Subj : Re: Monster Manual
To   : All
From : mbottorff@sprintmail.com
Date : Sun Dec 03 2000 01:27 am

From: mbottorff@sprintmail.com (Michelle & Boyd Bottorff)
Subject: Re: Monster Manual
Organization: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=E0?=



> I received the Monster Manual today. Leafing through it, I noticed two 
things:
> 
> 1. No more green slime. I don't know if they eliminated other old monsters,
> but I noticed this one missing for some reason.

Well, green slime wasn't exactly the most... ecologically stable?  Nah,
the big problem with it was the "zap, you're dead" syndrome.  There
wasn't much point to using it beyond doing a quick-kill on overly
powerful characters.

> 2. TSR has finally gotten over its fear or puritanism. Not only do we have
> demons and devils back in the game, I also noticed that you can see bare
> nipples in the picture of the harpy.

Well, they're deliberately aiming for the upper high-school to college
crowd again.  A lot of the toning down was them aiming at making D&D a
rite of passage for middle-school.

The target audience was also probably the reason behind Forgotten
Realms, which, IIRC, was published around the time that demons and
devils-- and bare tits, come to think of it-- vanished.  A 12-year-old
isn't going to worry about why the barman is a twelth-level fighter, and
the barmaid is secretly a fifth-level mage-- all they're seeing the bar
as is a place to drink, and a place to trash every other Saturday.

-- Boyd

--
|Fidonet:  mbottorff@sprintmail.com
|Internet: scott@conchbbs.com
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| Standard disclaimer: The views of this user are strictly his own.


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