Grayhawk is DEFINITELY high fantasy, see Temple of Elemental Evil. Grayhawk is considered the default campaign setting for D&D and is basically the setting the game was designed around. It has less defining lore because it is the world defined by the Player's handbook and DMG. Some campaigns were released for it, but never anything tremendously world-building.

My interpretation is that you still transformed the character, which is why it was more interesting :)

Of course the wiggle room depends on the choices given, which is probably limited in CRPGs, my only point of reference. It might be that I am just a bit chaotic and want to kill jerks in a game when they get annoying.

Oh yeah. Well, in Table tops, you can play a crass, rude and downright volatile and angry paladin (mine wasn't all those things exactly) because drubbing a local boy for spitting on your boots was legal and acceptable punishment. Drawing a weapon? Probably not. Punching him until his own mother won't recognize him? Absolutely. Paladins could be slave owners if the world your game is in doesn't view slavery as evil (it's not necessarily since slaves in our games were always criminals being punished for crimes).

Computer games have to be careful not to offend anyone, moreso now than ever, but they were always worried about it to some extent. Homebrewed games of awesomeness that weren't afraid to trounce on social and societal norms to make an interesting setting are a recipe for some fun times.


EDIT: I'd go so far as to say Lawful good is no different than most of us who live our lives today. The good, law-abiding citizens.. Too many people try to force paladins to be kind, polite goody-goodies. May as well play a pacifist monk (another GREAT character to play, btw) instead of what he is: a shield of righteousness that will pound all dissenters in the dirt.

That doesn't even mention non-lawful good paladins. The paladin is the embodiment of righteous vengeance of a "Christian-like" god. But in D&D there are many dieties that one can choose from, and depending on their character, their religious strong-arms may have other skills and requirements. Like the requirement of being lawful evil, or even chaotic neutral. They may also get some pretty awesome abilities like defoliation and life absorption for HP recovery, or boosted electrical damage/resistance.

Paladins are an interesting class, and the default "Christian" paladin is often seen as the only version. But it only makes sense that other deities would have their own spiritual vigilantes.

I'm confused, is this comic for fun or meant to be serious? It has some of the looks of something written as a real warning, but what is said about the game D&D being an occult kind of witchcraft is either preposterous or absurdly funny, I laughed my ass of before I frowned from confusion with those strange 'warnings' from the bible. Are you sure the bible isn't some devious way to cloud a healthy mind by accepting this ghost called 'Jesus' into your life?

These days, when I think of D&D, I can't help but think of some of the significant issues with early editions. For example, in first edition:

* Non-humans had hard limits in how far they could advance. This is not suitable as a balancing mechanism; in low level campaigns (which I hear are the majority of them), they don't come into play, while in high level campaigns, non-humans are completely non-viable. Offering a choice but making it useless in some campaigns is poor game design, as is including a rule that doesn't actually matter, and there's also the issue of a campaign going from low level to high level; character choices that seem reasonable at first eventually become useless. Even worse, the level limits are only listed in the Dungeon Master's Guide, which players weren't supposed to look at, to this mechanic essentially ambushes the players. *Very* poor (and player-hostile) game design here.
* Female characters were not allowed to have high strength scores that were legal for male characters. Furthermore, there was no mechanic to counter-balance that. Hence, this rule is basically saying "Tou want to play a woman with near-super-human strength? Nope, can't do that, but you can play a man with that strength.".
* I also note that arbitrary race/class combinations are not permitted. For example, dwarves can't be magic-users (as the class was called back then), and only humans could be paladins (a class that I would have designed differently, but that's another story).

I believe many groups simply ignored these rules as though they did not exist. When a rule makes the game worse, it has no business being there.

Fortunately, things improved over the years:
* In 2nd edition, racial level limits were increased (but not eliminated, and still kept secret from the players), and the female strength rule was eliminated entirely.
* In 3rd edition, racial level limits were eliminated entirely (instead, humans got a couple perks to make them a worthwhile choice), and and racial class restrictions were eliminated as well, so you can play a dwarven mage if you want (and it's not actually a bad choice, as it turns out).
* (4th edition is very different from other editions, so it doesn't really make sense to compare it, plus I'm not familiar with 4th and 5th edition.)
* 5th edition explicitly allows non-binary characters.

Of course, that's not to say the later editions have flaws, but at least they're *different* flaws, and there aren't as many of "no, you can't play this character" rules, at least as far as I can tell.

Jack Chick, being a representative of the American hardcore fundamentalist Christians, was dead serious with that and he even endorsed the hilarious movie adaptation of it since he couldn't grasp, that what he published is its own satire.

I recommend watching the movie, it even features "The Gamers" (from the series) in fitting roles on the side.

Oh, ok. I guess I meant clichéd then rather than generic. Forgotten Realms has tons of fleshed out lore, I just find it really uninteresting. ;)

Forgotten Realms has a ton of lore, yep. And most of it is as original as the output of a Xerox machine.

One other thing I am wondering:

For those who have played the tabletop game, does anybody use the rules for encumbrance, or do you consider it to be too much bookkeeping?

I could ask the same question about material components; do you keep track of all material components, or just the most valuable ones? (I believe 3e is where I first saw the rules suggest that a material component pouch or similar be enough to cover cheap material components instead of keeping track of everything.)

Usually I try to ignore things like that. It slows down the game and saps the fun out of it. I only invoke encumbrance when for some reason it's particularly important or it's obvious the players are pushing it beyond reason. Same goes for food - I don't need the players to tell me they buy X days worth of food every time they're in a town, or to tell me they remember to eat the food ever time they rest. I mean, I think we can trust that the player characters are actually smart enough to remember to eat. I only bring up food when the players are in a survival type situation, and looking/hunting for food actually becomes a crucial game-worthy task, not a menial task.

I think even the base games quickly realized how bad encumbrance was, considering how cheap it was to buy a bag of holding and just forget about it.

To me it's the memories of great times, with my usual group of school friends, playing AD&D in the 80's.

I've changed my mind. It's more like a soggy wiener... with like a bit of creole mustard.

Where did you find this facist psudo christianity drivil? this is probably produced by the same group that sneaks in to medical facilities to take pictures of aborted fetuses and spouting that it's murder, those people need to drink the red koolaide and jump on the ship to the other reality they dream about....

You're late, Jack Chick died in 2016 at the biblical age of 92.

I thought everybody here knew this comic already since the movie adaptation is one of the few movies sold on GOG.
He made a bunch of such comics on different topics, they are as hilarious as they are creepy. You can find them on the site I linked above.

PS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Chick