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Faraer
Great Reader
3308 Posts |
 Posted - 21 May 2004 : 18:48:12
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It would be hard to argue that renaming all girdles 'belts', like removing all irregular plurals, wasn't treating the audience as idiots.
The 1E class/level restrictions were based not just on game balance (a legitimate decider of continuity, according to 3Ethink), but also on stated and implied social, cultural, and biological facts about the World of Greyhawk, the implicit setting. Dwarves don't have the ability to be magic-users; paladins and rangers are human institutions but elves have a tradition of multiclass fighter-mages. It's not, as sometimes said by 3E apologists, arbitrary.
2E softened those restrictions at the same time as forgetting about many of their reasons (a microcosm of David Cook ignoring or not understanding the game's original design principles). With 3E written to represent a broader range of heroic fantasy, not just Oerthalikes, it's natural that it doesn't write those limits into the rules. But the limits -- whether as absolute rules or DM discouragement -- should stand as applicable to specific campaign settings, and the assumption must be that the DM will say what's possible and what's not.
In the Realms, many of the norms that created the pre-3E class/level limits apply. The Realms mindset tends to say 'X doesn't do Y' rather than 'X can't do Y' -- as in the case of humans worshipping demihuman gods -- trusting the DM to allow or disallow exceptions and trusting players not to choose things that are disruptive but aren't forbidden. |
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Prestige Classes and Feats
