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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9851204" data-attributes="member: 7052563">I would have been almost nine years old when this issue came out, and just getting interested in RPGs as the D&D craze peaked in the USA.  I was friends with these two brothers whose parents were friends with my parents, and the older one had many of the popular RPGs of the time, including B/X D&D, AD&D 1E, Star Frontiers, and eventually WFRP 1E.  My interest was first sparked by ancillary products like the D&D action figure toy line and the D&D cartoon that aired on Saturday mornings on US TV, but it really took off as I thumbed through my friend’s RPG rulebooks.  At first I mostly just looked at the illustrations and read the flavor text.  I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the various Star Frontiers species.  The SF rulebook characterized Humans as unusually curious risk-takers and natural explorers who loved using tech gear to solve problems, inspiring a popular saying among the insectoid Vrusk species, “Mr. Human and his Indestructible Junk Show”.  Science fiction has always been a mirror held up to modern society, but I wonder if anyone has ever written a book or academic paper about the particular ways in which sci-fi comments on human nature and history when contrasted with imaginary alien species and civilizations.  Many sci-fi writers will follow the TSR route and produce a flattering picture of human adaptability and the drive to expand our horizons, but you also see counterpoints which portray humans as a ravenous, warlike plague spreading across the galaxy - effectively the “orks” of the setting.  I noticed all of the various faerie beings in the D&D rulebooks, but I rarely saw them actually used at the table.  I did use the Quicklings from MM2 once in a homebrew wilderness adventure because I liked their high speed invisible attack powers, but that was about it.  No one in my local groups really used fey much, probably because we thought they were a bit too childish - an irony that is always lost on children who want to grow up and become teenagers, and especially on boys who want to seem “macho” or “rugged”.  But we also rarely used classic Good-aligned beings like the metallic dragons, Blink Dogs, or Unicorns, simply because we were murder hobos who wanted to slay evil monsters and loot their treasures, not sit around jawing with the good guys.  Apparently somebody at TSR agreed with us, because fey rarely showed up in the classic D&D modules, and Goodman Games definitely followed this example when they promised that DCC adventures would bring back the “good old days“ when NPCs were there to be killed.  I did not really understand at the time how the D&D sensibility was based not on the primary sources of European folklore and mythology in which faeries figure prominently, but on secondary sources like pulp sword & sorcery, which were Gary Gygax’s personal favorites.  As a kid I would have enjoyed reading this article about fey beings but would probably not have actually used it, but now I really like the way WotC has used fey more than TSR ever did in products like Witchlight Carnival and the new Lorwyn digital supplement.  The OSR is also using fey in creative settings like Dolmenwood.I wonder if the City in the Swamp adventure allows the PCs to find the other assassin and get involved with why they did not carry out their mission, essentially picking a side in the conflict between the two, or is the plot just an excuse to lead the PCs into a standard hex crawl.  Shapechanger or doppelganger species are staples of fantasy and SF precisely because of their potential for assassination, espionage, and impersonation.“I’m not a fan of refusing to let the players read any of the rulebooks to keep things simple.” I remember my older friend getting a bit nervous about letting me read his rulebooks, and making me promise not to memorize details like monster stats.  He was probably worried about players knowing too much about the rules because he was remembering EGG’s advice in the AD&D rulebooks, which claimed that any player who so much as glanced at the DMG was a filthy cheater deserving an ignoble death (for their PC, right? <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😅" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f605.png" title="Grinning face with sweat    :sweat_smile:" data-shortname=":sweat_smile:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />).  The “Viking hat” style of adversarial judging common in that era often included attempts to keep players from owning or even reading the rules, but I am not sure why.  It seems unlikely to have been a product of the hobby’s war gaming roots, because war games usually required players to read the rules as there was often no referee.  The letters touch on two perennial debates in the RPG scene.  My adolescent D&D groups had a fair number of unwritten rules and unspoken assumptions, and two of them were “no Evil characters” and “no player vs. player”.  We would joke about fighting city guards or picking pockets, but never actually did anything of the sort except in CRPGs with convenient save points, and even then only out of curiosity, before continuing with the noble quest plot written into the game.  The only time we ever played Evil in D&D was in a goofy one-off which served as a last hurrah for our group.The letter about infravision reminds me of how I always thought it was strange that the D&D rules often tried to describe the magical elements of the game in scientific (or pseudo-scientific) terms.  I distinctly remember trying and failing to understand what exactly ultravision was for, and why so few PCs or monsters had it.  There was also lots of obsolete medical jargon like “dipsomania” or “imbecile” which seemed to clash with the implied medieval setting.  Looking back, I think it was a combination of at least three things: Gygax’s love of showing off his self-taught erudition and expansive vocabulary; the simulationist trend that was popular in RPGs of the time (the falling damage debates were the stuff of legend...); and the way pulp literature mixed elements like super-science and sorcery before the definitive split between fantasy and science fiction.</blockquote>

Verification