I started doing some 1e comparisons when I wrote the previous entry, but it quickly grew out of control and I decided to section it off, so that 2e classes also get to be compared on their own merits. That said, let's look how classes stack up in 1e vs 2e: What has been left out from the accumulations of classes from 1e? Monks and Assassins were in the 1e PHB and dropped. Thief-Acrobats, Cavaliers and Barbarians introduced in Unearthed Arcana didn't make the cut either. I say to all of this - Good riddance. Let's take a closer look: Monks . Mechanically, Monk was probably the shittiest class ever devised for D&D, and conceptually too marginal to merit being salvaged for 2e. Are 3-5e really richer for bringing it back? I think not. Assassins ! The original edgelord class. In Gygax' own words, "The anti-thesis of weal." Bleeeergh. Having a core class that must, by the book, be of evil alignment in your core rulebook is just a recipe for bad group dynamics, i...

The AD&D appraisal show is back on the road. Today is about classes and it's a bit long, so here is the  tl;dr - a high level run-through and review of the classes, priests get the most attention, we look at the weird asymmetrical XP progression inherited from 1st edition where warriors are the slowest to advance from 7th to 14th level and wrap up with what racial requirements and certain classes means for the implied AD&D world.  Alright, let's get to it. Don't tell me you seriously believed we were done showcasing art from the revised core rulebooks? Few things are more defining for a DnD game than its take on classes. And in 2e, we find probably the best take on it that has been done. Presentation-wise, they are, finally, organised into the sensible class categories the game has been asking for ever since OD&D introduced the spuriously defined notion of 'sub-class':  Warrior (Fighter, Ranger, Paladin) Wizard (Magic-User, Specialist) Priest (Cleric, Dr...

Besides the semi-immortality of PCs , that is. I bet you're dying to know. The answer is its pluralities of disassociated choices and disassociated designs. Short and sweet, this could be my shortest blog entry for a long while. Who knew blogging was this easy? Let's just party instead. Alright alright, I'll go into some detail to explain what I mean. Others have gone into more detail  about disassociated mechanics . Briefly a a disassociated mechanic is a mechanic that does not refer to an event being resolved in the fiction. "I cast Charm Person " is an example of an associated mechanic. You take an action in the game world and something happens in the rule mechanics (a save vs spells) that then affects the outcome in the fiction too. Most infamous of disassociated mechanics is Trip attacking oozes in 4e , where the action of "tripping someone" in the fiction is wholly secondary to the mechanic initiation and outcome. But 4e has of course often been de...

 A frequent objection given against my rants against certain post-TSR trends in D&D is that my rants do not target the system per se, but rather table behaviour. That it is possible to use it in a different way and not go where the game is implicitly inviting you to go. I call this phenomenon of game invitation "system nudging". The basic idea is: If you have rules in the core system for how fighters may build a stronghold, then you will see this happening more often than in a system that does not make this part of its core rules. In other words, although the system is not necessarily telling you that you should  do this, it is nonetheless nudging   you in that direction. It's basically the system telling you how it wants to played. How often does this happen in Classic D&D vs 5e? The mortality rules for each set will give you a good idea. There are degrees of nudging, and types. Some are intentional, others accidental because the developers didn't consider ...

 We've all read S. John Ross' seminal Medieval Demographics Made Easy  [MDME],  I presume. I for one adore S. John Ross and have spent long hours on his excellent gaming blog .  Trouble, his piece not as usable as it presents itself to be. At least not for the kind of fantasy setting that seeks to emulate a world with some measure of wilderness to explore.  Ross' baseline seems to be pre-Black Death 14h century Europe. But I don't consider this to be a good era to use, since it reflects a time where the remnant frontiers of Europe were basically non-existent and internal development in terms of arable land and infrastructure fully exploited. I would rather look to the 11th century, which strikes a good middle ground between being solidly in the high Middle Ages, but not yet having maximized its population, arable cultivation and development potential. There were still frontiers, tribal lands and unexploited and unexplored lands to find, alongside well developed ...

Mmmm, races from the good old days, Before tieflings, drow and dragonborn became core options in the World of Warcraft menagerie that is modern D&D. This is the D&D liberals want. There are no half-orcs in second edition. I don't miss them and honesty feel half-elves could just as well have been left out. Although it is the ability score adjustments that perhaps initially draws the eye on that first page of the PHB chapter, that is really only a small part of the page and everything else is actually the interesting stuff: Minimum and maximum ability scores. Class Restrictions.  Level Limits.  How can we know that Dwarves are a durable and stocky lot? Because no dwarf will ever have less than STR 8 and CON 12. We can know elves are clever and prepossessing folk, because no elf has less than 8 in INT and CHA. It goes the other way too - Dwarves have a cap of 17 for DEX and CHA (which means with the -1 CHA adjustment, no dwarves with more than CHA 16) and can never  ...