Aardvark Barbarian's page

About Aardvark Barbarian

A (not so brief) Brief History

I began playing D&D in middle school with 1st and red box and consumed all the material I could find. The downside was I didn't have a DM to mentor me, an older friend that had played since the beginning.

2nd came out soon after and offered some explanation in the rule books that didn't seem clear in the beginning. Amongst my friends I always ran the games since I was the one who had read the books cover to cover (multiple times) and knew most of the core information by heart. Because I was never taught the game, I had only one thing to rely on, the rules. I have always been described by my friends as Lawful Lawful Neutral (with good tendencies). There were always rules that made sense and those that I felt didn't, but as the game even said, it was my game and I could change those as I saw fit. I have always run homebrew (nothing against any published worlds, but those were someone elses' worlds and followed their rules, my world followed mine).

When 3rd came out I was amongst the vocal against it, but it was D&D, and I loved all things D&D (even when I don't agree with them) so I would give it a fair chance. I found that a lot of the new rules were rules I had already used of my own creation. As always I consumed all that I could find. Some things just didn't fit (monks never fit, as my world had no Asian culture). There were now rules galore, I had my fill of rules and then some, went back for seconds, circled the table buffet style then over-indulged in a horde of rules to handle almost any situation I could imagine. Over time I realized these just made me fat and slow, every action had a bunch of references that needed to be attached. There's always the "just add a situational modifier", but I'm not random, I'm LLN. If there was a rule, I'll find it and use it, if I don't agree I'll change it.. officially and inform all the players of the new state of things.

Soooo, 4th appears and again I rally against the intruder into my happy world, but all things D&D must be given the benefit of the doubt and consumed. Lo and behold, they took all those rules in 3rd that answered my queries, and compact them into a simple easily digestable format.