We definitely didn’t play all the rules as written (hell, Gygax didn’t play the rules as written) but we were cool with racial attribute mods. Made enough sense that halflings are weaker than dwarfs and dwarfs aren’t as smart as elves or whatever. I don’t remember it ever coming up in terms of gender – female characters were pretty rare and, when someone did have one, it was usually a cleric, magic-user or maybe a thief. No one was playing human barbarian women for the 18/50 vs 18/00 debate to come up. We did happily disregard the racial level limits because those were dumb and unfun.
(emphasis added) I am fascinated by this qualifier.
I did like it when they removed attribute penalties from the game. But now they’re moving towards removing racial ability score increases from the game. Hell, they’re moving away from using the word race and replacing it with lineage or something. So when you create your character you’ll simply stick your ability score increases anywhere you’d like.
We all remember that Hank, Eric, Diana, Presto, Sheila, and Bobby were transported to the realm of Dungeons & Dragons but few people remember that Lyrix the Beholder was transported to our realm at the same time. So Lyrix was a regular in our group for a number of years even though she wasn’t a very good player. But it’s tough to get rid of a player who can disintegrate you.
fwiw, I was a human woman (well, girl) playing in the late 1970s.
Excellent answer!
I think our D&D club in junior high in the mid-eighties had two girls in it, IIRC, out of maybe 8-10 kids. There were definitely all-male groups I played in, especially since we often played at sleepovers, but I think most of my groups as an adult have had multiple women in them.
I didn’t mean to imply that there were no women or girls who played D&D back then. I really didn’t start playing until around 1988 and it wasn’t until AD&D 2nd edition a year later that I started buying my own books. Though I knew of a few girls who played, from what I could tell the player base was overwhelmingly made up of white adolescent males. Seeing a girl at the hobby shop or browsing the D&D books at B. Dalton’s was not a common sight. Though TSR did include women and girls in their advertisements for D&D as seen in this 80s television commercial (Youtube link).
No doubt part of my perception has to do with how isolated we were back then. As a kid without a driver’s license, I had a very limited number of potential people to find who were interested in AD&D. I didn’t even know a lot about the people who created the gaming materials we used. For years I thought Tracy Hickman was a woman and back in the early 1990s was surprised to learn that Mike Pondsmith is black.
No girls playing in junior high (c. 1985) and the only one I remember in high school was a friend’s girlfriend who was mostly there to hang out with him (I’m still friends with her and she’s never had any real interest in fantasy). A couple women in college and any “girlfriends” at the table were legitimately interested in their own right and would have been there even if they weren’t dating another player. Pre-Covid, when I was playing/running Adventurers League games, it was maybe 20% women – usually one at a table but I don’t think I ever saw more than two at a table. In regular campaigns, ours had two out of seven, the other table had maybe 4/7 and there was a “ladies night” group of six women who played their own thing. So a lot more common now than back in the day in my personal limited experience.
In 5e terms, I am awarding you a point of inspiration for this response.
I think he meant “human as opposed to imaginary.”
It does not seem sexist that a brewster or spinster would not be as strong as someone who had lifted weights and engaged in martial arts every day for the past ten years. It does seem ridiculous when the rulesets make it a point to mention that the female preternatural freaks of nature, living legends, and demigods that are typical RPG characters (they are not playing as obscure bureaucrats, right?) be necessarily weaker than their male counterparts.
*bump*
Looks like this - I hesitate to call it a movement, maybe tendency? - is continuing, which I’m all for. Even R.A.Salvatore is on-board. Woke Drizzt, here we come:
We’re past the point where it’s a movement or a tendency it’s the new status quo. WotC made their decision a while back and these are simply the results. While I’m only personally mildly bothered by the Drow, I realize where critics are coming from and I’m not at all bothered by the prospect of changing them or orcs. What the D&D player base found acceptable in 1991 isn’t necessarily acceptable to them in 2021. And the game will continue to change in order to suit the needs of a contemporary audience.
Okay, this is sort of stupid, but…
I read a lot of R.A. Salvatore novels when I was a kid, particularly the stuff with Drizzt in it. I’ve long since outgrown D&D novels and have done my share of eye-rolling at the general hamminess of those books. But there was a scene in one of the novel where Drizzt and friends go to Silverymoon, and the leader of the city blocks Drizzt from entering, telling him, basically, “I know you’re a good dude, but people will freak the fuck out if they see a drow walking around my city, so I can’t let you in. Maybe, someday, things between our people will be better, and you can come back.” As a teen, that scene got to me - I was young enough to really buy into the “tragic outsider” thing, but also old enough to recognize that “drow are evil” was a genre trope, and wouldn’t ever really be changed, and that “someday” wouldn’t ever actually come.
Except now it has, and Drizzt can finally go to Silverymoon, and I’m honestly a little verklempt over closure to a storyline that I stopped following over two decades ago.
This one makes little sense to me. It’s clear from the books that Drow aren’t inherently evil - the influence of Lolth in the massive Underdark cities is.
There are even groups living in enclaves on the surface that worship Eilistraee.
How “obvious” it was definitely depended on which books you read. Good Drow certainly weren’t emphasized in any of the 3.5 source books I’ve read, including the ones focused on elves or the underdark.
It sounds like all they’re doing is fleshing out two new Drow communities, jungle drow who are druid focused and arctic drow. Which is fine by me, I think DND went a bit overboard with the number of races. I’d rather have a bunch of different nations of the same core group of races than your generic fantasy “elf nation, orc nation, dwarf nation”.
That’s something Eberron did really well.
I was in high school in the mid-late 1990s and there were zero women playing AD&D (we were using 2e and later 2.5), although we would have loved them to join us - but it was seen as ridiculously nerdy in a bad kind of way and even those of us with girlfriends basically had to accept they weren’t interested and thought what we were doing was at best “some guy thing” and at worst embarrassing by association.
For years afterwards I only encountered maybe two or three women who played D&D and they were generally of the “someone’s older sister who really likes fantasy novels” variety or otherwise “weird” and it wasn’t until the 2010s that I recall meeting more than a couple of ‘regular’ women who played D&D and and it’s really probably been in the past four or five years that it’s finally been embraced as a completely mainstream, fun activity for everyone to enjoy.
I’m glad to see that evolution and while I think the “are orc racist?” debate is eye-rollingly ridiculous (I’m with @Jophiel that they’re basically the fantasy equivalent of generic goons to be dispatched for XP or make it a bit harder to loot that treasure/rescue the prisoner/get from point A to point B), I can see younger (as in 20s) players wanting to go for “Humans with hats” rather than “Well everyone knows Dwarves are hardy people so they get +1 Constitution, but they’re not exactly nimble so they also get -1 Dexterity” or whatever which is how the older systems worked.
What’s interesting is the “Racial bonuses/penalties” thing still very much exists in computer RPGs and I’m (fortunately) not seeing people screaming in appreciable numbers that World of Warcraft or Skyrim is racist.
I was in high school in the 70s, and i played ad&d. Yes, I’m a nerd. All the guys who played were also nerds.
I don’t remember when i started playing, but i think it was jr high.
In my game now, I took the position that, if you play a +2/+1 race, you can either (a) move the +1 to whatever stat you want or (b) reverse the stats (so you get +2 Cha, +1 Dex instead of +2 Dex, +1 Cha). This has made everyone I play with happy and they feel it’s a good compromise between retaining racial flavor and not being condemned to an unplayable character that “only” has a 15 in its primary attribute since you can always get that 16.
I was talking about the Drizzt books Miller was discussing. In that series, it’s clear that even Drizzt’s father was not evil, and did everything he could to fight against the evil in Menzoberranzan, even after death.
And Drizzt was allowed into Silverymoon fairly early in the series - there were even rumors of romance between Drizzt and the ruler of Silverymoon.
That said, Eilistraae was officially canon in Drow of the Underdark, in 1991. Emphasized, no. Already part of the Forgotten Realms? 30 years ago.
I mean, the whole point of the Drizzt books was “Not all Drow are evil”. It’s kind of hard to avoid that point when the main character is a drow who isn’t evil.