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So you'd do everything with skills? Would advancement happen by player choice (e.g. the Hero system where you get points and decide how to spend them) or by improving the things you use (e.g. Runequest or Oblivion)?

I wanted commas, but was told it made it sound like a firm of lawyers. Stabbem, Lootem, and Flee. Let's not even get into the effort necessary to prevent people from abbreviating it "ACK" like Bill the Cat expelling a hairball. Names are really hard - if every kid in the world had to have a...

I'd call this internal consistency. It's related to balance, because both are vulnerable to being broken by exploits, but I think of balance as necessarily being related to competition or at least comparison between players, whether it's within a party or between different groups. With...

I agree with Aberzanzorax that there is some supplemental content the 1st party basically has to release. The Kickstarter for Adventurer Conqueror King set publishing mass combat rules as its first bonus goal because they're an integral part of the system, something we just ran out of room for...

Hill Cantons blogger ckutalik just announced that his forthcoming Hill Cantons: Borderlands is going to be compatible with my forthcoming Adventurer Conqueror King. As a developer I'm pleased to hear him say "the unified economic system inside ACKS is a really inspired piece of work"; as a...

The Adventurer Conqueror King system is trying to make it easier to do some of the classic Arneson/BECMI "end game" tropes - stuff like building strongholds, raising armies, fighting mass combats, setting up trade routes, etc. I've done OK with these using a mixture of 3.5, Excel spreadsheets...

Picture an old-school game that has detailed rules for campaign activities like running a thieves' guild, recruiting an army, or constructing a dungeon beneath your wizard's tower so you can harvest monster parts for your spell components. Would you want to include skill DCs, designing skill...

This, plus choosing characters by selecting a mini and letting them keep the mini, works great for me in the birthday parties and afterschool D&D class I do for Adventuring Parties - heck, it even worked for the bachelor party we did. Here are some posts I've done about techniques for DMing...

Seeing diaglo's posting about OD&D reminded me that I usually look forward to getting together with folks from here at Gen Con. This year, the normal ways I do that are ruled out because I will be insanely busy running a continuous four-day demo of a new second-wave retroclone I helped create...

I'll be visiting Auckland and points nearby on July 6-10 and would love to meet some gamers while I'm there, whether it's to roll some dice or just have a drink and talk about our respective local scenes. I'll be traveling with my wife and nine-year-old son; the latter is an enthusiastic gamer...

I'll always regret not having submitted anything for the paper editions of Dragon, but here are the electronic ones I've done: Warden Essentials (Class Acts, #379, with Eytan Bernstein. Has a legend about how wardens might have come to be. Primal Power: Power Play. Has a theme of magical maps &...

He was darneson at Finarvyn's OD&D boards; that link will take you to his profile, from which you can query for posts by him. As far as I know that was his only forum presence but I'd love to learn otherwise.

The DCC RPG Facebook page is a good way to keep up with the news, including an upcoming playtest I'm doing in NYC.

Many of those names speak for themselves, but as a playtester I've seen some of Stefan Poag and Jesse Mohn's work for the DCC RPG and it is fully worthy of inclusion in that august company! A little Googling indicates that there will also be cartoons in the style of the AD&D DMG. I had the...

At Anonycon, I used the DCC RPG playtest rules to run a combination of modules written for AD&D and Castles and Crusades; it was easy to convert stats on the fly when they were given in the text, and I called up the 3.5 SRD when I needed stats for wandering monsters. I was very pleased by this...

I need help with the afterschool D&D class I teach on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on Thursdays from 3:10 - 4:30. The job pays $40 per class, and involves helping kids 8-12 years old play D&D, most often acting as an assistant to one of the student DMs. If you or anyone you know are in the...

I will ditto Piratecat in affirming that Anonycon is awesome!

Ethan Gilsdorf, notable for his book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks (which recently got a great review at Grognardia) as well as his blogs at Tor and Psychology Today, left a comment to my post about D&D in Contemporary Art at The Mule Abides: I will definitely be checking this out and would...

Here's the video of the event for those who missed it (and also some clarifications for those who didn't!).

nedjr, I don't know much of anything about art - in theory this is why I make a good moderator, because I'll ask the obvious questions - but I used to be a neuroscience grad student; I encourage you to melt my ears about cognitive models in this thread or a separate one!