The Great D&D Flattening: Why Everything Became a Character Build
“Ask a table today what their character is, and you will often get an answer that sounds less like a person and more like a shopping list: Hexblade Two, Paladin Eight, Polearm Master, Sentinel, Metamagic Adept. Ask that same question of a table playing in 1985, and you’ll hear a name, a class, and all manner of information provided by the player about who this fictional person is supposed to be. In the course of the fifty years separating those two tables, the notion of identity for a D&D character has shifted from existing within the context of the fiction to residing almost entirely on the build sheet.“
