Recent content by RandallS

That's because a lot of what one group of people want out of D&D is 180 degrees away from what another group of people want. In August 2011 (before 5e was even announced) I made a blog post (A New Edition of D&D Designed to Unite D&D Players -- Can It Be Done?) about how it would be almost...

I'm bored to the point of not returning to the game by D&D combats that take more than 15-20 minutes from start to finish (including setup and tear-down time if minis and battlemats/terrain are used). I solve this issue by not playing at tables where long combats are a regular thing. This also...

Microlite81 Advanced, the last of the four planned Microlite81 games, is now available free download. Like all RetroRoleplaying games, it is free to download and use (although donations to the RetroRoleplaying Cancer Fund are welcomed -- and even encouraged as we are having the Winter Holidays...

I selected "rules" but not necessarily because I believed the older rules were necessarily better, but because they were better for my favored styles of play and my homebrew campaign settings. Other editions (especially WOTC editions) favor other styles of play and would require me to make major...

That's true for some styles of play, but not really true for others. For example, two players are playing in a game. One wants combats to be very short (an average of 10 minutes max) and abstract (no minis, no battlemats, with tactics limited to real world type tactics), and does combat as war...

I noticed that many of the links to the various Searchers of the Unknown games listed in my Searchers of the Unknown One Page RPG: The Many Variants blog post from about a year ago have gone bad. Some of them seem to have disappeared from the Net completely (except behind Scribd's download...

The individual games are fairly light (some as short as two pages plus the OGL). The versions in volume II, however, are not nearly as lite. The The Microlite20 RPG Collection is somewhat popular because you can download a lot of variants in one (now two) large files. If you really want like...

The new two volume 2012 Edition of The Microlite20 RPG Collection is now available for free download. The Microlite20 RPG Collection is a PDF compilation of Microlite20 based games. This collection is made available for free and is not to be sold. Each individual game is copyrighted separately...

Same here, I really don't like having to use minis in RPG combat. As an option for those who like that level of detail in combat (and the resulting longer combats), they are great. As a practical requirement to play, they just just turn me off to playing the game at all. This is the one place...

I've read the entire thread, but would like to reply to the original "All Roads lead to Rome" analogy.... Yes, all roads lead to Rome -- the Eternal City. However, while Rome may be eternal, it's not unchanging. Early Rome (under the monarchy) is a much different city that Rome under the...

While I could make a case for 3.5 being the edition that changed things the most, I finally decided that it was 4th edition, for the following reasons: From OD&D through AD&D2e (including all D&D editions through RC), the differences between the various systems were so minor that characters...

Almost 6 months after I had originally hoped to get a final version of Microlite75 out, Microlite75 Version 1.00 is finally available. The edition available is the "Condensed Type" edition with very tiny "Microlite20" style print and only two illos per booklet, one of the front cover and one on...

Download the Microlite75 Final Playtest Draft The (hopefully) final Playtest draft of Microlite75 is now available for free download. M75 hase been split into two books: Characters and Magic contains the standard rules, the spell and equipment lists, and a player's intro to old school play...

Microlite75 Playtest Version 0.3 (with Psionics) Available The third playtest draft of Microlite75 is now available. Changes for this draft are mainly in the optional rules section. Major additions to the optional rules include: Advantages and Disadvantages, Character Goals and Traits, Armor...

Two new M20 items: The Microlite20 RPG Collection: A large number of Microlite20-based games and Microlite20 variants have been published over the last 3 or 4 years. I was testing PDF combining programs for a client today and decided to test them by making a combined PDF holding all the free...