History Headscratchers / DungeonsAndDragons

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** Technically a fiend probably ''could'' turn Good under '''extremely''' unusual circumstances. It's just that "some stubborn PC kept preaching at it" doesn't qualify all by itself. And any such HeelFaceTurn would need to involve the fiend's own deep-seated CharacterDevelopment, not just a fluke or a single show of mercy or kindness by a Good being.

** Just because death isn't permanent doesn't necessarily mean it's not painful. Also, it would probably be reasonable to assume that powerful demons like the Balor can totally buttrape the 'soul' or 'essence' of the demons in question, which would presumably be significantly more dangerous than just having a mortal shell destroyed.

** Although it's been forgotten over the decades, from the original edition to 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the default assumption was that the world has one been replete with magical workings but that the world and its magical levels had fallen and decayed over the centuries (for various cataclysmic reasons or simply due to "thinning" as greed replaced creative curiosity) until our player-characters find themselves the last of a hardy breed who are willing to search for the lost magical items found only in the terrifying wildlands and in the abandoned dungeons. Magic shops were only found near such wildlands or dungeons, in which proprietors basically purchased the magical items of retiring or traumatized adventurers (who needs a ''+5 only versus basilisks'' sword to retire to gardening in a safe city far away from the wildlands?) and then sold them to the latest would-be adventurers. The sight of a magic shop meant that a magic-laden wildland or dungeon could not be far away, for magic shops were never found in safe or mundane parts of the world. Most NPCs never bothered to learn how to make magic items but instead guarded them as ancient treasures impossible to reproduce, making the player-character magic-user a very rare individual privvy to secrets of item creation unknown to most mortal folk!

* This is something that always bugged me: why is the spell destruction not in the destruction domain? I mean, if there was a spell called "fire" I would expect it to be in the fire domain.

** All elves obviously have serious learning disabilities, if not full-on mental retardation. Why do you think the average level 1 elf is more than a hundred years old, and yet has the same knowledge and capability of a human teenager?

** There's no reason to treat this unlike any other method, including direct undeath disruption. So it changes "undead" to "slain". But if undeath counts as "time being dead", mortals have very little chance to resurrect a lich. 200 years old, and you'll need level 20 priest. 500 years... yeah. And after all this, it can easily turn out to be someone dying of old age. The only method explicitly said to revert undeads was "Gift of Life", a High Magic (elven-only tradition) spell from ForgottenRealms.

* Why is the "standard cosmology" in the third edition called that? According to wikipedia: "The standard D&D cosmology is the official cosmology used in the Planescape and Greyhawk campaign settings." If it's only used in those settings, what's "standard" about it? Or if it's the one usually used (which ''Manual of the Planes'' seems to imply) then why does TheOtherWiki single it out as used by ''Planescape'' and ''Greyhawk''?

** Ir's also quite plausible to assume that many spell-casters, or at least the ones who aren't interested in becoming liches or whatever, spend the last few years of their lives channeling their power into magical items. Aging clerics would imbue items for their church's defenders and acolytes; wizards would equip their apprentices or the warriors of a royal patron; druids would craft gifts for rangers and forest folk with whom they've worked. The archetype of the venerable mage who, sensing his own death approaching, expends the last of his power to bequeath some enchanted boon to a new generation is a staple of fantasy fiction.