Recent content by Flying Toaster

“Always choose long sword as your primary melee weapon if your character class allows it. If not, pick short sword or footman’s mace.”

I knew there were similar insectoid beings in science fiction and in the RPG homebrew community of the 70’s, but I could not find anything in Web searches. Gygax thought that everyone else in the early gaming scene was stealing his ideas, and singled out the Arduin Grimoire for particular scorn...

Oh I am definitely not recommending having a small pool of players or DMs as a general remedy for any kind of problems with a gaming group, just musing about how it worked out in one particular situation. Most of us were friends anyway and D&D was one of our main activities, so nobody wanted to...

I definitely remember arguments about “killer DMs” in the Forum column of Dragon magazine, but never met any in real life. I believe that the very small size and relative isolation of my teenage AD&D groups actually curbed antisocial behavior by both players and DMs, as everyone implicitly...

As a Gen-Xer, Transformers and TMNT came along just a little too late for me to get into them. D&D was already a 1980’s Saturday morning cartoon, and a line of action figures. Sometimes I toy (heh) with the idea of a light-hearted campaign using ineffectual recurring villains inspired by...

I definitely remember a friend who was a fan of comics (and martial arts) showing me this gritty, scrappy new comic that was spoofing the latest trends in mid-1980’s superhero comics: teenagers (New Teen Titans), mutants (Uncanny X-Men), and ninjas (Daredevil). This was a few years before...

In the early days of D&D there was an almost punishing emphasis on DM control of all aspects of game play, especially the campaign setting. I think this was an inheritance from D&D’s roots as a war game variant, and perhaps also a result of Gary Gygax’s own controlling tendencies - or at least...

If a DM wants to run a strongly themed campaign that restricts or bans some of the familiar PC options, I would expect that they would offer some other options unique to that setting. Using monsters appropriate to that theme seems like a natural next step. I am interested in running campaigns...

Off-topic side note on the role of infernal politics in Gygaxian D&D lore (I was remembering the Gord novels and bit off a bit more than I could chew, decided I might as well post it as an afterthought): I never shared EGG’s interest in the demonic politics of the Abyss, which were a major plot...

I remember reading some of those letters, long after the fact. The module took a wide variety of British cultural and historical references and shoehorned them into the adventure, because why not. UK residents got a bit shirty pointing out bizarre anachronisms like Dickensian urchins...

This adventure and the classic Expedition to the Barrier Peaks were some of my first exposures to fantasy / science fiction crossovers, and like many others I usually thought of them in terms of the iconic ad campaign for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups: two great tastes that did not taste great...

This was a major issue that definitely got lots of attention from my junior high school AD&D group, although we were reading it a couple of years later. It was one of a number of back issues I bought either from a hobby shop or by direct order from TSR. The paper sculpture cover was indeed...

Slightly off-topic, but I think armor was an issue even back in the TSR days. When I was rolling up AD&D characters we mostly did equipment by the book, and starting gold was generous enough that my warrior characters hardly ever started off with anything worse than chain and shield, plus all...

The BECMI bell curve ranging from -3 to +3 was very clean design, easy to learn, and did not require rolling fistfuls of dice in order to get a viable character. Whereas AD&D had this bizarre mishmash of bespoke ability scores, no two remotely alike, that did not give any bonuses except at very...

Once again we see the essential conflict over what D&D is and should be. In this thread we have posters saying that D&D is a high fantasy game, so the problems come from trying to make that game appealing to fans of low fantasy, while others say that the problem comes from trying to make a...