Quiconque

Is this "default assumption" actual in the rules, or is it just the general mythos that players are steeped in regardless of D&D? What you're describing is something that may have changed organically inside individual players and inside the culture at large, but not something where D&D itself pulled the rug out from under anyone. Indeed, this is something that individual DMs have always run to suit their taste. You could find DMs in the 80's who ran maybe-the-orcs-aren't-that-bad campaigns, and you can find DMs today who run inherently-evil-kill-on-sight campaigns. The rules have never prohibited either. So what even are you alleging has changed here, between editions? That the rules spend more sentences mentioning the possibility of non-evil orcs? And that they somehow included these extra sentences because they were worried players would be offended if they didn't? That's not really a QED -- it's just a speculative assertion about designer motives, put forward without any evidence whatsoever. This is exactly my point! Edgwyn stated (and the rest of you seem to agree) that D&D "modified some things with each edition to make them less offensive". You are all providing examples of things that were changed, but so far, nobody has provided any evidence or argumentation explaining why these changes were clearly made "to make them less offensive."

The question at stake is: "Do you have an example of something that was modified or removed from AD&D solely because people were "offended" by it..." Complaints made 20 years after they stopped publishing it cannot have caused its prior modification or removal unless you're alleging time travel.

o scorpe

Yes, this is precisely what I cited above -- this link is from 2020. What I don't see is anything that suggests (let alone shows) that these comments were made when it was originally published, let alone that WotC changed or discontinued it as a result.

OK, so let's look at the three examples that have come up. 1) Female nudity and near-nudity. This wasn't changed in the 80's or even in the 90's; this only really started to change in the last decade as the demographics of D&D players shifted (and perhaps also the attitudes of existing players). These new players and attitudes are hardly offended by nudity; rather they object to the inequity of having a huge proportion of scantily-clad women, and very few scantily-clad men. 2) "not discriminating against orcs" Evil orcs still exist, and I don't think anyone ever said they were offended on behalf of the hypothetical non-evil orcs. For one thing, good orcs did exist in plenty of custom campaign settings; having a turncoat friendly goblin, orc, or other lesser minion has always been a popular trope, easily played for both humor and character development. (I'm willing to bet there's even a reference to this in the core 2E rulebooks from 1989, though I can't produce one off the cuff.) For another thing, Tolkien himself brought this up decades before D&D existed -- there's a Gandalf line about it, and I'll bet more than a few in Tolkien's letters, too. Finally, the evil orcs haven't been removed; rather more options were added. Adding a new option because people wanted to be able to play in new and different ways is not the same as removing an existing option because it was seen as problematic. 3) Satanic Panic I agree that this might be closer to being offended, but it was taken to much greater heights. From Wikipedia: "In 1985, Patricia Pulling joined forces with psychiatrist Thomas Radecki, director of the National Coalition on Television Violence, to create B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons). Pulling and B.A.D.D. saw role-playing games generally and Dungeons & Dragons specifically as Satanic cult recruitment tools, inducing youth to suicide, murder, and Satanic ritual abuse.[42] Other alleged recruitment tools included heavy metal music, educators, child care centers, and television.[42] This information was shared at policing and public awareness seminars on crime and the occult, sometimes by active police officers.[42] None of these allegations held up in analysis or in court. In fact, analysis of youth suicide over the period in question found that players of role-playing games actually had a much lower rate of suicide than the average.[42]" Even if offendedness and personal judgments were behind the BADD movement, what they actually expressed were some very serious allegations. This is something that largely affected 2E (again, 1989), but even then, demons were de-emphasized but not removed, and labels like "demon" were absolutely still used. The concern wasn't that people were going to be offended by the inclusion of demons, but rather that there could be legal repercussions. It's worth noting that 2E made a number of other small changes to sidestep possible legal issues, too, like obscuring all references to Tolkien/Leiber material. Do you have a source for this? I can't find anything about it -- while "oriental" is a weird word choice for the title, Wikipedia just shows me that the 1985 book was a huge seller, and the 2001 book won an award for best campaign setting. I'd especially appreciate a source for the "seeking an apology" bit. What I do see are people today -- 20 years after the most recent release -- going back and rereading it with a modern perspective, often more interested in historical accuracy, and pointing out problems. But I just don't see anything about people being "offended" back when it was actually being published -- certainly nothing about WotC cancelling it for that reason. (Compare to the mtg Kamigawa expansion that WotC put out a few years later.)

Do you have an example of something that was modified or removed from AD&D solely because people were "offended" by it, rather than for other reasons (e.g., players in general didn't enjoy it, change in design philosophy or target audience, material impact, copyright issues, etc.)? You can probably see where I'm going here -- I'm wondering if there is a more relevant description for this kind of stuff than "offensive".

'offend as few people as possible' has definitely fallen off the corporate game design bandwagon

I'm sympathetic, but again, I think you gotta understand that what you want is a very, very, very niche request. Nothing wrong with enjoying the game that way, but I don't think you can expect any developer to cater to this preference. Another option would be to get a good custom screenshot program (I recommend ScreenshotCaptor) which can automatically organize screenshots. Then you just hit your screenshot key instead of "record in journal" and you can scroll through images of all the text you want to hold onto, in order and at your leisure.

Battle shaping is great in G5 because, finally, for pretty much the first time, it's usable and effective. It's not that the other shaping options are too weak to use suddenly. There are a few things that pushed the limits of balance in G5, particularly the existence of the Sorceress. Creations are always a strong strategy in Geneforge, and so is Mental Magic. So I think having these increased min-maxing opportunities led to a slightly harder game overall.

I would note that most of these issues seem to stem not from Avadon I in general, but from the Avadon I Codex in particular. Both in- and out-of-character, I think the simplest way to handle this is just to treat the Avadon I Codex as an unreliable document. That plus understandable imprecision of memory going back 50 years makes these seem... well, a lot less imposing than the whole continent thing

What is linear? The history of Spiderweb is definitely non-linear.

I think that's how the entire trilogy behaved, too.

*applause*

What I was saying in the second bit is it could be an unexpected result of how combat played out. Just as the 2 members with the hit% bonus just happened to be the ones hit with slow, there could be some other thing that just happened to impact their attacks more (or less) than the other 2 members. This could be as a result of affecting them, or affecting the enemies. Definitely appreciate that you actually did statistical tests. Still, the fact that 10% produces an inflated impact does create a feeling that there's something we're missing here. This might not have anything to do with your tests, specifically, and could be a third factor that nobody expected to be relevant. Nonetheless, it definitely makes me a little uncomfortable when you keep saying the data "proves" this particular conclusion... it supports it at least partly, but the conclusion doesn't completely explain the results you got, so "prove" seems like a stretch.

I think you've identified the right question to be asking here. But there is at least one very plausible solution: natural variation in data. 50/63 (79.4%) is literally just a few arrows away from a number that would line up better with your speculation. Also, a question... why are the two groups of results different sizes? You had the tests all intermixed, on fixed (different) characters, rather than separate with the same characters, so it's also possible there's some other factor about the combat that affected things. Since the two groups didn't even end up with roughly the same number of shots, as we would expect if all other things are equal, this seems plausible.

*coughs loudly* There's not much for me to say after Ess. I don't understand where the heck this came from -- you're better than this, TriRodent -- but I have to point out that even as a math-based power play this fails utterly... given the large quantity of members who've been here longer than the two of you combined 😛

Those items definitely don't reduce encumbrance in-game, FWIW. It seems clear that Exile used some fields for multiple purposes, and I guess that must be one of them...

I just don't think this is true. If you look at what people said about G3 and boats closer to release, and what they say about it now... I'm honestly not sure there's much of a difference. The same things people like or hate about G3 today, like the absolutism of the forced choices, were hot topics then, too. The boats were described in similar terms then and now. Certainly I've never seen anyone say that the boats single-handedly "ruin" the game. I think your take on this greater trend of convenience is interesting, but I'm not sure why the reaction to G3's boats are being forcefully shoved into that pattern.

There was a pretty negative reaction to them on release here, anyway. Walking to and from the boats is a prime example of "sandwich time" - which is something that Jeff had somewhat recently written about critically, IIRC. I'm not sure you can call anything about the boats immersive, either. They were arguably the worst art asset in the game, and since the world map lets you skip from zone to zone without needing to be immersed in walking between them, it didn't make any sense that you had to walk to and from a boat. Especially since the boat travel itself was also non-existent.

I think it says something that you're wondering if you're the only one who doesn't hate it... and yet even you don't like it.

I think those item ability levels are actually visible in-game as well.

By skill value, I assume you mean the value fed into the lookup table, not the actual Disarm Traps skill value, right?

BoE. Things certainly could have changed, but given the number of changes in core numerical mechanics that we've observed (zero) or even had suggested (I think also zero?) it doesn't seem likely.

It does, but there are actually several numbers that are added in before the lookup. Your traps value moves up 1 slot per point in Traps, and 2 slots per Dex bonus point, which is either +3 or +4 at your Dex (I forget which) and which IIRC is just increased by +1 if wearing the Nimble Gloves. I think Dex 4 is a bonus of 0, so your second test would have 18+2=20 vs 20+2=22. I guess your results would be consistent with an overflow. Not having seen this before could be explained by the fact that, well, nobody ever invests that far into Disarm Traps that I've heard of.

What the linked post is describing (I think) is what happens when Dex is raised past the point where it has a bonus lookup value, so I'm guessing the bonus just reset to 0. That shouldn't be happening here. There's a table of lookup values for disarm chance: 5,30,35,42,48, 55,63,69,75,77, 78,80,82,84,86, 88,90,92,94,96,98 Your combination of Dex + Disarm Trap + the Nimble Gloves (+ Luck, if you have any) should be more than enough to max this out at 98%. I don't think I've ever heard of overflow from this, and if you have any Luck your stats are probably enough to push past 98% without the gloves anyway. If you test by taking off the Nimble Gloves, do your chances of success improve significantly?