Recent content by Flying Toaster

He is also the inventor of the 100-sided "Zocchihedron." In the late 80s I had one of those, in lime green. It looked a bit like a golf ball and rolled like one too, taking some time to come to a full stop. Maybe someday I will find it in a box somewhere. There are so many new polyhedral...

The When We Were Wizards podcast says that J. Eric Holmes MD was a doctor who played “white box” D&D with his sons and thought the game needed an introductory version. Holmes volunteered to write it himself for free, so no surprise that Gary Gygax agreed. Perhaps Gygax was so hands off because...

My friends and I learned to play with B/X and BECMI c. 1985-86 before graduating to AD&D 1E (post-UA). At the time we did not entirely understand the already fairly convoluted edition history of the game. I got a mint or near-mint copy of the 1981 Moldvay Basic Set (including module B2)...

“like a mash-up between D&D and Gamma World” In the year 1994, from out of space comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, unleashing cosmic destruction! Man's civilization is cast in ruin. Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn. A strange new world rises from the...

This is an aside from the main discussion, but T1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil is a good example of how TSR worked (or did not work) under Gygax, and why there is so much argument decades later about who wrote what and who deserves credit. EGG himself wrote T1 The Village of Hommlet and TSR...

See also: All of the episodes of Star Trek TOS in which Spock saves the day with his Vulcan superpowers, such as super strength or magical green “half breed” blood. Clearly every Starfleet ship needs its very own Vulcan as part of a standard crew complement! TNG recycled this plot device by...

When our group graduated from B/X to AD&D, I noticed lots of minor rule differences in things like hit dice or damage done by various weapons, spells, and magic items. Some of the numbers got bigger, like fighter HD going up from d8 to d10. But other numbers got smaller, so some options were...

I often played clerics and druids because I knew we needed a combat medic, but nobody else wanted to play that role. I would flavor my clerics by choosing a deity from one of the L&L pantheons, usually Norse, and if possible I would use their favored weapon. Sometimes I could talk the DM into...

I guess I was thinking about how magic spell damage is split into cold, fire, radiant, etc. That was an element of the AD&D rules, but the way it was handled was not quite so systematic as it is in 5E.

As a kid I had fun reading about all of the crazy polearms, but they definitely raised a lot of questions not easily answered in a world before the Internet. Many of the names were in French, or referred to places like Bohemia or Lucerne. How does anybody in Oerth know about Earth? Or is it...

I agree with all of this, but we rarely had a chance to use any of it in actual play. I liked the way 2E removed the cumbersome weapon vs. armor table, and replaced it with three basic damage types (Slash, Pierce, Bludgeon) that worked together like rock - paper - scissors. It rewarded...

My friends and I liked to pore over the books and quibble about the fine points of the rules (shocking, I know...), and we quickly noticed that most swords and some polearms were just about the only weapons that actually did more damage against Large sized foes than they did against Small and...

I never liked Krynn tinker gnomes much at all. They always seemed like a one-note joke about absent-minded professors whose gadgets always blow up in their faces. I vastly prefer gnomes as forest-dwelling fey folk wearing pointy hats and pointy boots, confounding bigger enemies with magical...

Just for fun I once rolled up a fighter who used only obscure UA weapons and armor, but wisely never tried to actually play him.

Our group perused the UA errata, but I do not know if we ever actually used any of them in the game, and I think we assumed that they had been incorporated into the later printings that we had bought. Years later I was a bit shocked to read the UA Wikipedia entry only to find out that it never...