Recent content by Man in the Funny Hat

That is neither proven nor disproven, for any edition (except maybe 4e;)). It is as presumptuous to make the claim as to deny it - unless you have some empirical data to support one view or the other it's ALWAYS just been a matter of personal preference as opposed to ANY edition being manifestly...

I'd rather be playing 1E, 2E, or 3E - but those are editions nobody else around me will run. They're all more familiar with 5E and VTT's, so it's kinda the only game in town if I want to be a player. Wanting to DM the editions I prefer will seemingly now require learning to run a game on a...

THAC0 itself functions the same in 1E and 2E. Only the to-hit tables underlying it might be different in that they featured no repeat 20's in 2E. For 1E only some of the underlying tables could result in a THAC0 of 20 which might not be the first of the repeating 20's, meaning that a player...

Haven't played 3E in SO long... However, if I ever run it again as DM it'll be 3.5 with E6 rules, and I have literally 3 pages of house rules to go with that (capstone feat stuff mostly IIRC).

Gygax was writing a game for the people he gamed with - adults. His children played the game as well but at the time THE MARKET for this was other adults, more specifically other adults with some experience with tabletop wargaming (upon which D&D was based), and for AD&D, adults with some...

Well, I've never personally seen any statement to support anything like that from anyone who would have been writing rules at TSR when 1E was made. Not claiming that reasoning doesn't exist - just that I've asked before plenty of times and nobody has ever had any cited evidence of it. I...

I've tried to convince people for years that limits on demi-humans were not intended as "balance" measures. "Balance" being in any way even promoted much less achieved by these measures is utterly laughable. People were complaining about those limitations almost the day they were in print. I...

It ain't what you play - it's how you play it.

There never was a formal conversion document. If you are playing 1E, use the 1E rules. If you are importing PC's into a 1E game that exceed 1E limits, reduce the PC's to those limits, or with the permission of the DM consider them to be exceptions. If you are playing 2E, use the 2E rules. If...

Whether anyone needs it, uses it or what, this hobby in general can definitely use as much free, community-created content as it can get.

AD&D doesn't have a whack-a-mole issue without first house-ruling it in, because btb if you go to 0hp or lower you're in a coma for 1-6 turns, then dealing with 1 week minimum of bedrest, regardless of what put you under and what healing you received after. It's the rule for 1E anyway (DMG p...

Not really. The PH was written with thinking still largely orienting around the OD&D combat rules. It has TWO (count 'em! TWO!) pages talking about actual combat rules (pp104-105). Everything not covered there had to be imported from OD&D (or even Chainmail) for another year. The actual full...

I actually started writing a thing a while back that I titled, "AD&D: How This S*** Works," to simply explain in clearer, more concise wording, what the AD&D rules are trying to say regarding major topics. 1E, by Gygax's own admission, was written in a stream-of-consciousness style. It...

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wpklxxtkmrrv7wg52wiif/S.I.R.E.-v4.odt?rlkey=lv8po1gegyc3ld03om8a9lggd&dl=0 Covers most of how I handle combat. Details change now and then because I keep tinkering with it for no particularly good reason. I think it mostly holds its own.

"A man can be an artist... in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasy's art is death. He's about to paint his masterpiece." - Man On Fire