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Bards beat up the wizard and stole her stuff. "Learning the innermost secrets of the universe to unlock ultimate cosmic power? Why should only smart people get to do that?" Yoink! Bards bullied the cleric into giving up their stuff. "C'mon, no one wants to be like you because you just sit there...

@Celebrim : "Knowing the fiction but not the damage is different than knowing the damage but not the fiction." Very quotable and good advice for any DM.

I never allow skills to substitute a different ability score in general play. Doing so negates the interesting choice made at character creation to be better at some things than other things. If a player wants to argue that they should be able to use their PC's Int score to roll persuasion...

That's a fun idea. As a player, the first question I might ask is "does it actually work?" Do these Fat Boys (and girls?) get superpowers from eating exotic foods? Or is it just a philosophical order? From a gamist point of view, there's a lot to be said for making a class whose powers are...

It's an intriguing idea to be sure and I played a few turns. As interactive storytelling it does a decent job but as the story gets longer even advanced LLMs like Claude and GPT4 are likely to lose the thread. These models may have very long context windows in the mathematical sense, allowing...

If alignment is just a role-playing aid indicating ethics and tendencies, and gods intervene, then gods should have an objective and observable alignment. If alignment is a role-playing aid and gods don't intervene, then their alignment should be subjective (relative to worshipers'...

Thanks for this nugget Snarf. Was that RPG Villains & Vigilantés?

The Great Wheel is too well organized to represent a multiverse where Law and Chaos are in equilibrium.

I agree with both of the main speakers for the last few pages, more or less: * I think it is entirely possible to invent a culture that is original, or that remixes multiple Earth cultures to the point where referencing back to the inspirations is impossible. In this case we can make them as...

Agreed, but they are pulled straight from the pulps and probably sounded cool and heroic at the time. John Carter consistently describes himself as a "fighting-man".

Overall I enjoyed wizards in 2e. I was a little disappointed that the Illusionist lost some character but the extra spells and possibility of specializing in other schools more than made up for it. If the designers had been a little less conservative, they could have given each specialist some...

Wasn't weapon specialisation reserved for single-class fighters? In my experience with 2E, the 2WF was a pretty nice benefit--not as powerful as the bonus damage to giants but on all the time. But restricting it to light armor nerfs it pretty hard and forces rangers to have high Dex just to...

Only one human in the lot, and that one a paladin.

Was that the Baba Yaga adventure where the geometry of the hut is bassed on a tesseract? I loved this issue and adore the cover art. My friends and I played JB007 a few times and we liked the system.

From Snarf: A corollary of this assumption that I like a lot in AD&D is that wizards are essentially greedy scavengers of secrets they don't fully understand. Even the ones who manage to invent their own spells or enchant items are just piecing together makeshift solutions, not exploiting...

I felt like putting down a few musimgs on the flavors of active neutrality. 1. Cosmic neutrality. Some over-deity like Ao in the FR wants a balanced pantheon and might take steps to adjust the balance. 2. Humanist neutrality. Moorcock's law vs chaos dichotomy, and civilization only flourishes...

That's a good summary! In the example, I think the MU not finishing sleep in the surprise round is a mistake. If the enemy is surprised then the party should have at least one full segment. I find a lot of confusion around the initiative system can be cleared up with one simple house rule: The...

They are not fun for everyone but they are fun for some people. Same as the other classes. One of the joys of AD&D is that each class (or each group) represents a different strategy for interacting with the game and a different experience for players. And at level 1 not even the fighters are...

The problem with old-school wizards is that they are only cool in the context of old-school games. When you have only one class that can use sleep or fireball, then the class has a real identity. For some players, the initial weakness of the class can be both a challenge and part of the PC's...

Nice summary! A couple of comments: Also stolen from Vance in AD&D : one version of the Binding spell (minimus containment), Imprisonment and its reverse (=the Forlorn Encystment, a much classier name from Vance), and of course Clone. I feel like in one of the original Mazarin stories he...