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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9111482" data-attributes="member: 18">I don't think that's really a reasonable position - I think it's kind of sort of "honest bad faith" one if that makes any sense. I get that you believe it, but it's also a sort of butterfly effect claim that means, by the same logic, we could never ask any question about anything speculative, because of the butterfly effect. In which case why be involved in the discussion?As I illustrated you can dig through things and look at influences. Not everything is instantly influenced by D&D. D&D isn't that big a deal for quite a while, and without D&D, other, similar sources might well have been chosen.I mean, we can imagine another fantasy RPG replacing a non-existent D&D - probably a little later in history - so with different influences itself. D&D derived heavily from fantasy novels of the era and it's quite likely another RPG would. By even the early 1980s, or with different people, it'd be a different bunch. Some things would be very likely - that there would both "fighting men" and "wizards" in the game, that some sort of lightly magical or non-magical bard/rogue/swashbuckler-type role would exist, because these people exist in the books of the era.We can say other things would be astonishingly unlikely - as I've explained repeatedly, Clerics are an absolute freak of nature. The circumstances that combined to create them are basically impossible to repeat. There's no way at all anything much like that would have emerged independently of D&D specifically. Monks could only really appear in the 1970s, with a bunch of people obsessed with specifically 1970s martial arts movies. Vancian Wizards are also incredibly unlikely and bizarre, to the point where no-one not directly copying D&D, even when heavily inspired by D&D, has ever copied them! 2E's Bard, from which all current Bards spring, also seems pretty unlikely.(The closest thing I could see us getting to a Cleric would be a sort of Van Helsing/Exorcist class at some point, but they'd a class dedicated to destroying evil supernatural beings, and might well not even be a spellcaster in a games-rules sense.)So we can identify some stuff which would definitely be out, for sure.</blockquote>

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