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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7335709" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yes, it is, usually, possible to play in a sub-optimal way and take the class you want, or at least the 'base' class (its VERY hard, even with 4d6 ordered as you want to qualify for the 'sub' classes in 1e). That assumes you aren't using 3d6 in order, which was the only known method when 1e PHB was released. With THAT method you are entirely incorrect, and I think its fair to judge what Gygax wrote in that light. Nor do I know anything in the PHB (or even the DMG) which 'strongly implies' anything. It was a known fact that if you dumped players with a sucky character they didn't like they would just find a way to die and roll again. So it wasn't uncommon to bow to the inevitable a bit and allow a player to start over if the result was particularly bad AND they weren't in the mood to ham it up and try to make a go of it (which we often did, heck it could be fun for a while). OD&D even codifies this to a small extent by allowing you to reduce one stat by 2 points and increase another by 1 point, though that was never implemented in 1e.It was an inevitable consequence of play in that era using those processes. I was there, and no amount of telling me different is going to change that. I mean, I have actual character sheets that have names like 'blah blah blah #7' and such written on them. It happened quite often. It was also common to just not bother to NAME the character until after a few levels since then you weren't stuck with some crappy name on your high level guy. In my friend's campaign there was a very high level wizard called 'Tribord VII'. Well, we thought it was amusing, and the character eventually obviously got a real history and some personality, but you can only imagine the endless hours of slogging away with nameless low-level throw-away PCs before that happened. I speak truth, and many others will corroborate this.You are missing the point Max. The whole point was that the prefatory description of play in 1e that Gygax put in the PHB in 1978 simply doesn't match the reality of play that his system actually presents AT ALL. In fact you play a character of a type drawn from a fairly narrow range of choices with attributes at least partially mandated by dice, and said character is then projected into a gritty world of dungeon looting in which their chances of reaching even 3rd level are fairly thin, at best. Its an interesting enough game, but it isn't AT ALL what was 'on the tin' so to speak. This is equally true of Original D&D, all three versions of Basic D&D, and of 2e. And to be perfectly frank, TSR missed the boat. There might have been any numbers of reasons for their demise that were business-related and whatnot, but ONE of things that hurt them was a seeming inability to produce a set of rules for their flagship product that delivered the sort of games a lot of the public was looking for. By the early 90's TSR's sales were waning, 2e never achieved the success of earlier 1e/Red Box, and they had entirely ceded thought leadership in RPGs to newer entrants like White Wolf who WERE able to produce games responding to many player's increased desire to actually play something that met their expectations in a way that they found more interesting. Admittedly, no other game has ever really topped D&D in overall sales, but I'm not at all sure that is a product of it being an inherently superior game. It has some elements that other games haven't duplicated (a very extensive and rather unique milieu, a steep and open-ended power curve, straightforward archetypes modeled by discrete classes, etc). OTOH 'modern' D&D, post TSR and post 3.x, has certainly had to embrace some of the innovations of the 90's in a sense, or at least respond to them. I don't think that's an accident. 1e-style play was simply too limited to remain the only possible offering of a game in the 2nd decade of the 21st Century. That is pretty clear to me.</blockquote>

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