Recent content by JoeNuttall

On my blog is a list of all published D&D scenarios from the 1970s. It would take some time to work out exactly which adventures are for OD&D, but as a start here's a list of everything published before the PHB which are generally available and which are complete enough to be playable (there are...

Actually I think it's extremely common everywhere, on the internet and in real life. My whole life, and in every subject. It's especially tedious when you have to deal with it at work.

I've read Raven Crowking's blog quite extensively and I can't recall any claims of the sort. My understanding of his opinion is simply that he thinks campaigns where the DM does not place arbitrary restrictions on the players (which he refers to as a sandbox) are more enjoyable if you like (what...

Would they be a cross between the archetypal Ranger (Aragorn) and the archetypal Thief (Bilbo)? A sort of dual wielding backstabber?

I can't say how much JMal read Dragonlance, but IMHO DL1 was a terrible module (though I believe there were some good bits). The success of it (perhaps spurred on by the likes of Quagmire and The Forest Oracle being far worse) did cement the idea that the module was there to tell a story that...

Did you think I meant it never covered reroclones? Yes, it contained posts about retroclones. It contained posts about pulp fiction. It contained posts about Traveller. It contained posts about White Dwarf and Dragonlance. But it was a blog about old school D&D, not a blog about retroclones.

A good summary. But you conflate the OSR with the associated rule systems. The OSR was a reaction against WOTC's D&D (streamlined? ROTFL). For example, Grognardia was a blog about D&D - not a blog about retroclones. I never personally even played a clone until OSE. Except that from a historical...

OSR is any TSR version of D&D, or a clone thereof. When I search ebay for MERP it returns results for The One Ring, Rolemaster, and random LOTR miniatures because the seller has randomly tagged it MERP just so it appears in related searches and they widen the net for suckers to buy it...

With the open licenses they had some of the building blocks in place, but Rolemaster has never had an open license, but that didn't stop Against the Darkmaster being a MERP clone. T&T has never had a license or a clone, but has still had its own old school revival so I don't think either were...

That was a quote from Grognardia from 2010 to illustrate that at that point, when the OSR was in full swing, the most popular OSR blogger didn't think there was an renaissance at that point in Traveller or Runequest. I think some of the games you reference postdate this quite seriously (Cepheus...

Yes, there were indeed later renaissances in these. Which was my point!

See https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2010/04/other-old-school-renaissances.html?m=1 "None of this is to suggest that there couldn't be Traveller or RuneQuest renaissances in the future -- I hope there are! -- but, right now, if they're happening, they're happening very quietly and well off my...

Since I was trashing Rahasia, it only seems reasonable to comment on the fact that when people talk about and it's interesting to note that Rahasia was actually one of the earliest dungeons to include XP rewards for achieving goals other than collecting gold and killing monsters. You get...

From my personal perspective, coming back to RPGs in 2010 I decided to run D&D for my children. Looking at 4E it just wasn't D&D. Pathfinder was an option, and I bought the books, but it was over complex. I decided to run B/X and discovered through play that a mix of OD&D, B/X, and AD&D worked...

But it was technically just for when you ran it as a tournament. Yes, most tournament adventures were linear and there were a lot of these so that was quite common. There are vanishingly few non tournament linear adventures from that period though. Yes, but more than that - for TSR over the...