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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.