What Was Gygax Thinking?
Dungeon! predates D&D, MeGarry brought the prototype with him when he went with Arneson to show Gary how Blackmoor worked.
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Well, very easy to look at old modules and see, sooo...Prove It.
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It does, but what I don't think has ever been seen is the original prototype. And both take Chainmail as a kind of ur-influence. (The differentiation between heroes and superheroes being an obvious example). In later editions there's definitely D&Disms. What I'm not sure on is things like whether the ochre jelly is a Megarry invention or whether it was grandfathered in later because of D&D.
That I don’t know. Here is a great blog article on the early board game.
The Dungeons of Pasha Cada
zenopusarchives.blogspot.com
robertsconley
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Some back history
The term Old School Revival/Renaissance/Rukus/Revolution originated from the group of folks involved in promoting, publishing, and playing classic editions of D&D between 2008 and 2010 to use as a shorthand name for the group. It won out because of the fun wordplay of TSR versus OSR.
From the get-go the group that was playing, promoting, and publishing was criticized for using the term. On one side were the folks who never stopped playing and were offended at being lumped in with the retro-clone folks. On the other was from a segment of the wider hobby who felt that OSR was saying that the only classic D&D was old school.
Then as it is now those who published, promoted, and played classic editions of D&D marched to the tune of their own drummer, including myself. Most ignored the criticism, which also includes me.
Where the hell Old School Renaissance come from? (2009)
That being said, every OSR participant I know of, including myself, is interested in other systems both old and new. And alongside our OSR efforts, we promote, publish, and play these other systems. The difference is that it varies a lot what these systems are, while classic D&D as a focus is nearly universal. For me I do stuff with Traveller, GURPS, and AGE.
What many folks don't get is that the OSR as we see it today is what true creative freedom looks like (until Wizards started being dicks). There is no dominant player setting the tone like there is for Savage Worlds and Fate. Instead, it is hundreds if not thousands each with their own take on what to do with classic D&D, what to do with "old school". And throughout the 2010s it diversified so much that nobody has a handle on all that the OSR is doing.
But classic D&D acts as a magnet that keeps the OSR from scattering in a thousand directions. Its mechanics, its tropes, and its themes create a gravitational field with people and groups drifting in and out over time.
For example, my focus is on sandbox campaigns, and hexcrawl formatted settings. Not dungeon crawls. Moreso, I do a lot of things differently than the other sandbox folks. For me is less about the charts, procedures, and tables, and more about immersion techniques. One side effect is that I use skills, starting with my Majestic Wilderlands supplement in 2009.
Wrapping it up
The creative freedom I mentioned applies to your efforts as well. It doesn't matter how I or anybody else defines the OSR. What matters is what you personally do with the material and the ideas you learned about. If it winds up ignoring classic D&D then so be it. As long as you are having fun with it, it is all good.
The term Old School Revival/Renaissance/Rukus/Revolution originated from the group of folks involved in promoting, publishing, and playing classic editions of D&D between 2008 and 2010 to use as a shorthand name for the group. It won out because of the fun wordplay of TSR versus OSR.
From the get-go the group that was playing, promoting, and publishing was criticized for using the term. On one side were the folks who never stopped playing and were offended at being lumped in with the retro-clone folks. On the other was from a segment of the wider hobby who felt that OSR was saying that the only classic D&D was old school.
Then as it is now those who published, promoted, and played classic editions of D&D marched to the tune of their own drummer, including myself. Most ignored the criticism, which also includes me.
Where the hell Old School Renaissance come from? (2009)
Use it how you like, it is an organic term, to begin with. Just realize that many (not all) who play, promote, and publish classic editions of D&D use it to refer to themselves as a group label. That is the sense that I personally use it for and I am not alone in this.
Except in the case of the OSR the terms arose among those played, promoted, and published for classic D&D. As you are being to see using that description over and over again gets old quickly. Hence why many folks started using OSR starting in 2008.
Your reaction is not uncommon. I will point out two things
- Regardless of what many others think, people like mucking around with classic D&D. It not going away, it has a wide variety of folks, doing a lot of different things just like any other RPG one can point at. Classic D&D is neither better nor worse than any other RPGs for doing a variety of things with. It does have the disdain of many in the hobby. Considered to be archaic and broken.
- Unlike classic D&D, many other RPGs from the era didn't have a break in continuity thus not in a need of a renaissance. Traveller, Runequest, and Rolemaster are all examples of this. Other like the IP for The Fantasy Trip was regained and started up again under a traditional publishing arrangement.
That being said, every OSR participant I know of, including myself, is interested in other systems both old and new. And alongside our OSR efforts, we promote, publish, and play these other systems. The difference is that it varies a lot what these systems are, while classic D&D as a focus is nearly universal. For me I do stuff with Traveller, GURPS, and AGE.
It never changed. From its first use in the last 2000s to now, there was the OSR focused on classic D&D and the larger osr focused on older RPGs and older play styles.
Whether it is classic D&D or not.
What many folks don't get is that the OSR as we see it today is what true creative freedom looks like (until Wizards started being dicks). There is no dominant player setting the tone like there is for Savage Worlds and Fate. Instead, it is hundreds if not thousands each with their own take on what to do with classic D&D, what to do with "old school". And throughout the 2010s it diversified so much that nobody has a handle on all that the OSR is doing.
But classic D&D acts as a magnet that keeps the OSR from scattering in a thousand directions. Its mechanics, its tropes, and its themes create a gravitational field with people and groups drifting in and out over time.
For example, my focus is on sandbox campaigns, and hexcrawl formatted settings. Not dungeon crawls. Moreso, I do a lot of things differently than the other sandbox folks. For me is less about the charts, procedures, and tables, and more about immersion techniques. One side effect is that I use skills, starting with my Majestic Wilderlands supplement in 2009.
Wrapping it up
The creative freedom I mentioned applies to your efforts as well. It doesn't matter how I or anybody else defines the OSR. What matters is what you personally do with the material and the ideas you learned about. If it winds up ignoring classic D&D then so be it. As long as you are having fun with it, it is all good.
AsenRG
#FuckWotC #PlayNonDnDGames
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Actually, histography means "description of bodily tissue" according to Merriam-Webster, and that's the only definition I'd met before. So I'd offer that there's a vast difference with "historiogrpahy"...
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And what you should really do is add the qualifier "the principles of old-school D&D as generally interpreted within the OSR movement". Because the actual principles were, AFAWK, "make up some shit that you think would be fun" and "if you don't like it, vote with your feet" (with the unspoken addendum being "if your players are voting with their feet, look in the mirror"
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Right, so I'm kinda into the Nu-OSR, and find both the classic and adjacent OSR...kinda perplexing
.And what you should really do is add the qualifier "the principles of old-school D&D as generally interpreted within the OSR movement". Because the actual principles were, AFAWK, "make up some shit that you think would be fun" and "if you don't like it, vote with your feet" (with the unspoken addendum being "if your players are voting with their feet, look in the mirror"
)!
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Yes, that's my basic problem. The classes give you too many ways to completely avoid problems, such as wilderness survival at too low a level. Part of the fun of an RPG is overcoming problems, and when you get handed too many auto-win solutions, it takes that fun away. It also leaves the DM with combat as the only way to challenge the party. It's like they designed it with the intent of allowing you to scrub past all the non-fight stuff.
They already have. A couple of them are aspiring game designers, so they are as upset about the OGL as anyone. They are glad to be ahead of the ball with their friends on having a suitable replacement to suggest to their 5E friends.They should thank you one day!
It could indeed be read as "We have barely begun to villify our customers. Release the dragon."Are we sure they weren't identifying themselves as Tiamat?
One the other hand, I imagine the people that run the social media accounts at WotC are the same kind of people that wrote that message that Professor Dungeonmaster tore apart in his last video.
robertsconley
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"So your ninth level magic user cast a fourth level spell on the sixth dungeon level correct?"
This is where I get confused.
At one point you have capitalized OSR ( classic D&D related stuff), and then you talk about "osr" (not capitalized, but talking about older games in general, I guess? Maybe?).
And then, of course, I still don't get where a love of older, D&D based mechanics (and playstyle to a real degree) fit into all of this.
Where does Mothership, White Lies, or Gangbusters B/X (and their creators) fit into all of this?
Part of my question of terminology is also because there seems to be a thing where some very unpleasant non-game associations seem to be accruing to some boogie-man described as OSR in online spaces.
To me, OSR/osr just means a love of old game playstyles and mechanics (mostly) centered on old D&D variants (especially 0e and B/X).
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that seems equally appropriate to the thread
Gringnr
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Tunnels & Trolls, from its first edition (spring 1975) intended for dungeon depth to correspond to difficulty/challenge. The deeper you went, the tougher it got.
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Oh, to be clear, yes, the deeper you go, the tougher that dungeons were meant to be, in D&D or otherwise. My contention is that this wasn't comparable to providing "balanced encounters" (a party could go to any level of the dungeon at any character level) and there was no set categorization of D&D monsters corresponding to Dungeon Level analogous to Challenge Ratings assigned to creatures in modern D&D
AsenRG
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Having argued with Mr. Conley, I remember that he uses osr-uncapitalized to mean "old-school games that do not use (old or new) D&D mechanics", like say Cepheus engine (which is definitely old-school, a lot of it being inspired by Classic Traveller). But games run in the frei kriegspiegel style would also count, and so on...
Apologies if I'm misrepresenting something, it's accidental.
I'd agree, actually
!I find it hard to pronounce the difference between the two when speakingHaving argued with Mr. Conley, I remember that he uses osr-uncapitalized to mean "old-school games that do not use (old or new) D&D mechanics", like say Cepheus engine (which is definitely old-school, a lot of it being inspired by Classic Traveller). But games run in the frei kriegspiegel style would also count, and so on...
Apologies if I'm misrepresenting something, it's accidental.
I think I'm going to be difficult and just start using the term Retro-GrogNerd instead.
JoeNuttall
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The main thing in Dungeon added after Gary saw it was (apparently) the player vs player combat, the main input he had prior to that was most of the monsters come from Chainmail.
The tagline "The deeper you go, the better they are but the worse it gets" is from Dungeon! - that wasn't the case in Blackmoor but became core to D&D.
In addition secret door rules appear to come from Dungeon! as does what a Dungeon looks like. There's probably more (+1/+2 swords, MU's can't use swords), but when I looked I couldn't find the original rules.
There was no official categorisation, but people came up with unofficial ones pretty much as soon as D&D was published.
Monstermark by Don Turnbull was published in Owl & Weasel Jan 1977, then reprinted and expanded in its successor White Dward. This system was well-known in the UK, especially as it was reprinted in the Best of White Dwarf Articles. The stated purpose was so that "new monsters could be assigned with reasonable accuracy to levels". Ooo, heresy.
Len Lakofka did a similar system in Dragon #44 (Jan 1980), but the stated aim then was to give more representative XP values to monsters.
Gygax clearly didn’t like nuts and bolts procedural stuff and thought it should all just be made up in the moment by the DM based on their judgment calls, so in OD&D he just glossed over most of it with vague instructions to refer to other games (Chainmail or Outdoor Survival) or assign a 1 or 2 in 6 chance for various things. But the audience wanted hard & fast rules and explanations for that stuff so even though he resented it and thought it should all be intuitively obvious to the readers just like it was to him, in AD&D he nonetheless tried to provide it. However he wasn’t good at either codifying or (especially) explaining that stuff so he did so grudgingly and with the result that those rules are mostly a big nigh-incomprehensible mess with tons of weird ellipses and contradictions and odd fiddly special case rules that were likely only used at his actual table once (if ever). That’s why the best parts of the AD&D rules are where he leaves the mechanics aside and goes off into tangential philosophical essays.
Where his heart lay, what he enjoyed and was good at creating, was Stuff - character classes and spells and monsters and magic items - with lots of flavor and some bespoke mechanical elements. He had a great intuitive sense for how to take some idea from a book or movie or plastic toy (or, more controversially, something suggested by a fan or ostensible collaborator) and tweak it into something that would fit and work in the context of his game-universe. That plus creating fantasy locations with evocative descriptions and detailed maps and orders of battle, intriguing places and situations you can easily picture in your mind’s eye and that feel less like pure game constructs than something plucked out of an alternate world.
That’s presumably why he was seemingly always seeking out assistant/collaborators who would handle the nuts and bolts crunchy procedural stuff so he didn’t have to be bothered with it - Arneson and Kuntz and Schick and Lakofka and Mentzer and Cook and Grubb and so on. The problem there is that while he wanted them to do that work he didn’t want to share credit or royalties with them…
In a perfect world Gygax would have set aside some of his ego/greed to collaborate with someone who was really good at that “physics engine” procedural stuff - someone like a Steve Perrin or Frank Chadwick or Greg Costikyan - producing a merger of a solid and well-explained mechanical base plus all of his imaginative Stuff layered on top.
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robertsconley
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Old School Renaissance is a lable that refers to a specific group. While old school renaissance is a description of a trend in the RPG hobby.
Label versus Description.
Examples
Some popular retro-clones in the Old School Renaissance are OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, Old School Esstentials and Swords & Wizardry.
We are in the midst of an old school renaissance where older editions of RPGs like Traveller, D&D, and Runequest are sparking renewed interest.
Because circa 2005 amid the 3.0/3.5/d20 era there was a group of folks who played and promoted classic editions of D&D and wanted to do more. OSRIC and Basic Fantasy allowed them to add publishing to playing and publishing. Then this group came up with an informal label to describe what they were doing. OSR won out.
Like White Star, even my own Majestic Fantasy RPG. Systems that build on classic D&D mechanics. As why they fit in the answer is quite simply because the creator read something they liked in classic D&D and adapted it their purposes. Just I made the Majestic Fantasy RPG using Swords & Wizardry as foundation for my own reasons.
I would ask those making the accusations how it can be anything beyond specific people doing specific shitty things.
As for me, google my name and Judges Guild and you will understand how I deal with such matters. And I am not alone in doing this.
That sounds workable to me. As long as you realize it always "It depends on the individual" when it comes to anything with the OSR. If you run across something that makes you go "huh?" just look at who is talking about it and what their interest are. That usually provides better answers then the nebulous "OSR they" that many try to use.
robertsconley
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Having argued with Mr. Conley, I remember that he uses osr-uncapitalized to mean "old-school games that do not use (old or new) D&D mechanics", like say Cepheus engine (which is definitely old-school, a lot of it being inspired by Classic Traveller). But games run in the frei kriegspiegel style would also count, and so on...
Apologies if I'm misrepresenting something, it's accidental.
I'd agree, actually
robertsconley
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Good luck, you are not the first in trying to do that. I am not being critical. Your reaction to maddening situation surrounding the use of OSR, osr, etc. has been shared by many since its first use of OSR in 2008. While I don't consider Retro-GrogNerd supplanting osr or OSR likely, but who knows? So you do you.
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That'd be an interesting project I think. What alternative or deriative terms have taken off and which haven't.
"Old school" seems to have been adopted else where - the "Old School Gamebook Revival" community are small but vocal. That is both obviously inspired by the OSR and is entirely its own community.
As mentioned, B-OSR is niche but has been widely adopted by the people it's aimed at.
Nu-OSR or Old School Revolution never really got off the ground.
Vile Traveller
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BedrockBrendan
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Lol. I also remember reading about people who thought that turn undead meant the zombies spun around in place. There were a ton of strange interpretation of the rules and sometimes those strange interpretations would spread within a particular circle of friends and become their norm.
I think what happened with a lot of us was we encountered these concepts in very piecemeal fashion. It wasn't like today where you go on wikipedia and the edition history and the rules history is laid out, where you have books written on the topic. Most of what we gathered was a combination of word of mouth and what RPG books and systems we happen to have. Your path in gaming could also be highly idiosyncratic and a product of your local gaming scene. When I started, I was on the west coast and began, I believe with MechWarrior. Then I started playing in a D&D campaign but didn't have any of the books. The first RPGsI could buy because of the Satanic Panic were stuff like Top Secret. I eventually was lent a 1E DMG by a friend, but had that for only a few weeks. Then when I moved to the east coast, I started gaming with my cousin. 2E had just come out, and he told me to buy the second edition PHB and the Red Box (which at the time was the Mentzer version). Most of what I initially learned about GMing was from Mentzer. Then I started GMing and got the 2E DMG, the Monster Manual and was actively reading Dragon and Dungeon. We were also playing other games and systems, plus plenty of 1E books were floating around (I had the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, Dragonlance, and Oriental Adventures, my friend had the Wilderness Survival Guide, the 1E PHB). It wasn't uncommon for people to bring in things like the Barbarian from 1E and the monk from 1E to a 2E game. And it obviously the GM advice we were getting was all very splintered and fragmented (I remember the GMing side being very difficult for me until I picked up the Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide).
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I originally thought it meant they could turn into undead
BedrockBrendan
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Feel free to post the passage, i think that would be useful. I recall similar language in the early D&D books I encountered (and maybe in places like Dragon or something). But my point was more I found this confusing, especially since no one I knew appeared to be using dungeon levels in this way (and the concept I think struck as somewhat artificial, even a bit silly). This may just have had more to do with changing tastes or things fragmenting. I came into the hobby in 86 and wasn't GMing till 89 or 90 I think. While I had some of the old 1E books at the time, and made use of them, I didn't sit down to make some kind of sense of them as a whole until years later when I picked up the 1E DMG again on a whim after being fed up with 3E). Prior to the early 2000s, among most of the gamers I knew, we tended to go along with each new edition and find some of the older stuff a little out of date or primitive. I changed my thinking on that a lot after reading the DMG cover to cover in the mid-2000s and going back to the old books looking for gameable content. Before that, when we read the 1E DMG in the 90s, we tended to laugh like we might at our parents old music. However after reading it and many of the older books with more serious interest in how things functioned at the table I found that many of the older approaches I thought of as outdated or silly were actually quite useful and many of the newer ideas that seemed cutting edge actually were getting in the way of me enjoying the game).
I don't claim to speak for the OSR. I am very outside the OSR in terms of what systems I use. But I like some of the idea from the OSR, many of the modules coming out of it especially. But I do think it is a mistake to think of the OSR as reconstructing a model of what D&D was like in 1974 or 1978 or 1983----it is a new thing inspired by older ideas.
Telok
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Someone droppedIt had, in general. I’m not entirely sure whatTelok is talking about.
About people looking to switch to PF/PF2, and I replied that I think it's more that there's an impression that, because some (and particularly recent Pazio games) systems got their math & system goals right in a way that seems to make them 'better' from a point of view. Then there were a couple "why do you think that" follow on posts.
5e defaults to a particular play style and party type. Deviate from that and it starts getting creaky. Nothing an experienced GM can't handle, but novices struggle and the DMG/adventures don't (opinion) seem to actually help with identifying, understanding, or adapting. Like the skills dcs & advice not including examples, leaving everything to DM experience. Then the caster issue being that, while casters have generally fewer spells and less combat buff/debuff stacking, the "this breaks sneaking/travel/investigation" type spells are still there and caster heavy parties plus rest frequency isn't really addressed by the books.
Dr Jack
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Red Box D&D said this about Dungeon Levels:
I won't copy the whole of those later pages referred to here, but they link to random monster tables at the back of the booklet at guidelines and these give tables of suitable monsters for each level which mostly have more dangerous foes in a manner similar to CR based tables.
Dungeons are often more than just a few caves. In your first group adventure, the ruins of a castle were explored. The cellar below that floor of the castle is left for you to fill with monsters and treasures. This is called the “second level” of the dungeon. The least dangerous (easiest) level of a dungeon is always called the “first level” of the dungeon, or “dungeon level one.” A dungeon may be any number of levels deep. In general, the deeper you explore in a dungeon, the more dangerous it becomes. Tougher (higher level) monsters are discovered -but the treasures should also be larger. Dungeon levels and designs are explained in more detail on pages 47 - 48
I won't copy the whole of those later pages referred to here, but they link to random monster tables at the back of the booklet at guidelines and these give tables of suitable monsters for each level which mostly have more dangerous foes in a manner similar to CR based tables.
Gringnr
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Voros
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I believe it is mentioned in The Hobbit that hobbits have a natural talent for stealth. That is one of the reasons Gandalf recruits Bilbo as a Burglar (the LotR motivations are a retcon by Tolkien). May need to pull the book off the shelf to confirm.
The random treasure and monster tables in OD&D Vol III make it clear that deeper dungeon levels have tougher monsters and richer treasures. There’s also the guidelines for giving out XP in Vol I that say that an 8th level character operating on dungeon level 5 should only earn 5/8 XP - which at least implies that players should seek out the dungeon level corresponding to their character’s level (or perhaps character level +1 or 2 if they want to trade higher risk for potential richer reward).
However, as soon as the “megadungeon” paradigm was abandoned dungeon level became effectively meaningless and nothing replaced it except the subjective “for character levels x-y” printed on module covers. Dungeons still tended to have multiple levels (but generally 2 or 3 rather than a dozen plus) and it was still a rule of thumb that deeper levels were more dangerous (and had richer treasure) than upper ones, but the idea that the first level underground = dungeon level 1 = appropriate for 1st level characters was already obsolete by about 1975 (with Dave Arneson’s Temple of the Frog in D&D Supplement II - because of course Arneson never really subscribed to that artificial dungeon level construct, Gygax lifted it from Dave Meggary).
I always thought it was weird when TSR started publishing modules that they didn’t list the equivalent dungeon level on the cover: so G1 would’ve said it was a level 8-9 dungeon, G2 a level 9-10 dungeon, S1 a level 12 dungeon, etc. Of course as soon as they started including town and outdoor stuff that would’ve gone out the window, but it’s weird that they didn’t even try - they had a tool already sitting on the shelf and didn’t bother to use it.
However, as soon as the “megadungeon” paradigm was abandoned dungeon level became effectively meaningless and nothing replaced it except the subjective “for character levels x-y” printed on module covers. Dungeons still tended to have multiple levels (but generally 2 or 3 rather than a dozen plus) and it was still a rule of thumb that deeper levels were more dangerous (and had richer treasure) than upper ones, but the idea that the first level underground = dungeon level 1 = appropriate for 1st level characters was already obsolete by about 1975 (with Dave Arneson’s Temple of the Frog in D&D Supplement II - because of course Arneson never really subscribed to that artificial dungeon level construct, Gygax lifted it from Dave Meggary).
I always thought it was weird when TSR started publishing modules that they didn’t list the equivalent dungeon level on the cover: so G1 would’ve said it was a level 8-9 dungeon, G2 a level 9-10 dungeon, S1 a level 12 dungeon, etc. Of course as soon as they started including town and outdoor stuff that would’ve gone out the window, but it’s weird that they didn’t even try - they had a tool already sitting on the shelf and didn’t bother to use it.
Toadmaster
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OSR as anything more than some sort of retro clone of D&D or D&D inspired (mechanics) rule set is meaningless to me. Just relating to "old" games, fine which games? how old?
1998 was 25 years ago, is that "old school" enough? 25 years classifies a car as an antique, and qualifies it for historic plates in many states. I think a lot of people want 1980 as a cut off, some push it out to '81 or '83 to capture B/X and BECMI.
Is a game looking back on Traveller for inspiration really that similar to one based on Runequest? Is Traveller really more alike to D&D than GURPS or even Vampire (which doesn't seem to be "old School" despite being 32 years old)?
Meaning something based on D&D that at least gives me a clear picture whether it is based on OD&D, B/X, AD&D or even 3E. Which particular flavor is a helpful sorting tool but even lacking that I have a pretty good idea what I can expect from the game.
That last category pretty well trashes the effort. Commercial OSR = shit I don't like.
Brock Savage
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Concerning 5e DCs, I find adjusting Easy to 8, Moderate to 13 and Hard to 18 worked out best for lower level, grittier games where consequences can be punishing. I think the term "Moderate" is misleading as 13 is the spell save DC for level 1-4 caster with 16 in their primary stat i.e. a spell cast by a gifted prodigy.
Toadmaster
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In the Hobbit the whole party excepting Gandolf are basically just regular people. The Dwarves are not warriors, they are basically tradesman with a bit of skill in fighting because it is a dangerous world so eveybody had a little experience fighting to defend their homelands. Bilbo wasn't a thief in the sense of a person who steals for a living, simply Hobbits had a natural talent for thief like abilities, being observant, clever, unassuming, capable of moving quietly and just plain lucky. Finding the ring was just a happy coincidence although that falls under the "lucky" part.
The fighting skills of the Fellowship are notably better as they are actual trained warriors. Yet another failure of the Hobbit films.
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If I were t divide gaming into "Ages" like comics, I'd go -
up to 73 - Prehistory
1974 - 1980 - The Stone Age
1981 - 1990- The Golden Age
1991 - 1999 - The Silver Age
up to 73 - Prehistory
1974 - 1980 - The Stone Age
1981 - 1990- The Golden Age
1991 - 1999 - The Silver Age
Gringnr
D6 Nutz
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up to 73 - The Arneissance
1974-1980 - The Rule of Gygax
1981-1990 - The Age of Exploration
1991-1999 - The Goth Invasion
2000-2009 - The Story of Gaming
2010-Present - Fuck It, Let's Just Play Old Shit
SirFrog
Forest Perception Manager, Strategerist
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As someone who has GM’d every edition of D&D (minus 4E), all of them require an experienced GM to run well…wait, that’s true of every RPG…experience matters
Vile Traveller
Dreamscape Designer
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- 801
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That's why everyone who read Butterfield et. al before playing B/X was in a better place. They suggested the idea of halflings thieves (taken from their knowledge of AD&D, I believe), leading me to always separate race from class in B/X right from the start. And elves should use cleric magic.
EmperorNorton
Legendary Pubber
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ftfy
