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Thank you, Ed! I first found some friends to play D&D with in '91 with 2nd Edition (I'd wanted to play for years but just couldn't find anyone before then) and was introduced to the 'Realms with the Purple Box, and was given a big set of 'Realms novels by a college student working at the...

The stuff you heard that "Basic D&D became like Advanced D&D" might have been a from a misinterpretation of the fact that TSR started releasing Mystara boxed sets and supplements for use with 2nd Edition AD&D rules in '94? (that's the year the Karameikos boxed set was released, anyway.) So...

In the 1st Edition of AD&D, Gold Dragons were presented as Asian-style Dragons; wingless and serpentine (flying through sheer magic.) This matched their presentation as wise, intelligent, and benevolent, befitting the mythology of Chinese and Japanese-style dragons. Gold Dragons stood out from...

I really liked the original Tieflings, people with some distant fiendish ancestor that gave them random deformations and dark powers... it fits with a medieval magical mentality, that being born with a deformity is a sign of having a tainted ancestry. I even love the name; from Teufel, the...

Whereas I think that any Demon or Devil worth its salt would absolutely revel in the name, and all of the historical, cultural, and religious connotations that come with it. Some rando peasant isn't going to have the slightest idea what in the Hell a Baatezu is, but he will damn well know what...

And yet even then the book would remain intact. Those things were built like friggin' tanks. (In a bizarre coincidence, I am right now eating tacos as I read through my 1E DMG.)

I SERIOUSLY wish I could play BattleTech; I'd been waiting to play it with bated breath ever since it was first announced... but when I finally bought it I discovered that it just wouldn't run on my laptop for whatever reason. As far as I can tell my machine meets all the specs, but for...

If you've never read the 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, you should track down a copy as soon as possible and read it cover to cover. Every RPG player, no matter what game they play, should read that book. So much densely packed information!

Very interesting. I have the same opinions about 2nd Edition (that it stripped out all the oddities, quirks, and charm that made 1st Edition flavorful and fun, while not really anything to the mix that made up for the losses) and mostly loved (and still love) 3E.

I loved reading The Role of Books! "But why read something not closely related to games when you can read something made for games?" I much prefer to rely on original sources for my gaming material than to just take things from gaming specific books, for very harsh reason; Ever here of the...

Seeing him light up with happiness and excitement at playing again was just pure joy. Watching him geek out over LotR and other nerdy things is always fun, but this just warmed my heart. I can easily imagine him doing everything he can to squeeze a new weekly D&D campaign into his busy...

Rad

Very cool. I'd like to use this for some unique local legendary monster in my homebrew world of Alterra. I'll call it either the Camford Devil or the Oxbridge Devil, a creature that haunts the deeply wooded areas just outside of one of the two dueling rival university cities, with the stories...

While I really don't care for Eberron as a setting (the "magic as technology" trope is just too twee for me and rubs me the wrong way) I am very happy for the people who do love the setting, and look forward to the book because, even though I'm not a fan of the world, I'm assuming there still be...

There never were any Strength penalties for female characters, even in 1st Edition AD&D. There was a Strength cap, however: female Humans were capped at 18/75, while male Humans could go up to 18/00. 18/75 was also the cap for male Elves.

I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to belittle anyone who plays D&D and doesn't understand where terms come from or what they're supposed to mean... but I do get irritated when the actual writers of the game clearly don't understand what they're writing about and end up misusing such...

Why is D&D so popular? Because it's awesome!

I specifically said that we each had our favorite settings but that never precluded any of us from buying books for other settings as well, if only just for material we could mine for ideas and for our preferred world... or simply because most of us liked more than once setting. My great love...

Not trying to dispute your personal experience, but really? Your friends would only buy books for one setting, and refuse to buy any books from any other setting? That just seems truly bizarre to me. Among my friends each of us had a preferred setting that we would focus on (and use when that...

I still don't buy the idea that having different settings "fractured" the D&D player base: no one I ever knew refused to buy Forgotten Realms or Ravenloft books because they "only played Dark Sun." Yes, people may have had favorite settings that they focused on, but everyone always bought...