Whatever happened to the Mystara setting, Veeky Forums?

Whatever happened to the Mystara setting, Veeky Forums?

I like looking into some old stuff from time to time, but what I glimpsed of Mystara doesn't look attractive.

It was weird and colorful and different, and that is emphatically NOT what the 90s wanted in their media. Also it was tied pretty strongly to Basic D&D, so when Wizards killed the Basic line it was only natural that it would join the myriad of other settings from Basic and Advanced on the chopping block.

Shadow Elves are still my favorite take on Dark Elves.

Someone did a 5e conversion that was mediocre last time I looked, but as says, it went the way of the dodo when Basic died off.

Glantri will always remain my favorite part of the setting.

Not really thread-related but the arcade game is really fun, I love the gnoll sprite

D&D lost something when elves, dwarfs and shitlings became player races from player classes.

and some more when it left restrictions from the 2nd ed...

3e.

Yeah the arcade games are fantastic.
There's a also a fan made game set in Greyhawk that's pretty good, pic related.

Go away, dad.

>tfw your son doesn't like Basic D&D

I told your mom we should feed you to the lions at the zoo, but oh no, maybe he'll turn out all right.

How did DnD get away with calling the wizard "Magic User"? The Fighter isn't "Sword User"

They were separate in OD&D.

Advanced D&D is older than Basic.

It was "Magic-User" and "Fighting Man" for a good while. Clerics were a mistake.

>They were separate in OD&D.

Only technically, race restrictions were race-as-class in all but name. Basic just slapped a label on the rules that were already there.

>Advanced D&D is shittier than Basic.

ftfy

>Only technically,
Dwarf Thieves tho.

Ye olde dnd was the last time elves and dorfs felt rare and magical. When even the system points out that nothuman races are their own classes, you know that shit's special.
But nooo, let's make everything humans but with pointyears/tall/short/strong.

No wonder people flock to exotic shit and bird people. They still feel fresh and different while the staple races are different shapes of the same thing. Sure, a good GM can work wonders but It's still a thing.
/rant.
I am old

You missed the point of it. It's not that they're rare, it's that they're archetypes.

>When even the system points out that nothuman races are their own classes, you know that shit's special.

Mind you, that never really sat right with me. The idea that every member of X race is piegeonholded into a given role.

>The idea that every member of X race is piegeonholded into a given role.

That's not true, though, that's just you interpreting it that way. Consider that mature elves with a position in their society don't normally run around with a bunch of crooked humans robbing tombs, nor do dwarves. The only ones that would do so are rebellious young people. It's basically their races' juvenile delinquents that wanna go hang out behind the Tomb of Horrors and smoke with the human kids.
And even in Basic D&D, you can play an elf thief if you like. Your class is Thief, you just happen to have been raised by humans and don't know how to do all the magic elf stuff that elves raised in their society would know.

Not everyone can be everything. NuD&D is all about equality and multiculturalism.

>Consider that mature elves with a position in their society don't normally run around with a bunch of crooked humans robbing tombs, nor do dwarves.

Nor would mature humans with a position in society.

Yeah but it gets weird when those races do have examples of those things but PCs can't be them. Like say, Elven Priests of the Elven Gods but the 'Elf' class can't do that.

Same thing that happened to most the settings TSR made. WOTC dropped it when third edition began.

>Dragonlance went back to Margret Weiss.
>Ravenloft ended up with Sword & Sorcery(White Wolf)
>Blackmoor was handled by Arneson
>Greyhawk & Forgotten Realms had steady support
>Dark Sun had support later(4e)

Everything else was fan supported. Dragon Magazine had an issue dedicated to old settings in 3.5, but that's all.

Now It's just Forgotten Realms. Stuff from other settings just gets shamelessly pulled into FR

>Nor would mature humans with a position in society.

My point exactly -- PCs are not representative of "every member of X race." They're obviously crazy misfits.

It's already odd enough that the evangelical human clerics will go down into dungeons with a bunch of grave robbers, it would be doubly weird for insular elven priests to do so, IMO.

Yeah but we also have human paladins going and robbing graves alongside barbarians and clerics and wizards. It just messes with my suspension of disbelief to go 'Yeah, humans of basically any sort ever can be PCs but other races only get the most stereotypical members'

>human paladins going and robbing graves
Not really a thing unitl AD&D, and even then paladins had really messy restrictions that expressly prohibited them from many fun and normal things.

Weren't AD&D paladins like 0.001% of PCs by RAW, due to the ridiculous attribute requirements?

...

Not in OD&D. All you had were Thieves, Clerics, Fighters and Magic-Users. It makes sense that humans would just have those for classes, when NPC humans could be aristocrats, priests, monks (of the Christian variety, less the Buddhist kung-fu kind).
Also the assumption was that demihumans were rare outside of their homelands. An elf high priest hob-nobbing it with a bunch of human tomb robbers makes no sense to me (unless he hid his identity, which it would make even more sense to act like a 'stereotypical member' of their race.

Oh fuck off with that shit, if you want to play something then it can't be "rare and magical", it need to be an acutal balanced race, leave your special snowflake complex on the door

Whoops. Posted that in the wrong thread.

1-in-54 for OD&D, all they needed was 17 Charisma.
Also Gary was notorious for fudging the dice.


>All you had were Thieves
Thieves weren't in the Little Brown Books; they were added in Supplement II, same as Paladins.
They were actually a last minute (and completely unplaytested) addition to Supplement II, Paladins predate them significantly.

Yes, and that also contributed to them not going around merrily robbing tombs by virtue of being largely non-existing.

Not this guy but I get your point, I really do, but as much as I'm okay with having no dwarf magic user, it's wierd not to be able to play other roles than the stereotypical elf. You can't be an elf or dwarf thief (which would make sense outside of their homeland) etc.
I like playing this when I play old DnD but honestly I'm glad they got rid of it in later editions.
I'd like race-specific classes instead of simply restraining anything not human.

>You can't be an elf or dwarf thief

c >even in Basic D&D, you can play an elf thief if you like. Your class is Thief, you just happen to have been raised by humans and don't know how to do all the magic elf stuff that elves raised in their society would know.

>You can't be an elf or dwarf thief (which would make sense outside of their homeland) etc.
You explicitly can though?

That's OD&D+Greyhawk though. (proto-AD&D) We were discussing Basic.

>be elf
>make living stealing shit
>lose ability to see in dark
That's dumb as fuck.

Hey, if you don't learn to use it right as a child, it atrophies and you lose it.

responded to , who was explicitly discussing OD&D.

What if I'm an elf who got into thievery later in life?

Wouldn't someone who goes about stealing things in the dark be using it all the time?

Oh, my bad.

Also, being a thief should make you learn how to see in the dark more, not less. Who has more use for being able to see in the dark, a thief or a warrior?

Were you raised by elves? Then I'd let you have infravision, but your family isn't going to be happy with you actually thieving.
If you were raised by humans, no infravision for you.

Only if you were thieving as a small child. And I'm not doing dickens here, so cut that minmaxer shit out.

No you see: Human thieves steal in the dark because humans can't see in the dark. Elven thieves clearly don't because elves can see in the dark, so instead they steal in broad daylight!

Heh. I like the cut of your jib, user!

How does a biological vision type go away? Heck, most elves won't use infravision for most of their lives because it doesn't let you do day to day stuff very well, so even elves will use lights at night.

But 'seeing in the dark' here means an explicitly supernatural infravision ability that only elves/dwarfs can develop with proper and timely care from their racially homogenous and non-degenerate integrated communities.

>How does a biological vision type go away?

Same way feral children don't develop the power of speech, and have great difficulty learning to do so later in life. Brain structures that aren't used atrophy. And that's before you put elf family magic rituals into the equation.

>Nor would mature humans with a position in society.
Naaaaaah. Kings and Barons get up to that shit. Gotta' raise those war funds, amirite?

None of that implies that there aren't any thieves in those communities.

I generally run it as a cold war situation between Thyatis and Alphatia. We had some fun times.

Yeah but it's a vision type. As long as there is 'Dark, ever' they'd be using it. It's not like speech where they can go a long time without it.

Stealing? Among dwarves and elves? What do you think they are, humans who look funny?
It might happen rarely among dwarves who haven't learned proper clan loyalty, but there are no records of any dwarf ever having done it, and no grave markers where any such dwarves might have buried had they existed, far away from the family plot they have no right to.

Yeah but you see, thieves in an elven community would never be allowed to leave. They wouldn't exile the thief or have them go on the run, after all.

So what you're telling me is that race-as-class dictates a huge amount of my setting's demihumans to me, and fixing that would require me to rewrite the classes entirely or bolt racial bits of one onto another to the point that I should have just played a system without it and adjusted the allowed classes per race? I can see why this trash was binned.

It's not just atrophy that's the problem, you need your family to train you. It has to be developed via ancient ritual or it won't happen..
The atrophy just means you can't go to your racial homelands and develop it later on. (Or maybe you can, I might let a player swap one level's worth of XP to buy it, now that I think about it. The longer he waits the more costly it gets, too, which is nice.)

I mean, if someone wants to play a mary sue like an elven thief rather than an elf who can fight like a fighting man and cast spells like a spellcaster.

Yeah, it's flavorful and makes the races feel different. Can't have that shit.

>It's not just atrophy that's the problem, you need your family to train you. It has to be developed via ancient ritual or it won't happen..

...which rituals? I can't remember a single case of 'How you see' being mentioned as a ritual thing in any of the old books?

>Dwarf thief in Basic

We're in houserule territory here, user, have been for a half an hour or more. This is all basically "what I would do at my table if it came up"

>it's retarded and makes the races feel like caricatures
FTFY

You'd know a lot about caricatures, since you post like one, right user?

This thread has almost nothing to do with Mystara

It's not too useful around people who uses candles and torches.

Yeah, OP's question got answered really quickly, now there's nothing left to do except waffle on about dwarf thieves.

If you dont like it, you can go complain to the ONE (1) Veeky Forums janitor. I don't know what time of day he's on, but you can find him in /twgg/.

It's kind of funny that even Mystara, the setting designed specifically for Basic,the one place the race-as-class assumptions should be true, got rid of race-as-class.

What, you mean the Mystara conversion for 5e? I don't think that counts, user.

They are though? That's the whole point.
'Dwarf wizards' are an abberation, not an innovation.

I've never read the 2e stuff but assume he meant it.

It's still silly, since 2e inherited 1e's rules which had already separated race and class. Of course they split them when converting them, that's why it's called a conversion.

No, I mean the GAZ series and Hollow World have more classes for some races (dwarf-cleric, the halfling Master [though that's more of a prestige class than an alternate class], the shadow elves having two classes from the start, the warrior-elf from Hollow World, most of the new Hollow Earth monstrous races being able to be shamans or wokani), which makes the game less race-as-class and more "set of racial classes".

THUNDER
THUNDER
THUNDERCATS
HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

"Set of racial classes" is still race as class, though. It's no different than there being multiple human classes. You still don't get to just pick whatever you want like "dwarf wizard" by RAW, races are still limited to their own separate class or classes.

Personally, I feel like multiple racial classes are the right way to handle people's snowflake addiction desire for mechanized racial diversity in a race-as-class system.

Race-as-class makes sense when the non-human races are rare and basically get lumped together or stereotyped into set roles that only they can really out-perform humans at.

>"Set of racial classes" is still race as class
No it isn't. Race-as-class is "your race is your class", not "your race sets which classes you can choose from". Multiple racial classes is pointless class bloat the midpoint between race-as-class and free class selection.

To rank them from most free to least free:
Pure race-as-class, with Human being its own class as well as the non-humans
Early Basic mostly race-as-class: Humans have multiple classes, everybody else has one
Multiple racial classes: Everybody has multiple classes, but they aren't the same in number, role, or mechanics
AD&D-style unified classes with racial restrictions and modifications: The races use the same base classes, but make some non-trivial modifications to them as a result of being that race. AD&D 2e with required racial class kits.
AD&D-style unified classes with racial restrictions: The classes are the same for each race, but your race controls what classes you can choose and how high a level you can rise to.
Point-buy with race or class limiting things: Lots of different ways for this to work, covering everything from SenZar's "races set your stat maxima, classes your stat minima, and both give you ability packages" to Anima's "class sets how much your abilities cost, race gives you some special abilities and stat modifiers" and all that sort of stuff
Free point-buy: Race and class may be templates, but there aren't any restrictions here.

Shit, I forgot 3.X-onward free class selection in-between the Unified Classes with Racial Restrictions and Restricted Point-Buy.

>most free to least free:
Or indeed the other way around.

It's just some gronard and /pol/tard combo shitposting.

I can't think of any class in 3.X that has a racial restriction ignoring prestige classes or certain archetypes in Pathfinder.

this this this

It made them more interesting and unique. You really had a feeling that they are different from humans, now everything is homogenized to hell and back.

>EVERYONE CAN BE ANYTHING THEY WANT, MOM, STOP OPPRESSING ME

>You really had a feeling that they are different from humans, now everything is homogenized to hell and back.
No, you honestly didn't. They were still humans with funny looking hats with and without race as class.

You're just being a fucking hipster. who posts vague feel good buzzwords and vaguely /pol/itical bullshit like Having Dwarves be mechanical fighters but slightly crappier and not being able to progress as much adds nothing to the setting. Letting a dwarf be a cleric also takes away nothing.

>It made them more interesting and unique. You really had a feeling that they are different from humans, now everything is homogenized to hell and back.

Different but much, much lesser. This weird situation where every single member of a given race was a living stereotype.

>calls other people hipsters
>spergs out about /pol/ for no reason

Spergeddit checks out.

>>spergs out about /pol/ for no reason
>muh multiculturalism
>muh christchan
>muh people have to be in tightly defined and regulated roles
>muh homogeneity
>muh degenerate multi-culti society
No, I have plenty of reasons to call you him /pol/.

>you him
>I am not butthurt, I have reasons REEEEEE
>I am not paranoid about muh /pol/

Seldom have I seen someone triggered this much by a reaction image alone, jesus. You have truly confirmed yourself as a sperg from reddit.

Are you only capable of arguing in memes and reddit strawmen.
Especially when the only people who obsess over "muh reddit" are /v/ermin and actual fucking redditors

>triggered by memes

>focusing on the christ-chan bullshit, and literally nothing else
I believe you people would say that's not an argument.

>Are you only capable of arguing in memes and reddit strawmen.
>pulls the /pol/-strawman because of a reaction image

When you accuse someone from being both from /pol/ and from reddit at the same time without thinking for second it sure shows what a desperate reddit-lefty ideologue you are.

>"muh reddit" are /v/ermin and actual fucking redditors
This is just like reading the desperate damage control for why The Last Jedi sucked. Just go through the checklist of everything you dont like and see what sticks. Sad!

>focusing on the christ-chan bullshit, and literally nothing else
Well thanks for confirming that this is literally what made you so mad. Should I go for pepes next to make you shit yourself from impotent rage?

Except it doesn't make me mad at all. I'm pointing out what you yourself were fucking arguing you actual fucking retard.ed /polster. You're not adressing my points, you're just posting shitty reaction images and going "U MAD U MAD BRO" like a fucking child.
>When you accuse someone from being both from /pol/ and from reddit at the same time without thinking for second it sure shows what a desperate reddit-lefty ideologue you are.
Excpet plenty of people on /pol/ browse fucking reddit and vice versa, are you unaware of /r/the_donald.
>The Last Jedi sucked
What does this have to do with anything. I don't care about Star Wars. No one mentioned starwars? But uh, thanks for letting me know not to see it I guess?

>doesn't make me mad at all
>fucking retard.ed /polster.

Nigga, you are in such an autistic rage that you cant even type properly right now.

>Excpet plenty of people on /pol/ browse fucking reddit and vice versa, are you unaware of /r/the_donald.
Which is why you need to go back and stop shitting up Veeky Forums.

>What does this have to do with anything
He even explained it to you why you are such a brainlet. Come on, keep up sempai.

That's why it goes in between them. Free selection of classes and races, but you're still mostly locked to the class improvement track unless you hop into another one.

>what the rules of the game imply a setting? Surely not!

There's a world of difference between
>imply a setting, but make it fairly easy to change it
and
>weld you into the setting unless you feel like homebrewing half the character classes away

AD&D may not be particularly generic, but it's still a hell of a lot easier to say "in this setting dwarves can be mages, level limit 6" than it is to write your own Basic class, especially if you're relatively new.

Just play BFRPG and you can not have this race-as-class conversation.

Or, just as good, get rid of darkvision altogether.

And it sucks because FR is quite possibly the worst, and is essentially a cleaned up version of Ed Greenwood's magical realm either way.

Too sexy for WotC