IRC McQuaid Logs (EQ as originally intended)

[Ennewi]

There are a number of other interesting comments buried in the links below, from beta and post-launch, many of which detail features that didn't make it into the game or were removed for one reason or another. To avoid posting an unreadable wall of text, these stood out the most...

https://web.archive.org/web/19990220174951/http://everquest.moongates.com/files/irc/irc_051998-01.htm

May 1998 EFNet #EverQuest Chat

<BlkStaff> Will Necromancers 'create' their undeads from thin air or will they need to have a corpse of a dead monster or (n)pc to make them?

<Aradune> Animate dead Necromancer spells require a corpse as a target.

<BlkStaff> Will new NPCs, monsters, continents, and buildings be added to the game world after the release? Possibly through a mandatory patch? If so, how often will they be released?

<Aradune> Absolutely -- all three. The plan is to keep the development team working away, adding on the world. This would either be done through periodic patches and/or the purchase of expansion packs at your retailer.

<BlkStaff> Question in its simplest form: Will EQ attempt to prevent the use of "mule" characters?

<Aradune> If they become abusive in our unique environment, yes. We'll find out in testing if this will be a problem in EQ.


https://web.archive.org/web/19990220184712/http://everquest.moongates.com/files/irc/irc_071998-01.htm

July 1998 EFNet #EverQuest Chat

<EQV-Qs> Many people want to know more about necromancers and how they manipulate the dead or living to create undead.

<Aradune> Necromancers animate corpses of NPCs, turning them into 'pets' that will do their bidding.

<EQV-Qs> Is it at all possible that someday in an add-on to EQ you could introduce horses or dragon riding?

<Aradune> Yes, it's a possibility. We definitely plan on having expansions, which could include more features, more lands, and more playable PC races/classses. done


Unfortunately, those beta interviews cut off early and little else is accessible on the site. Here are the other IRC McQuaid interviews, post-launch...

https://web.archive.org/web/20020504051828/http://www.everlore.com/news/eq_chat.asp
https://web.archive.org/web/20021104071406/http://www.everlore.com/news/bradlog4-5_2.asp

Brad McQuaid IRC LOG 4/5/00

<Tsolzyob> Aradune: Any thoughts on the UPCOMING...EQ Emulator..?
<Aradune> tsol: i can't wait to see it
<Aradune> if its well done, we'll hire the guy =)

<Tsolzyob> Aradune: Think EQ server source code ever be released to the public, maybe 5 years down the line when EQ stops being profitable..?
<Aradune> tsol: i doubt it -- i dont see sony doing that

<Syruss> ARADUNE: Did you always intend/expect for the armor/wep shops to become useless after the servers had been up awhile???????
<Aradune> syruss:yes

<gentry> Aradune: what were/are your favorite MUDS out of curiosity?
<Aradune> gentry: my favorite mud was sojourn/toril

<mleko> Aradune: how big is the virtual world ? like 500 square miles etc ? or doesnt it work like that
<Aradune> mleko: eq with the expansion is like 60 square miles or something
<Aradune> its hard to calculate, because the world is zone based

<DaScott> Aradune: paineel storyline hints that the hole leads to the underfoot.. would really love to kill my god sometime ;p
<Aradune> dascott: glad some people are learning the storylines =)
<Aradune> some people say there's no backstory in EQ, and I wish they'd talk to NPCs and seek out the story
* Aradune sighs

<DaScott> Aradune: I liked the FA quest.. I was fortunate enough to stay ahead of all the spoilers until the end.. but the charming of miragul thing seemed more like a bug than a solution so we "lost" the race. Weakest part of the quest IMO..
<Aradune> dascott: really? its the part im most proud of, actually.
* Aradune wrote the FA quest, ya know

<kaiser> Aradune : one question.. if there are 2 people that are the most despised people on a server.. that continously disrupt peoples play, why are they allowed to remain (Dalover and Annabelle(shyness))
<Aradune> kaiser: if they are messing up the game for others, they should go

<Catalyst> Aradune: EQ has no means of fast travel aside from SoW and boats. Since EQ has no horse either it kinda puts a weird situation for an RPG, couldn't there be SoW stations in towns like a horse stable?
<Aradune> catalyst: i'd like to see more sow items that didnt allow you to kite
<Aradune> pure travel items

<Catalyst> Aradune: When can we expect an item that casts "SoW travel edition"?
<Aradune> catalyst: its just what we're thinking about now -- i couldn't say when
<Tsolzyob> Aradune: Any CLUE of another SoW item going into the game...? And make it all melle classes...
<Aradune> tsol: it would be as i was describing to catalyst

<Catalyst> Aradune: What are the issues with making SoW travel only? I'd like to dicuss them if possible, maybe we can come up with a solution tonight...
<Aradune> catalyst: well, the idea is to make a new item with a new sow-like spell that was cancelled if you ever engaged in combat
<Aradune> and had a recating time
<Aradune> recasting

https://web.archive.org/web/20021220115440/http://eq.stratics.com/content/community/irc/irclog-07042000.shtml

IRC: Conversation with Aradune 07/04/2000

<Strago> Aradune you should also upgrade hate. The southwest corner is totally lame. People using NO tatics can just go in and pull away. Its not even worthy of having the name "Plane of Hate", it should be "Plane of get armor for free"
<Aradune> strago: yeah, it needs an upgrade. at first these zones are really hard, but then over time they get easier as people learn

<Strago> Aradune can you describe how hard it will be to obtain level 60 ?
<Aradune> strago: pretty hard. its like a bunch of hell levels after 50
<Aradune> we upped the exp curve

<Azian> aradune: wielding anything new since FA came out to impress us all? =)
<Aradune> azian: i use karana's avenger now
<DaScott> he's wielding the version with the 250 dd proc that they nerfed
<Aradune> nah, i think it has same stats as FA, just rangerable

<ReefSmoke> aradune why doesnt dok's cigars sell cigars?? :(
<Aradune> reef: they made us take that stuff out. *sigh*

<ReefSmoke> aradune did you all plan on players being able to smoke in the beginning?
<Aradune> reef: yeah. halflings with pipes..i mean, come now, it would have been cool

<Jorloja> Aradune: Why not develope a few casino games in HighPass? The dealers are there...
<Aradune> jor: we actually had originally planned for gambling there, but it never was coded

<Jorloja> Aradune: Casino games? Might be a money sink... How deadly would that be, EQ Gambling Addicts... =+D
<Aradune> jor: we'd love it

[loramin]

<Aradune> strago: yeah, it needs an upgrade. at first these zones are really hard, but then over time they get easier as people learn

Sort of prophetic; he wasn't talking about P99, but he might as well have been.

[u_lock]

Casinos are canon!

[Ooloo]

I wonder if\how many original eq devs play on p99. I know that lovingrobot dude who does the interview streams does or did. It would be pretty cool to learn the tank in your group is an og dev.

[Swish]

https://i.imgur.com/GyaUGaT.gif

[Swish]

I wonder if\how many original eq devs play on p99. I know that lovingrobot dude who does the interview streams does or did. It would be pretty cool to learn the tank in your group is an og dev.

I'll bet some old time guides/GMs from the live servers have passed through P99.

[Ennewi]

I'll bet some old time guides/GMs from the live servers have passed through P99.

Tmk there are a few.

[greatdane]

Good old Aradune! I once made a long and boring post about the origins of Everquest (https://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=369631) and these answers ring so true. To someone who was familiar with the MUD from which Brad McQuaid largely plagiarized Everquest (though through the lens of a grahical engine), it's very clear that his original vision was even closer to SojournMUD (now known as TorilMUD) than even the release version of Everquest was.

Back in the mid/late-nineties, Sojourn was one of the most popular MUDs on the internet. Aradune was one of the game's most prolific players, and one day, he decided to make a game of his own. One that had graphics. That became Everquest. There was actually quite a lot of consternation in the MUD's community at the time, because it was perceived as a threat to the game. Needless to say, EQ's popularity saw Sojourn/Toril's playerbase decline by about 75% in a handful of years, owing to the objectively superior gameplay experience of a graphical game like Everquest. There was no way for a MUD to compete, even if it was entirely free to play.

<BlkStaff> Will Necromancers 'create' their undeads from thin air or will they need to have a corpse of a dead monster or (n)pc to make them?
<Aradune> Animate dead Necromancer spells require a corpse as a target.

Yep. On SojournMUD, this spell required a corpse, and the resulting pet's power would be based on the corpse it was animated from. This was the balancing factor of the spell on the MUD that this game was based upon. A necromancer without a pet couldn't easily kill anything that would make for a powerful reanimation, so it took time to work your way up to a strong undead minion.

When Everquest decided alleviate necromancers from the need for a fresh corpse, and simply let them summon a pet anytime, it led to the class being grotesquely overpowered for the first months of the game. It was subsequently nerfed in various ways, including no longer using the delay of whatever weapons you gave to it, a change that was also spread unto other pet classes.

Before this nerf, you could give your pet fine steel daggers and it would get the same attack speed that a player would have had with speed 19 weapons, but with the damage built into their pet level. Until this was nerfed, pets (not just necromancers, although their general versatility compared to magicians made them far superior) would out-damage melee player classes by 50-100%.

On SojournMUD, there was no concept of 'attack speed' as the game was based on D&D and thus worked in turns, so there were fewer balance concerns associated with giving weapons to your pets. The original developers of Everquest did not initially account for this.

<BlkStaff> Will new NPCs, monsters, continents, and buildings be added to the game world after the release? Possibly through a mandatory patch? If so, how often will they be released?
<Aradune> Absolutely -- all three. The plan is to keep the development team working away, adding on the world. This would either be done through periodic patches and/or the purchase of expansion packs at your retailer.

Back then, the notion of paying for expansion packs in a game with a subscription fee was rather controversial. While the MMORPG genre was not invented by Everquest, there had been very few such games until then, mainly Ultima Online and niche games like some weird AoL-only thing called Neverwinter Nights that I know nothing about. By and large, the idea of paying each month to play a game *and* also having to buy expansions was controversial, to say the least.

<BlkStaff> Question in its simplest form: Will EQ attempt to prevent the use of "mule" characters?
<Aradune> If they become abusive in our unique environment, yes. We'll find out in testing if this will be a problem in EQ.
This is an interesting question for reasons that most might not expect. Throughout the first half of the 90s, it was quite common for MUDs (text-based games that are otherwise quite similar to Everquest) to not save your equipment when you logged out. You would log in, search for items to use, and then try to take on the game's challenges. If you had to log out, or if the game crashed or rebooted, you lost everything you owned.

Then some MUDs invented the concept of a bank vault where you could store things for a price (in in-game gold), and this price was based on the character's level. As such, it became logical to make a level 1 character, a 'mule character', with which to store gear. Then when you had to log out, or when the GMs announced an impending reboot, everyone would scramble to store their best shit on a mule so that they could get it back when needed.

In the mid-90s, data was insanely expensive and many MUDs did not have enough space on their sites (usually hosted by some university somewhere) to save players' equipment upon logout. While SojournMUD was big enough to have made this possible, the fact that it was not the norm is why Brad McQuaid was asked this question.


<gentry> Aradune: what were/are your favorite MUDS out of curiosity?
<Aradune> gentry: my favorite mud was sojourn/toril

Well, there you go. Aradune was his main character on Sojourn/Toril, and there was actually quite a controversy when he left the MUD to make a graphical game based upon it. Everquest was very heavily derivative of this MUD, and if both had been commercial products (MUDs were almost always non-profit in those days), Sojourn/Toril would have easily won a plagiarism lawsuit because Everquest copied like 80% of its game mechanics and area concepts wholesale and simply translated them into a graphical engine.

<mleko> Aradune: how big is the virtual world ? like 500 square miles etc ? or doesnt it work like that
<Aradune> mleko: eq with the expansion is like 60 square miles or something
<Aradune> its hard to calculate, because the world is zone based

If you're not familiar with MUDs, this question might be more important than you imagine. MUDs were wholly text-based, and the gameworld was a grid of 'rooms' where each could constitute anything from a lavatory to a square mile of forest. A zone like Unrest might have comprised only a dozen rooms: the entrance, the outer courtyard, the main room, the first floor, the upper towers, the basement, etc.

It was notoriously hard to judge space on MUDs because there was no inherent distinction between a closet and a castle's courtyard. That's probably why Brad's answer is so vague. Separating the gameworld into distinctive zones was a relatively new concept; while MUDs had zones on the builder level, there was no actual zoneline or mechanical distinction between one area and the next, nor any load screens or associated borders.

The rest of the questions quoted in OP are from after launch when Everquest had already broken free from its MUD roots, but it very much built itself upon that foundation, and as someone who played Sojourn/Toril before EQ was a thing, it bears saying that a significant portion of EQ was just straight-up stolen from that MUD.

It's only because the DIKU license is strictly non-commercial that there were no legal repercussions; and even then, there was, in fact, an investigation which concluded that while Everquest was derived very heavily from the MUD(s) that it was based upon, the fact that it had a completely different engine and game format meant that it was not liable on any legal basis. But trust me: the original version of EQ is almost wholly plagiarized from Sojourn.

[Sadre Spinegnawer]

Sort of prophetic; he wasn't talking about P99, but he might as well have been.

Not only p99. The whole mmo persistent world model.


content digestion = farm status
content digestion ~2000: 10 months?
content digestion ~2004: 3 months
content digestion ~2010: 1 month
etc.


The reasons for this are well known. And, barring dynamically generated mechanics and gameworld, unfixable.

There is no reason an AI can't be trained to be a GM *and* mechanics adjuster *and* content modifier/joker. People want to ultra-grind?

Goodbye leveling sandbox and raid farm pixel hunt. Hello Chinese finger trap.

[Vexenu]

Good old Aradune! I once made a long and boring post about the origins of Everquest (https://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=369631) and these answers ring so true. To someone who was familiar with the MUD from which Brad McQuaid largely plagiarized Everquest (though through the lens of a grahical engine), it's very clear that his original vision was even closer to SojournMUD (now known as TorilMUD) than even the release version of Everquest was.


Kudos for these informative effort posts. Very interesting.

[aussenseiter]

Good old Aradune! I once made a long and boring post about the origins of Everquest (https://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=369631) and these answers ring so true. To someone who was familiar with the MUD from which Brad McQuaid largely plagiarized Everquest (though through the lens of a grahical engine), it's very clear that his original vision was even closer to SojournMUD (now known as TorilMUD) than even the release version of Everquest was.

Back in the mid/late-nineties, Sojourn was one of the most popular MUDs on the internet. Aradune was one of the game's most prolific players, and one day, he decided to make a game of his own. One that had graphics. That became Everquest. There was actually quite a lot of consternation in the MUD's community at the time, because it was perceived as a threat to the game. Needless to say, EQ's popularity saw Sojourn/Toril's playerbase decline by about 75% in a handful of years, owing to the objectively superior gameplay experience of a graphical game like Everquest. There was no way for a MUD to compete, even if it was entirely free to play.



Yep. On SojournMUD, this spell required a corpse, and the resulting pet's power would be based on the corpse it was animated from. This was the balancing factor of the spell on the MUD that this game was based upon. A necromancer without a pet couldn't easily kill anything that would make for a powerful reanimation, so it took time to work your way up to a strong undead minion.

When Everquest decided alleviate necromancers from the need for a fresh corpse, and simply let them summon a pet anytime, it led to the class being grotesquely overpowered for the first months of the game. It was subsequently nerfed in various ways, including no longer using the delay of whatever weapons you gave to it, a change that was also spread unto other pet classes.

Before this nerf, you could give your pet fine steel daggers and it would get the same attack speed that a player would have had with speed 19 weapons, but with the damage built into their pet level. Until this was nerfed, pets (not just necromancers, although their general versatility compared to magicians made them far superior) would out-damage melee player classes by 50-100%.

On SojournMUD, there was no concept of 'attack speed' as the game was based on D&D and thus worked in turns, so there were fewer balance concerns associated with giving weapons to your pets. The original developers of Everquest did not initially account for this.



Back then, the notion of paying for expansion packs in a game with a subscription fee was rather controversial. While the MMORPG genre was not invented by Everquest, there had been very few such games until then, mainly Ultima Online and niche games like some weird AoL-only thing called Neverwinter Nights that I know nothing about. By and large, the idea of paying each month to play a game *and* also having to buy expansions was controversial, to say the least.


This is an interesting question for reasons that most might not expect. Throughout the first half of the 90s, it was quite common for MUDs (text-based games that are otherwise quite similar to Everquest) to not save your equipment when you logged out. You would log in, search for items to use, and then try to take on the game's challenges. If you had to log out, or if the game crashed or rebooted, you lost everything you owned.

Then some MUDs invented the concept of a bank vault where you could store things for a price (in in-game gold), and this price was based on the character's level. As such, it became logical to make a level 1 character, a 'mule character', with which to store gear. Then when you had to log out, or when the GMs announced an impending reboot, everyone would scramble to store their best shit on a mule so that they could get it back when needed.

In the mid-90s, data was insanely expensive and many MUDs did not have enough space on their sites (usually hosted by some university somewhere) to save players' equipment upon logout. While SojournMUD was big enough to have made this possible, the fact that it was not the norm is why Brad McQuaid was asked this question.



Well, there you go. Aradune was his main character on Sojourn/Toril, and there was actually quite a controversy when he left the MUD to make a graphical game based upon it. Everquest was very heavily derivative of this MUD, and if both had been commercial products (MUDs were almost always non-profit in those days), Sojourn/Toril would have easily won a plagiarism lawsuit because Everquest copied like 80% of its game mechanics and area concepts wholesale and simply translated them into a graphical engine.



If you're not familiar with MUDs, this question might be more important than you imagine. MUDs were wholly text-based, and the gameworld was a grid of 'rooms' where each could constitute anything from a lavatory to a square mile of forest. A zone like Unrest might have comprised only a dozen rooms: the entrance, the outer courtyard, the main room, the first floor, the upper towers, the basement, etc.

It was notoriously hard to judge space on MUDs because there was no inherent distinction between a closet and a castle's courtyard. That's probably why Brad's answer is so vague. Separating the gameworld into distinctive zones was a relatively new concept; while MUDs had zones on the builder level, there was no actual zoneline or mechanical distinction between one area and the next, nor any load screens or associated borders.

The rest of the questions quoted in OP are from after launch when Everquest had already broken free from its MUD roots, but it very much built itself upon that foundation, and as someone who played Sojourn/Toril before EQ was a thing, it bears saying that a significant portion of EQ was just straight-up stolen from that MUD.

It's only because the DIKU license is strictly non-commercial that there were no legal repercussions; and even then, there was, in fact, an investigation which concluded that while Everquest was derived very heavily from the MUD(s) that it was based upon, the fact that it had a completely different engine and game format meant that it was not liable on any legal basis. But trust me: the original version of EQ is almost wholly plagiarized from Sojourn.

And Sojourn was heavily plagiarized from DIKU.

DIKUMUD / EVERQUEST (https://dikumud.com/everquest/)

After two hectic days, Verant and the DIKU group jointly resolved the DikuMUD / EverQuest infringement rumors on March 17th, 2000.

The DIKU group received a sworn statement from Verant, and the DIKU group thus no longer finds any reason what-so-ever to believe any of the rumors that EverQuest should be based on DikuMUD.

The DIKU group is proud that “the DIKU feeling” has found its way into a game as enjoyable and award-winning as EverQuest.

Give me Rolemaster or give me death(without deeds!)

[Sadre Spinegnawer]

Pager-based mmo's were a thing too.

[Ennewi]

Different source altogether but most, if not all, of those IRC conversations can actually be found in the link below. These were some of the other/extended beta answers from McQuaid, as well as Trost...

https://web.archive.org/web/19990209112156/http://www.gramsplace.com/eq/

Brad McQuaid

Q: <EQVBrd> Will the player who makes the deathkill on a monster or opponent get first pick of the loot?
A: <Aradune> Yes.

Q: <EQV-Qs> In many diffrent pages including eq's home page it has been noted how dark elves are great for seeing at night. How much of a diffrence will this make like will their accuracy be better, range or anything? also will they be punished by haveing a weaknees during the day.
A: <Aradune> Dark Elves see the best at night, followed by some of the other races that have infravision. So far in playing the game, having these abilities is very, very handy. As for dark elves being penalized for being in the day outside -- they aren't at this point, but it's something we are keeping in mind if we need to counterbalance them as a race.

Q: <EQV-Qs> I heard, somewhere down the line, that there was going to be a PvP server. I also heard that you have an overwhelmingly large budget to work on so, will you also be implementing a Role-Playing server or two?

A: <Aradune> No, all servers will be the same. Both +pvp and -pvp players will co-exist, and this is on purpose -- we feel keeping people together so they can talk, interact, trade, etc. is important, regardless of whether they are +pvp or -pvp. As for roleplaying servers, until the world agrees upon what rping exactly means, we really don't think that would be realistic

Q: <Relay_1> [Kenickie- ) Will the world of norrath be round? Also, on a related note, will the time of day be relative to where you are in the world whether it is round or flat?
A: <Aradune> Whether or not the world is flat or round won't be detectable at first, in that we're starting with one hemisphere... so also then is time of day constant.

Q: <Relay_1> [CTidwell ) Can the phase of the moon be determined within the game (assuming there are moon(s))
A: <Aradune> There is indeed a moon -- we are tossing around the idea of having more than one -- as for phases, though, not at this time.

Q: <Relay_2> <Arr> What causes a person to turn int a werewolf, and what happens to the player after the transformation?
A: <Aradune> It's a curse... and I can't go into details, other than to say that when you target a player or NPC while under that curse, instead of revealing its name (as is usual), it says 'meat' :)

<Relay_1> Thanks Everyone for coming out.. I think brad has something to say about beta?
<Aradune> Yep, I have a few announcements about the closed beta, where its at, and such. We decided a while back to have a Phase .5 of sorts, involving approximately 40 people, and this phase has been going on since right after E3. It's going great, and while that phase has been underway, we've been calling people about phase one, and sending out NDAs. We have well over 200 NDAs out now, and will be sending probably 100 or so more out for phase one. The plan is to have, as stated before, about 100 or so people online at any given time. Phase two will begin after we are happy with the way the game is progressing under phase one. With phase two, which will still be under NDA, we will increase the number of people such that we have approx. 500 people playing at any given time.

Q: <BlkStaff> 2) In one of the recent screen shots Aradune seems supped up. His stats are all above 100, his AC is over 200 and all his resistances are above 50, all at 1st level. I know this was probably done for testing but what will a "regular" Human Ranger's stats look like compared to that and will the Sony staff play with "normal" characters in final (at least part of the time)

A: <Aradune> It is true that Aradune's stats were buffed up for testing, however do keep in mind that the scale for AC and attributes and other stats is a bit different than others systems -- some range from 1-200, and others 1-400. Sony staff will play all sorts of characters in-game, and sometimes you will know they are Sony staff, and sometimes you won't. It depends on the role they are playing. If a GM is assuming the role of an avatar of one of the gods to hand out a quest or some such, I would expect that avatar to have some pretty hefty stats.

Q: <Relay1> *FL_Sonik* Alright: will monsters display cowardice .. . will weaker monsters purposely avoid you and/or only attack you in groups?

A: <Aradune> Yes, some monsters will display cowardice and react differently toward groups and individuals, as well as character they perceive to be more or less powerful than they are. It depends upon the intelligence and type of monster.

Q: <Relay1> I was wondering, are some races going to be faster than other races? In UO this was a big problem, someone with low Dex was just as fast as someone with high Dex and I would like the ability for some races to be faster than others. - Ryu

A: <Aradune> It's based on agility, and some races have better agility than others.

Q: Tell us about the new screenshots. Underwater creatures and the new character.

A: Well, those are giant piranahs, and well, they are hungry and would like to eat the poor female wood elf...
A: And the other pic is a halfling exploring the depths of the dungeon of Paw.

Q: Will there be in-game mail?

A: We are planning on in-game mail, but whether it will make it into first release isn't certain at this point.

Q: When can we expect EQ to hit the shelfs?

A: Sometime in the 2nd half of 1998.

Q: The developers of Everquest seem to have a strong MUD background... when did they start playing online multiplayer games like this?

A: Years and years. There's even a guy on the EverQuest team who played the first MUDs back on mainframes in college in the mid 70s!

Q: are there any plans to allow players to take the role of monsters and fight as them?

A: Nothing concrete at this time, but we have tossed those ideas around from time to time.

Q: 2questions. Will there be boat to boat combat? where there will be cannons? or will you have to rely on a mage or archer to shoot at the opther boats? 2. How long vould it take to sail from one continent to the other? could it take an hour? or only like 10 minutes?

A: Yes, there will be ship combat, and as for how long it takes to sail, it all depends on how far you are sailing.


Bill Trost

Q: <Relay2> So, can your character become an NPC character? Obviously he won't as an NPC have my sparkling personality, but it'd be nice I think to go up to my old adventuring buddy and buy a drink off him :). - Comstar

A: <Btrost> Retiring characters is still an unknown at this point.

Q: <Relay3> two part question bill. will we be able to choose from many types of guildhouses?...like can we have a tavern or a cathedral or a fighters arena built onto the main building? -stump|[JETLAG-] can you burn down a building

A: <Btrost> Ok.. Um I assume you are talking about player owned guildhouses... Yes there will be many types. and since we like having some buildings in EQ you will not be able to burn them... ;)

Q: <Relay2> [SirRobert ) will there be a system to leave messages for players, that they could retrive when they log on?

A: <Btrost> We hope so. whether it will make it into the 1st release is unknown. There will be bulletin boards in game for this purpose though.

[Haxom]

Enjoyed the read. Thanks for posting.

[Sadre Spinegnawer]

"...Retiring characters is still an unknown at this point..."

Who wants to live forever?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOhuK7aZayw
MOhuK7aZayw

Flaw in the fucking gameworld is persistent characters.

My current fave emu solution is, 30 in-game days after you hit max level, the game spawns a Brother Mouzone to track you down.
https://i.imgur.com/EOJhkXR.jpg

[cd288]

Super interesting read, thank you for posting. Wish they had kept the corpse mechanic for Necro pets. Or at least given all mobs a chance to drop bone chips (even if it's a very slight chance for a non-skeleton mob).

Also funny that SOE made them take smoking out of the game. Think about what we're totally fine with exposing kids to in games now? Back in the 90s everyone was trying to keep from integrating tobacco into games that kids might play. Nowadays you can have sex in games, we throw porn ads everywhere online and in public...swearing, smoking, drugs, all fine in video games. Tobacco is like the least of our issues anymore lol.

I know the staff here have made slight references before to the idea of putting some sort of casino into the game. The highpass comment seems to support that would be a classic idea that just never got coded due to time constraints. Wish they would do that!

[Ooloo]

Also funny that SOE made them take smoking out of the game. Think about what we're totally fine with exposing kids to in games now?

I mean even in EQ there are still like disemboweled dwarves in torcher chambers and heads on pikes. Ogres look so wacky and bumbling until you see what they do in their free time.

[greatdane]

And Sojourn was heavily plagiarized from DIKU.


No it wasn't. DIKU is not a game, it's a codebase. It's like a game engine. You use it as a framework on which to build a MUD. Calling Sojourn a copy of DIKU is like accusing Borderlands of plagiarizing the Unreal Engine. It doesn't even make technical sense.

Every MUD is built on a codebase, just as any video game is built on an engine. There's a number of different MUD codebases, the most popular at the time being DIKU, ROM, Circle, and some others. The DIKU codebase does come with some stock features, but Sojourn/Toril was highly customized and bore no meaningful resemblance to the stock attributes of the DIKU codebase.

Technically, the DIKU codebase does sort of come with a playable game. If you install the stock engine, it has a very primitive framework for classes, spells, skills, and basic areas. Any MUD worth its salt would customize these heavily. There has never been any such thing as a popular MUD that resembled the stock version of its codebase. No such game would ever have become popular in the first place. The stock version of DIKU is about as interesting as Everquest's original offline tutorial, the one where you meet Soandso.

Sojourn was built on the DIKU codebase but plagiarized literally nothing whatsoever from that codebase's stock features. Even if it had, the DIKU license prohibits monetization of any game built upon the engine, so there's no basis for plagiarism. The old EQ vs DIKU controversy stems from the fact that EQ had used a select few text strings (specifically the text shown when you use socials like /grin) from DIKU, which prohibits using any of its properties for commercial ventures. Since so little was used, there was no real case to be made.

Think of it like EQEmu's stock installation. You can set that up and it comes with a playable game, but you can then change everything. Sojourn kept virtually nothing from the original stock installation. No classes, skills, spells, areas, items or anything like that. Every possible aspect of that game was wholly unique, it was just built on the mechanical foundation of the DIKU codebase.

Meanwhile, Everquest stole wholesale from Sojourn and directly copied many of that game's unique concepts. Classes, races, area concepts, quite a few items, etc. Since SojournMUD was a hobby game run by amateurs with a playerbase of a few hundred people, no action was taken. If it had been a commercial game, it would have been a slam-dunk win in a plagiarism case against EQ. Everquest really is pretty much a direct port of Sojourn onto a graphical engine, just scrubbed of names that belong to the Forgotten Realms IP.

[Trexller]

Also funny that SOE made them take smoking out of the game. Think about what we're totally fine with exposing kids to in games now? Back in the 90s everyone was trying to keep from integrating tobacco into games that kids might play. Nowadays you can have sex in games, we throw porn ads everywhere online and in public...swearing, smoking, drugs, all fine in video games. Tobacco is like the least of our issues anymore lol.

tobacco is all but banned from games. but nudity, trannies, bestiality, homos of all types, child brides, general pedo shit, its all become the norm.

BUT GOD FORBID YOUR CHILD SEES A CIGARETTE THAT COULD BE BAD FOR THEIR DEVELOPMENTAL HEALTH

[Duik]

tobacco is all but banned from games. but nudity, trannies, bestiality, homos of all types, child brides, general pedo shit, its all become the norm.

BUT GOD FORBID YOUR CHILD SEES A CIGARETTE THAT COULD BE BAD FOR THEIR DEVELOPMENTAL HEALTH

What the fuck games are you playing? Umm u can always just stop playing the pedo/tranny/homo games.
Unless you secretly likem? I dunno.

[greatdane]

tobacco is all but banned from games. but nudity, trannies, bestiality, homos of all types, child brides, general pedo shit, its all become the norm.

BUT GOD FORBID YOUR CHILD SEES A CIGARETTE THAT COULD BE BAD FOR THEIR DEVELOPMENTAL HEALTH

Of all these examples (some of which are batshit insane to even bring up as comparable items) none are going to convert the player/viewer. Nobody becomes a fucking homosexual because they play a game or watch a movie that has homosexuals in it.

Now, I don't think there was ever any need to ban cigarettes from video games, because they feature in movies and TV shows and all manner of other media, so eliminating them from gaming probably doesn't accomplish much.

But if a game features homosexuals, it's not going to turn a person homosexual. Same with transexualism. A game featuring child brides (are there any, except maybe fringe shit like Crusdader Kings, played exclusively by 30+ year old white dudes from the western world?) would not influence a player to become a fucking child bride, or to marry a child. I don't know what the fuck kind of games you've played that have featured "pedo shit," but nobody becomes a pedo from playing any video game if they weren't already one.

But what does have some measurable impact on people's behaviour is when media normalize things that are readily accessible to the consumer of that medium. While the effects are probably minimal on an individual basis (let's say 0.1% of players of a game take up smoking because it's an aspect of that game), it is a thing. It's been the same things with movies, with the music industry, with celebrities and societal influencers of all kinds. A non-zero number of people smoke because the pop culture thing that they followed in their youth featured smoking and painted it in a positive light.

The hysteria surrounding it is overblown, and that's the telltale influence of the modern "woke movement" and its tendency to push the envelope to the point where it defeats its own goals; but that doesn't change the fact that there are differences and nuances between one game feature and another. If a game features necromancy, it's not actually going to compel anyone to attempt to practice necromancy in real life, because it's not a belief or opportunity that they're ever presented with. If a game or movie features homosexuals, it's not going to somehow change the player's/viewer's sexuality because that's simply not how humans work.

But if a game mechanic encourages in-game smoking - say, by providing a buff if you do it - or a movie features a sympathetic character for whom smoking is a distinctive character trait, that does have a very real influence on the receiving party to whom cigarettes are available every time they step into any supermarket or corner store. That does make some amount of people smoke. Probably not nearly enough to justify the level of hand-wringing that has gone on in the last decade, but certainly more smokers have been created by media that featured smoking protagonists or game mechanics than homosexuals have been created by homosexal protagonists or NPCs.

At the end of the day, this overreaction in the modern zeitgeist is a result of a phenomenon on the other side of the aisle. The recent resurgence in racism, homophobia, transphobia and other related hateful ideologies from the right wing has compelled the left to combat it by injecting tolerance into media and pop culture. Sometimes, the left has gone too far and made it obnoxiously "woke" to the point where it counteracts their own goals; but at the end of the day, all of this is simply the result of the fact that the right has ramped up its hatefulness in the last decade. If there hadn't been a rise in homophobia, antisemitism, misoginy, xenophobia and whatnot, there would not have been a corresponding reaction from the woke crowd.

And who really does the most damage? The ones who hate or the ones who try to make things a bit too soft in order to fight back against the hate? While smoking is not part of the culture war, it has become embroiled in it as a second-hand element, if you will.

[Ennewi]

I mean even in EQ there are still like disemboweled dwarves in torcher chambers and heads on pikes. Ogres look so wacky and bumbling until you see what they do in their free time.

Also worth mentioning the Neriak strippers and half elf "maiden" in Cab...

https://wiki.project1999.com/Dizra_To%60Biath
https://wiki.project1999.com/Tayla_Ironforge

[Dolalin]

I'll bet some old time guides/GMs from the live servers have passed through P99.

I was a Guide on Mith Marr, my guide name was Pallad.

I'm the reason you have %t to macro your target in chat. I suggested it to Rowyl during Velious beta and he put it in.

There's my 10 minutes of fame done.

[Seducio]

I'm the reason you have %t to macro your target in chat. I suggested it to Rowyl during Velious beta and he put it in.

I use that command all the time. Cool hearing about its origin. Cheers.

[reznor_]

Great read, thank you so much for posting. Lots of great information in this thread

[aussenseiter]

No it wasn't. DIKU is not a game, it's a codebase. It's like a game engine. You use it as a framework on which to build a MUD. Calling Sojourn a copy of DIKU is like accusing Borderlands of plagiarizing the Unreal Engine. It doesn't even make technical sense.

Every MUD is built on a codebase, just as any video game is built on an engine. There's a number of different MUD codebases, the most popular at the time being DIKU, ROM, Circle, and some others. The DIKU codebase does come with some stock features, but Sojourn/Toril was highly customized and bore no meaningful resemblance to the stock attributes of the DIKU codebase.

Technically, the DIKU codebase does sort of come with a playable game. If you install the stock engine, it has a very primitive framework for classes, spells, skills, and basic areas. Any MUD worth its salt would customize these heavily. There has never been any such thing as a popular MUD that resembled the stock version of its codebase. No such game would ever have become popular in the first place. The stock version of DIKU is about as interesting as Everquest's original offline tutorial, the one where you meet Soandso.

Sojourn was built on the DIKU codebase but plagiarized literally nothing whatsoever from that codebase's stock features. Even if it had, the DIKU license prohibits monetization of any game built upon the engine, so there's no basis for plagiarism. The old EQ vs DIKU controversy stems from the fact that EQ had used a select few text strings (specifically the text shown when you use socials like /grin) from DIKU, which prohibits using any of its properties for commercial ventures. Since so little was used, there was no real case to be made.

Think of it like EQEmu's stock installation. You can set that up and it comes with a playable game, but you can then change everything. Sojourn kept virtually nothing from the original stock installation. No classes, skills, spells, areas, items or anything like that. Every possible aspect of that game was wholly unique, it was just built on the mechanical foundation of the DIKU codebase.

Meanwhile, Everquest stole wholesale from Sojourn and directly copied many of that game's unique concepts. Classes, races, area concepts, quite a few items, etc. Since SojournMUD was a hobby game run by amateurs with a playerbase of a few hundred people, no action was taken. If it had been a commercial game, it would have been a slam-dunk win in a plagiarism case against EQ. Everquest really is pretty much a direct port of Sojourn onto a graphical engine, just scrubbed of names that belong to the Forgotten Realms IP.

Sojourn had no case no matter how many pretty flowers they put on it, because they didn't own the engine that ran their game. DIKU group did.

Notice that Sojourn never filed a complaint.

WrjwaqZfjIY

[greatdane]

Sojourn had no case no matter how many pretty flowers they put on it, because they didn't own the engine that ran their game. DIKU group did.

Notice that Sojourn never filed a complaint.

WrjwaqZfjIY

That's why there never was any legal action from Sojourn (I don't know who instigated the look into EQ's code; possibly lawyers from Datalogisk Institut Københavns Universitet, aka DIKU), but they most certainly had a "moral" case, or a right to be aggrieved by Brad McQuaid's wholesale plagiarism of almost all gameplay concepts from Sojourn. In almost every possible way, Everquest is just a port of SojournMUD to a graphical engine, just with namechanges for the cities and gods and whatnot. Literally down to the general stat spread of the races.

Nearly every mechanical aspect is lifted directly from that MUD. There are some exceptions, such as mana instead of traditional D&D's "Vancian magic" system where you memorize x 1st level spells, y 2nd level spells, etc. But all in all, Everquest is a shameless copycat job of Sojourn, so much so that if that MUD was a commercial product with its own IP, it would have automatically won a lawsuit against EQ.

But since it wasn't, there was no basis for it. Still, the fact remains that old Brad and his crew were not quite the creative geniuses that some suppose. He basically just grabbed a game he had played and translated it to a different engine. It was only ever legal because the game he plagiarized had no commercial rights of its own, due to the fact that the DIKU license expressly prohibits this. Still, the consternation over Everquest's genesis did have some merit, given how it all went down. It's just that since SojournMUD had a few hundred players, their grievances were pretty meaningless.

[Fammaden]

So, Brad just ripped another property off to turn into a 3D video game, no wonder he never made another successful game.

[Jimjam]

If you’re gonna steal then steal from the best.

[Cecily]

I was a Guide on Mith Marr, my guide name was Pallad.

I'm the reason you have %t to macro your target in chat. I suggested it to Rowyl during Velious beta and he put it in.

There's my 10 minutes of fame done.
Thank you.

[SlankyLanky]

"...Retiring characters is still an unknown at this point..."

Who wants to live forever?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOhuK7aZayw
MOhuK7aZayw

Flaw in the fucking gameworld is persistent characters.

My current fave emu solution is, 30 in-game days after you hit max level, the game spawns a Brother Mouzone to track you down.
https://i.imgur.com/EOJhkXR.jpg

on a rewatch right now, my mans one cold dude. its all in the game though.

[hextasy]

it makes me sad that p99 exists, but there's no active IRC channel for it

[Rader]

So, Brad just ripped another property off to turn into a 3D video game, no wonder he never made another successful game.

Sounds like the frivilous claim by Spirit that LZ ripped them off for Stairway to Heaven

A similarity of a single chord does not constitute plagarism

[magnetaress]

So, Brad just ripped another property off to turn into a 3D video game, no wonder he never made another successful game.

The argument could be made he saw gold and iterated on it. Just like WoW did with EQ. Ppl calling Brad dumb and evil are short sited themselves.

It requires genius to recognize and understand genius on a level to improve upon it.

[spoil]

The argument could be made he saw gold and iterated on it. Just like WoW did with EQ. Ppl calling Brad dumb and evil are short sited themselves.

It requires genius to recognize and understand genius on a level to improve upon it.

Yeah, I asked in another thread where someone was making this plagiarism claim how enchanter played on the Everquest MUD with charm, mez, lull, etc. No response. I wasn't even being clever, I don't know the answer, I just suspect it. I believe Geoff Zatkin invented those spells. There's so much originality in EQ, why focus on the fact they stole the idea of making a game or whatever. That MUD probably ripped off D&D who ripped off Tokein who ripped off European folklore and so on down the line.

[Pulgasari]

Yeah, I asked in another thread where someone was making this plagiarism claim how enchanter played on the Everquest MUD with charm, mez, lull, etc. No response. I wasn't even being clever, I don't know the answer, I just suspect it. I believe Geoff Zatkin invented those spells. There's so much originality in EQ, why focus on the fact they stole the idea of making a game or whatever. That MUD probably ripped off D&D who ripped off Tokein who ripped off European folklore and so on down the line.

You believe Geoff Zatkin invented charm and mez?

[Pulgasari]

This Gygax denial has gone too far

https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Players_Handbook_1st_edition

Charm monster • Charm person • Charm person/mammal • Charm plants

[Pulgasari]

Meanwhile sirens have been charming men since before the siege of Troy

https://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast246.htm

Sirens charm men with their beautiful singing. Sailors who are attracted to the singing fall asleep; the sirens then attack the men and tear their flesh. They sing when it is stormy but weep when the weather is fair.

[frames]

it makes me sad that p99 exists, but there's no active IRC channel for it

preach

[cd288]

Yeah, I asked in another thread where someone was making this plagiarism claim how enchanter played on the Everquest MUD with charm, mez, lull, etc. No response. I wasn't even being clever, I don't know the answer, I just suspect it. I believe Geoff Zatkin invented those spells. There's so much originality in EQ, why focus on the fact they stole the idea of making a game or whatever. That MUD probably ripped off D&D who ripped off Tokein who ripped off European folklore and so on down the line.

Yeah I mean I read OP's long post from 2020 as well and really there would be no possible claim for plagiarism (at least in the actual law suit sense). I agree that you can certainly argue many things were ripped off Sojourn (such as the two human cities and their characteristics, the Barbarians, the Ogre city, etc.) but none of this rises to law suit level. OP's posts are really interesting, but his adamant statement that Sojourn could've sued them had they been a for profit entity shows a lack of understanding of how IP law works (not that he should have an understanding of course, he's not a lawyer so that's not intended as a criticism).

Plus as you note much of what was in Sojourn was already in D&D. For instance, Dwarves being in the mountains? That was Tolkien and followed by D&D, not a Sojourn situation. Classes and their abilities? A lot of that was D&D, not Sojourn. The only real way Sojourn could've sued Brad/SOE would've been if they actually used the same code, the same names for the cities and the same lore, etc. I.e., if they basically stole the actual code and the entire game itself and imported it into EQ. Which they didn't.

[Ennewi]

CsmjyCU4sNM

[Tnair]

theres two different ideas of theft being conflated here

(1) legal theft of copyrighted material ... part of the whole reason something like Sojourn is free is because its based on copyrighted material. this is the p99 server using the titanium client. theres no basis for this here because of the admittedly cutthroat move of copying a world built by volunteer effort and then in turn copyrighting it for profit. if someone took all the custom changes made in p99 and used them as the basis for a project they coded themselves, and then copyrighted the results of Rogean n Co's work, it would be in this camp. not illegal at all, but using legality to advantage yourself over your previous fellows. understandable to be a bit upset over when receiving no credit whatsoever (for legal reasons partly im sure)

(2) creative theft... where idea of ownership get all mixed up. i didnt really see anything in OPs posts about this being the actual problem; the problem was taking a share of this freely available, communal worldbuilding effort, and then legally gating it behind money, without so much as an ackowledgement or gratitude (again maybe for legal reasons, or Brad was imo just caught up in the crazy times of early EQ management)

OP just brings up repeatedly that Brad was relying directly on essentially fan fiction without crediting the authors. thats not evil. its just not as hero-worship worthy as his involvement is often lauded as being. its only the replies where people are reading "did you know Norrath was basically already someone elses fan project?" but hearing "brad is a thief". it adds more depth to know about TorilMUD than it does to pretend Norrath was developed straight from reading Tolkein. reading the new player guides for it are neat.

[cd288]

theres two different ideas of theft being conflated here

(1) legal theft of copyrighted material ... part of the whole reason something like Sojourn is free is because its based on copyrighted material. this is the p99 server using the titanium client. theres no basis for this here because of the admittedly cutthroat move of copying a world built by volunteer effort and then in turn copyrighting it for profit. if someone took all the custom changes made in p99 and used them as the basis for a project they coded themselves, and then copyrighted the results of Rogean n Co's work, it would be in this camp. not illegal at all, but using legality to advantage yourself over your previous fellows. understandable to be a bit upset over when receiving no credit whatsoever (for legal reasons partly im sure)

(2) creative theft... where idea of ownership get all mixed up. i didnt really see anything in OPs posts about this being the actual problem; the problem was taking a share of this freely available, communal worldbuilding effort, and then legally gating it behind money, without so much as an ackowledgement or gratitude (again maybe for legal reasons, or Brad was imo just caught up in the crazy times of early EQ management)

OP just brings up repeatedly that Brad was relying directly on essentially fan fiction without crediting the authors. thats not evil. its just not as hero-worship worthy as his involvement is often lauded as being. its only the replies where people are reading "did you know Norrath was basically already someone elses fan project?" but hearing "brad is a thief". it adds more depth to know about TorilMUD than it does to pretend Norrath was developed straight from reading Tolkein. reading the new player guides for it are neat.

I'm not too familiar with Sojourn's lore but seems like it would be surprising if it had the same lore as Norrath.

To me, the arguments for similarities come down to 3 things:

- Classes and abilities. But as mentioned these were likely already taken from D&D (or heavily influenced thereby) by Sojourn, so not really relevant.

- Races. Is this really an argument besides a couple specific races like Gnomes and Barbarians? Unless are Gnomes in D&D I can't recall. Basically all these races already existed in Tolkien and then D&D (or at the very least in D&D if not in Tolkien).

- Cities. The human cities are obviously heavily inspired by Sojourn. As is Halas. Seems like there's an argument for Oggok too. Kaladim? Not really...dwarves in mountains comes from Tolkien so not really something Sojourn could claim. Neriak? Doesn't seem like this type of DE city originated with Sojourn. Not sure what the other cities in Sojourn were like...was there a Kelthin-type place? Felwithe and Rivervale are clearly inspired by Tolkien not another video game.

Every fantasy and sci-fi author for example has likely implemented things in their world inspired by other books they've read. It happens. Doesn't mean they aren't a good or creative world builder.

[Pulgasari]

Simutronics literally stole a Rolemaster license by misspelling a few names and still operates a pay-service with it to this day.

[Tnair]

I'm not too familiar with Sojourn's lore but seems like it would be surprising if it had the same lore as Norrath.

To me, the arguments for similarities come down to 3 things:

- Classes and abilities. But as mentioned these were likely already taken from D&D (or heavily influenced thereby) by Sojourn, so not really relevant.

- Races. Is this really an argument besides a couple specific races like Gnomes and Barbarians? Unless are Gnomes in D&D I can't recall. Basically all these races already existed in Tolkien and then D&D (or at the very least in D&D if not in Tolkien).

- Cities. The human cities are obviously heavily inspired by Sojourn. As is Halas. Seems like there's an argument for Oggok too. Kaladim? Not really...dwarves in mountains comes from Tolkien so not really something Sojourn could claim. Neriak? Doesn't seem like this type of DE city originated with Sojourn. Not sure what the other cities in Sojourn were like...was there a Kelthin-type place? Felwithe and Rivervale are clearly inspired by Tolkien not another video game.

Every fantasy and sci-fi author for example has likely implemented things in their world inspired by other books they've read. It happens. Doesn't mean they aren't a good or creative world builder.

i actually am kinda fascinated by how you could even define fantasy or scifi as genres. can it still be fantasy without racism baked in? is it still fantasy without mimicking colonial "the world is full of resources and plunder that rightfully belong to our superior society"? like of course almost nothing in fantasy is unique to just common attitudes from tolkien's lifetime, so its like... what can you change that makes it "not fantasy" anymore? its such a specific nexus of tropes, and yet in theory is not bound to any of them.

[Duik]

You bake the racism in.
A set of rules define possibilities, you define how you choose to use them.

Prolly a racist. Just saying.

[Pulgasari]

You bake the racism in.
A set of rules define possibilities, you define how you choose to use them.

Prolly a racist. Just saying.

J. R. R. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic from boyhood, and he described The Lord of the Rings in particular as a "fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision".

[Duik]

J. R. R. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic from boyhood, and he described The Lord of the Rings in particular as a "fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision".

Just like I said. YOU BAKE THE RACISM IN.
You literally said yourself. He, upon self reflection, noted his own builtin racism.
That was entirely too easy. You needa try harder.

Maybe try linking less anal sex subjects in ya DMs?

[Pulgasari]

Just like I said. YOU BAKE THE RACISM IN.
You literally said yourself. He, upon self reflection, noted his own builtin racism.
That was entirely too easy. You needa try harder.

Maybe try linking less anal sex subjects in ya DMs?

It's a power move.

https://64.media.tumblr.com/241cbe645958a5cd06f48546ed6b884b/ab88b8b65bfcd00c-8b/s540x810/6ba1cc59f6e2d2df792a4632907a2ef189a82a40.gif

[Duik]

You think linking a gif of the joker with sunday morning panda hooker eyes is a power move?

[Ekco]

- Races. Is this really an argument besides a couple specific races like Gnomes and Barbarians? Unless are Gnomes in D&D I can't recall. Basically all these races already existed in Tolkien and then D&D (or at the very least in D&D if not in Tolkien).


Gygax added Gnomes to DnD before it was even called DnD

[Jimjam]

Gygax added Gnomes to DnD before it was even called DnD

Anything beyond cleric / fighter / wizard / rogue and dwarf / elf / halfling / human is just fanon.

[Ekco]

Anything beyond cleric / fighter / wizard / rogue and dwarf / elf / halfling / human is just fanon.

Gnomes were in Chainmail 3rd edition as playable same stats as dwarves

“I added gnomes to D&D to broaden the choices for non-human PCs, as I did in AD&D. This was done because a number of players, myself included, were tired of having so many dwarves, elves, and halflings in the group of adventurers. In my campaign a party of 12 would have three front rank halflings, a second rank of dwarves, elves in the third rank, and the fourth rank the humans…”

Gnomes became the fifth playable race in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 1st Edition in 1978. They were originally introduced as an alternative to dwarves, elves, and halflings, and are often depicted as buffoons, illusionists, and inventors. Gnomes are usually 3–4 ft tall, weigh around 40 lbs, and have a base walking speed of 25 ft. They have superior vision in the dark, are cunning, and can speak, read, and write Common and Gnomish.