So, why does /tg/ hate Dragonlance so much? Can someone explain?
>>97923871We don't.
>>97923871It might be because it's shit.
>>97923871>Why don't people like poorly written Mormon LotR?Gee, I wonder why?
>>97923871I've read some of them.
Did it invent Kender?
>>97923871I can't speak for /tg/ generally, but I hate it.If you were around in the early 90s at its peak, its fandom was a very particular type of player. It was den moms, stay-at home moms, and that guy who always played kender. Also the setting was built solely to run the premade adventures. It was poorly built for anything except running the exact storyline that you were being told to run.And even by 90s D&D nerd standards, these were seen as baby fantasy novels for little kids and the aforementioned moms. It was sissy-baby-wimpy D&D for sissy, wimpy babies.And then 5th age came out and was an absolute trainwreck of a total piece of worthless shit.HOWEVER! All that said? The Tales of the Lance box setting was fucking rad. The DM screen was excellent and bullshit levels of cheese. The dungeon morphs were also fun, and it had tons of standees and great maps.
>>97923871But Dragonlance is great fun in the novels up to a certain point, I've never once played it in my life.
>>97923979>>97924100These, pulse it suffers from Star Wars syndrome. Someone else has already done all the cool stuff.
>>97923871It created three different useless short races - kender, tinker gnomes, and gully dwarves. Also, Raistlin Majere is a faggot.
We don't. It's great. Mormons built the best D&D settings desu
>>97924767Then why didn't they build Gamma World, anon?
>>97923871Storyshitting bad
>>97923871Allow me
>>97923871>All wizards wear matching pajamas based on whether they're good or bad!This will never not be stupid.
>>97924941I think that some writers don't realize that purity and innocent doesn't mean all their actions are good, it just means they don't have any ill will in their actions because they don't know what they're doing is wrong. And stealing is wrong, but Kender are so "innocent" that despite everyone telling them to stop, they keep doing it. At some point, Kender need to be blamed for ignoring the fact that stealing is wrong because it doesn't fit into their worldview.
>>97924168So to meet hot ttrpg player MILFs I have to play Dragonlance?
>>97925116if it your living in early 90s America, it's probably something different now
>>97924941Did a female write this? Serious question.
>>97925171Maybe, Margaret Weis is one of the main Dragonlance writers.
>>97925185Not of the setting book.
>>97923871A portion of /tg/ blames Dragonlance for shifting D&D campaigns away from sandbox dungeoncrawls towards a more linear story/adventure path, another portion have the "it was popular, so it sucked" mentality, and then you have some really absurd ideas including >>97924960 and >>97924754 you have a setting the gets kneejerk reactions from a chunk of the board.>>97924960It is more which schools of magic each Tower has access to. White Tower wizards have access to Abjuration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Evocation and Invocation. Red Tower wizards have access to Alteration, Conjuration, Divination, Evocation, Illusion, Invocation and Summoning. Black Tower wizards have access to Divination, Enchantment, Illusion, Necromancy and Summoning. Combine that with White Tower wizards getting more high level spells per day than the others, Red Tower wizards getting more low level spells per day than the others and Black Tower wizards getting fewer spells per day and you have a designed bias towards the White and Red towers.What is really stupid is the Knights of Solamnia:>Knights of the Crown - Basically Fighters with higher XP requirements, an extra d10 hp and the paladin's code restriction>Knights of the Sword - Fighters with Cleric spell access, even higher XP requirements than Crown, an extra d10 hp and the paladin's code restriction>Knight of the Rose - Fighters with even higher XP requirements than Sword, an extra d10 hp and the paladin's code restriction.Yes, you read that right the more elite Knight of the Rose is worse that the Knight of the Sword and the Knight of the Crown. This was so bad that they had to publish errata in Dragon to give the Knights of the Rose the Cavalier's "Weapon(s) of Choice" benefits and the Knight of the Sword's spell casting.
>>97925171>>97925185>>97925220From what I've found Tasslehoff (the OG Kender) was Maraget Weis' Dragonlance PC. She arranged things with the DM so that the DM selected 1 object from each character that Tasslehoff interacted with or bumped into. She did not know what item had been taken until someone tried to use the item or looked in Tas' pouch. She immediately returned the missing item when it was discovered and appropriate. So yes that was written based on a woman's work.
>>97925292Interesting to know. Not surprising in hindsight however.
>>97925116Nah the moms didn't play. They read the novels and listened to people talk about D&D. Maybe collected miniatures and dice and had played once or twice.
>>97923871i read the first 3 novels, seemed pretty milquetoast and harmless to me, if kind of generic but that was pretty par for the course at the time so i dont hold it against it. raistlin was a cool character at least, reminded me of vegeta
Mormons.Evil deities.Awful terrible subhuman jokes races featuring gully dwarves, tinker gnomes, and kender.
>>97924941>>97925100Ask yourself this:How did the kinder ever make it through the ice age that did happen in the lore? Or for that matter any of the hard times or even a winter? They lack the attention span to build anything, let alone gather resources, or construct basic infrastructure or even farm food. And they are habitual thieves, when resources are low and times are hard no other race is going to let a race of known thieves into their communities, no matter how "cute" or "innocent" they are.They should all be dead.
>>97923871As a Narrative, I don't mind it. Fine for middle-schoolers.As an Adventure path, it's unplayable bad railroading that wants you to just have a guided tour of the books in adventure form.As a Setting, it's a bland but functional generic fantasy world where any of its quirks that could've been neat are just sidelined. However, it also it represents a major change how adventures were designed at TSR. A major shift from player-driven emergent narrative to game-master driven planned narratives. Dragonlance is where we lost hexes on maps, and first saw completing the plot as a source of XP.
>>97923871My only issue is that the modules are actually unplayable. Have you ever tried them? You end up accumulating a HUGE number of NPCs following you around.Look at the fucking Cyan Bloodbane fight, where each PC will be controlling three to four copies of themselves...And fighting TWO DRAGONS...and they don't know which is the real one!What a fucking clusterfuck.
>>97924941Most people wouldn't have an issue with Kender if the writer wasn't telling you they are always good in spite of being shrunken gypsy stereotypes. Functionally, they're identical to most popular depictions of fairies minus wings, but no one feels offended by fairies because the author isn't telling you that you're a bad person if you take offense at them stealing your stuff.
>>97925251>Combine that with White Tower wizards getting more high level spells per day than the others, Red Tower wizards getting more low level spells per day than the others and Black Tower wizards getting fewer spells per dayIs that where Final Fantasy got their schtick from? kek
It gave us the Broo, did it not?
I ran a 7 year Taladas game that ended in White Plume Mountain. It was an awesome game but I had to severely change almost everything Dragonlance related which was gay. My gf at the time went from Crown Knight to Sword Knight and killed a fucking dragon. This was using 2e and 3e rules iirc. I 100%'ed the Dragonlance novels and they do not hold up well. L*****, you're a massive faggot.
>>97926355Broo?
>>97924854Holy based>>97923871Because the modules are pretty railroady, even if you accept that they're a narrative-driven adventure path.
>>97925251>It is more which schools of magic each Tower has access to.No, it's fucking stupid that the "evil" team wears an outfit that specifically points them out as the evil team. It's idiotic.
>>97926355Broo is Glorantha, doggggg.
>>97926667The Alignments of the Towers don't really matter (I do agree that it is stupid that the towers are associated with alignments) as even the Black Tower wizards were supposed to work with other wizards. Remember this is the setting where the Forces of Good caused the Gods to drop a mountain on them and then stop granting priest powers to everyone.
>>97923871I like dragonlance a bunch desu, big fan if the Minotaurs
>>97924960>I don't know the setting, only the memes about it
>>97924582>These, pulse it suffers from Star Wars syndrome. Someone else has already done all the cool stuff.I'll never get this defeatist mentality.
>>97925292A source on that would be nice. The earliest I know of about kender pockets is Roger E Moore's 1985 article in Dragon, with input from Harold Johnson who invented kender. He gave very basic rules for a random table of items the kender could grab out of his pockets, randomly replacing them with other things he pick pocketed. Notes passed from PC to DM, no roll required a lot of the time, gave items to the kender pockets too.>>97925586Ask yourself this, how do dragons fly and giants walk when cube-square rules dictate they're too heavy, unable to generate enough power for lift or have bones that are strong enough not to break. It's fantasy.
>>97925171Maybe, but not likely.>>97925220The pic is from 3e. Weis is listed as the first designer and has her name first on the cover. That could be ego but it could also mean that she was responsible for that, even though it could have been of the designers or developers who were men.
>>97924960Why is this bad?
>>97926920>Ask yourself this, how do dragons fly and giants walkWe know creatures far larger than giants existed and walked irl and with dragons one can have hollow bones and stronger muscles. Or just accept its fantasy because dragons are cool.Thieving manchild midgets are not cool and it makes no sense from a societal viewpoint that they are allowed anywhere near settlements, nor that people would help them survive and they are openly stated as having super adhd and literally incapable of anything requiring more than a seconds attention span, as well as being incredibly annoying.Adhd attention seeking manchild midgets that compulsively steal worse than a gyppo are not cool and would be unable to survive. Not that they deserve to.
>>97926920>A source on that would be nice.https://www.sageadvice.eu/how-i-play-tasslehoff-by-margaret-weis-dragonlance/
>>97927024It sounds like you are speaking more of the flanderization of kender the internet created, rather than how they are written in the books.
>>97927042It was more a flanderization cause by people playing Kender in an actively disruptive manner even before the internet became mainstream. It was a meme in the 90s just like Drizzt clones.
>>97923871The sin of Kinder alone should condemn it to the abyss
>>97926206No, the White Magic-Black Magic split is from something earlier and originate is western magical tradition stuff
>>97923871/tg/ doesn't hate Dragonlance, /tg/ doesn't think about Dragonlance. This is the first time I've ever seen discussion of Dragonlance here.
Characters are either boring one note stereotypes or overwrought edgelords and/or freakshit
>>97926718We're shown in the books that black robes are overwhelming evil. It's idiot that the self serving, """evil"" faction would dress themselves in a way that immediately lets anyone dealing with them know that they are part of the self-serving, """evil""" faction. That is fucking stupid.>>97926786Explain, in detail, how any of that is wrong.
>>97927560The thing is Final Fantasy's job system in the snes games had Black, White and Red mages. Red mages were sort of a milquetoast blend of White and Red but with lower level spells.
>>97926667Been a while since I've read Dragonlance, but wasn't the deal that there were three gods of magic associated with the three moons? Wizards not hiding their association to their patron god seems like sensible enough thing to me.
>>97926667Aren't there hedge wizards in this setting?
>>97927597Because it's all in the OSR threads.
>>97928659o yeah, forgot about that, and Final Fantasy 1 is rather unashamedly a D&D game so that might be the case
>>97926946They didn't know why.
>>97927597Newfag. Dragonlance is perennially discussed here.
>>97928691Yes. Lunitari, Solinari, Nuitari. Red, white, and black respectively.
>>97925586They're the Bonobo to Humanity's Chimpanzee. Less aggro, faster to trust and have no boundaries when it comes to domiciles kr property. Basically, Kender stuck together during the cold times while humans "needlessly" kept each other at arm's length and froze.... Wait did DL even have an Ice Age?
>>97925116The possibility exists.
>>97928957Alright, I remembered it right, then. I always thought that both the gods of magics and the different orders of wizards more or less getting along and cooperating despite their differences due to their shared interest in magic was kind of neat. I also always felt like white robes, red robes and black robes openly identifying their allegiance made sense because what else are you going to do, insult your patron by treating him like an embarrassing secret? Insult one of the other gods of magic by pretending to be their follower despite acting completely against their moral preferences? It's not like black robes were black robes because they were dedicated to the concept of evil or anything like that, either, from what I remember, they were just selfish assholes without much in the way of morals who followed the god who was fine with them being like that. All in all, wizards were one of the cooler and more memorable things about Dragonlance, to me.
>>97924582>Someone else has already done all the cool stuff.Nobody's saved the setting from a maniac summoning hordes of Rust Monsters to crash the steel market and bring back the Gold standard, this plot interrupting their own plan to use said gold to fundementally alter the setting's comminication system by buying up the gold, fashioning it into wire and building a fantasy telegraph system.
>>97929020Cool, but I can do all of that without needing dragon lance, so why is dragon Lance involved in this in any way?
>>97929130It has dragons and lances
>>97927042Having read the books, no. Tasselhof deserved to be burnt, as did all his kith and kin.
>>97927037Thank you very much for that link. Do you have anything more substantial that shows Weis as the source of the "handling" or as playing Tasslehoff in the early days?Particular issues include:It's a 4 year old tweet written in the present tense about how she "plays" not "played" Tasslehoff when kender were being developed.It doesn't say she developed handling or kender or Tasslehoff.Kender were invented by Harold JohnsonTasslehoff Burrfoot was a PC created by Johnson to replace his own halfling thief character which didn't work in Krynn.Hickman directly says he conceived of kender borrowing/handling.The substantial part of the tweet about handling items is>I make arrangements in advance with the DM to take one object from each character I manage to touch, bump into, shake hands with, etc. Choice of what I take is the DM’s. The character doesn’t know I have it. I don’t know I have it until I reach into my pouch and grab something. (DM’s choice.) Or until the character reaches for it and finds it missing.That is not what is described in either Moore's article, the DLA book, the early modules, or that 2003 rule book screen cap. The early modules and screen cap say nothing mechanical about kender handling stuff at all, just a brief cultural note. That the screen cap says nothing about mechanics but the tweet is all about the mechanics is not evidence that Weis wrote the section in the cap.It was Hickman—not Johnson who invented kender and Tasslehoff, not Moore who developed them, certainly not Weis for whom I can find no evidence of playing Tasslehoff during development in the 80s—who came up with the idea of handling so that a race of thieves could steal stuff without it creating a moral dilemma.>I was troubled by the idea of a race of thieves. My sole contribution to Tas and his kenderkind was their inveterate curiosity and their innocent tendency to "borrow" things for indeterminate periods of time.>Hickman, Annotated Chronicles, page 25
>>97927024>We know creatures far larger than giants existed and walked irlLet's take a look at that shall we?An upright T. rex would be 6.5 metres tall upright. That's smaller than a cloud giant which is 7.3 m tall, so we'll leave that out of the discussion for a moment and go straight to sauropods.Sauropods, about 30 tonnes.Cloud giant would be about 4 tonne.That sounds good. Big heavy things existed.Sauropods had thick, columnar legs.Humanoids don't.Bad.Sauropods were graviportal.Giants aren't.Bad.Sauropods were quadrupedal.Giants are bipedal.Bad.Bone has a breaking stress around 150 MPa. A human skeleton scaled up porportionally to cloud giant size would have bones unable to match that stress while walking, tendons and ligaments would also rupture, and muscles too weak to get it moving faster than humans jog.Force on lower limbs is easily 2-3 times total static weight force. In order for the lower limbs to withstand the stress from this increase force they were have to 2.5 times thicker than proportionally scaling up a human limb bone. As stress on bones while walking increases with v2, a giant would need even more if it tried to run. This would displace a substantial amount of muscle to keep the same human proportions seen in most giants. Muscle force scales with cross sectional area so it would need much thicker muscles to compensate for its increased mass that increases with volume.It could walking at about 10 kph, slow enough that it's probably not ripping apart its ligaments and tendons, since they would also have to scale up disproportionately, or breaking its joints, joints being where torsional forces needed for walking peak, and basically knee capping itself on its first step.However, at 10 kph it would need a power output of about 4 kW. This is far in excess or humanoid muscle capacity for long periods so it had better get where it's going quickly.
>>97931379Increased power means increase heating so it had better have huge elephant ears or back fins or something to dissipate the heat before it dies of hyperthermia.Its heart would have to be larger too and its vascular walls much thicker to provide the pressure needed to raise the blood as well as to supply sufficient blood to provide oxygen and nutrients will eliminating waste.It would need disproportionately giant sized feet establish a low enough loading on the bones.Looking at T. rex. It has shorter limbs than a giant would. Its femur was around 20 cm diameter which was strong enough to support its slow walking pace. Lower torque at pelvis due to low walking speed, wider hip, and lower CoM due to its inclined torso, counter balanced by tail, less than two-thirds what a bipedal upright humanoid giant would have.>with dragons one can have hollow bones and stronger musclesIf you mean bird-like hollow bones: too weak, as already described above for giants. Unable to use wings to fly due to insufficient power. It would require near megawatts of power to fly. If it could produce that it would lead to extreme hyperthermia at the power needed for them to fly that even the wings couldn't dissipate. If it tried evaporative cooling it would be losing nearly 1 tonne of water per hour, on a creature that probably only has a mass around 5 or 6 tonnes and you might as well give dragons a new sweat attack.In short, your argument that>We know creatures far larger than giants existed and walked irljust doesn't cut it for giants or dragons. The humanoid body plan simply can't be scaled up to fantasy giant size and stronger muscles in a dragon are not a real world possibility.The only way giants and dragons work in fantasy is because it's fantasy, it has no regard for many inconvenient real world considerations.
>>97929130Other settings already have a gold standard, DL's Steel currency is unique to the setting. Meanwhile gold is worthless, which allows the scheme in the first place or at least makes it more plausible.
>>97928625>Explain, in detail, how any of that is wrong.Even though you forgot your manners.>Muscles rippled beneath the shining black skin. His arms looked as though he could have picked up the stalwart Sturm and carried him about the room as easily as if he had been a child. He was not dressed in robes, but wore bright-colored, loose-fitting trousers. The only hint that he might have been a wizard at all came from the pouches that hung at his waist and a white sash that girdled his broad middle.That's from a 1987 novella by Weis and Hickman, nearly 40 years old, still quite early on in Dragonlance, and contemporaneous with the Dragonlance Adventures setting book release. The following is from a much later 1998 novel by Weis and Perrin.>The wizard’s name was Antimodes. ... His early experience left him with a canny business sense and a taste for, and knowledge of, fine clothing, one reason he rarely wore his white robes.>>Some mages were afraid to wear their robes, which were a symbol of their calling, because that calling was not well loved in Ansalon.It wasn't just an affectation of one or two wizards to dress in activity appropriate clothing, such as Antimodes wearing grey while travelling so the dirt didn't show as much or a silor wearing trousers not robes, wizards around the time of the War of the Lance often didn't wear their robes for other reasons and that probably extends to several hundred years of wizard history due to the King-Priest. Wizards having to wear matching pyjamas is a joke meme.
>>97931714Alright, I admit I was wrong. Thank you for being civil and tutoring my ass. I still think the setting is shit, but I will no longer bring this argument up.
>>97931387Simulationistbro out here killing it. I love playing with you guys but I hate arguing with you. I'm a gamist tho.
>>97928625>It's idiot that the self serving, """evil"" faction would dress themselves in a way that immediately lets anyone dealing with them know that they are part of the self-serving, """evil""" faction. That is fucking stupid.How is this any different than Red Wizards of Thay walking around with shaved heads and their titular red robes? The Towers are actual organizations with very real political and social influence, somebody who's a Black Tower mage is somebody with status and knowing that he's a "bad guy" isn't really more useful or relevant than seeing any other uniform
>>97931803You just don't like fun and/or high fantasy. And that's perfectly fine.
>>97928834>>97928659>>97927560Original FF was straight up D&D/Sword World and even used spell slots instead of MP. Black Mage/White Mage/Red Mage are literally just Wizard/Cleric/Bard.
>>97931864Also, as was mentioned earlier ITT, there's, a religious aspect of sorts to consider. Gods of magic are real, they have real opinions on for how magic should be used and how their followers should act, it makes sense to associate with the god who fits your own moral framework and goals, and it also makes sense to openly declare your alkegiance, at least when dealing with ither wizards.
>>97923871Because the average fa/tg/uy is a stupid faggot with no taste and a double-digit IQ.
>>97932021This motherfucker got robbed by kender lmao
>>97932032Kender are fucking faggots. Draconians is where it's at.
>>97931869Nah, I love fun and I love high fantasy. I dislike Mormon-tinted Tolkien knockoffs.
>>97923871Because it was once very popular and everywhere. At a time when TSR was publishing a new setting every Thursday it felt like Dragonlance overshadowed everything else.
>>97931860Thank you friend anon though I wouldn't say I'm a simulationist, that would be very hard work in fantasy (or sci fi) where you'd have to invent a set of consistent fantasy physics laws. I just hand wave it. I just wanted to throw a little science in because it's okay to not like kender but it was silly of that anon to call out kenders as bad because they couldn't realistically survive winter due to a lack of kender farming practices listed in the setting without acknowledging that fantasy is already based upon a huge pile of unrealistic "because I say so" and "that's just the way it is baby" premises.
>>97923871Reposting from the archive from last time this topic came up.
>>97932036So you don't hate Dragonlance. Got it. Draconians are cool. Yup.
>>97932045I can't blame you for that.
>>97932268Np. Ppl hate what they don't understand and that's fine. It's just a waste of time to hate on shit that doesn't that make sense when none of it does anyway. We're playing a game with talking, flying reptiles. It's silly to argue about this stuff but some ppl are always trying to ice skate uphill. When I'm faced with what I don't understand, I try to learn more. Ig I'm in the minority here.
>>97932279I mean, it doesn't have to be that way. It's your game. You can make it any way you want. Also, I've seen worse backstories.
A lance made from a dragon seems impractical.
