.Most of the "detail" involved an "appeal to authority" vis-a-vis quotes from Gygax. I provided some opposing quotes, and I believe others did, as well. Additionally, I don't think that Gary is the final arbiter of what is and is not roleplaying. He may have birthed (or, at least, midwived) the hobby, but it has grown up.My belief on the history is that a certain amount of it is due to the hobby being young -- the archetypes were still archetypes, not cliches. The early game was also closer to its war gaming roots and hadn't matured, yet. Even then, there's plenty of evidence to indicate that Gary and company injected quite a bit of persona into what they were doing.Actually, come to think of it, the further back I go into my gaming history, the less I see my group concerned with functional roles. I didn't see a cleric played until the late 1990s, as far as I recall. No one I played with liked them. Only one person in any given group typically wanted to bother with magic-users, either. So, we had the fighter on the left, the fighter on the right, the ranger, and (maybe) the thief. Functional niche wasn't even a consideration. We just adjusted our tactics/strategy. It's only been since sometime in 3E that my group has made an effort to take function into consideration -- most likely because the D&D team has made efforts to balance each functional role against the others.</blockquote>

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