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The above is Quoted for truth. I sometimes give the impression that I expect D&D to be something handed down on stone tablets from Mount Sinai. Obviously it's an evolving game. Actually we don't disagree on substantial things, it's just my pettifoggery which causes me to cavil on the ninth...

S4 was a great module. I DM'd this around 1984. I did a horrible job. I selected this module, totally unsuitable for beginners, as the intro to D&D for a large group of beginners. I had them start at very low levels -- I should have given them quite high-powered characters. I threw in a...

The stable doesn't look well protected to me. The thick walls don't look as if they ever protected anything -- they look like bizarre, crooked, inefficient load-bearing walls. But I'm not a civil engineer. The thickest wall is on the inside. That would make sense if it looked like there...

You're a fortunate man.

I could do that. It would take graph paper, and I would probably end up coding a dice-roller for it anyway, but I could do that. That sounds like the right way to do things. Do you use lined paper to keep track of all these things? I suppose it wouldn't be so hard to keep a turn tally...

It turns out neither set of DMs were correct, but the non-Monty Haul ones were considerably closer. If you stop the adventure in the middle of the day to memorize a 1st-level magic-user spell, it's supposed to take 4 hours and 15 minutes. If you memorize two, you can get it done in 4 hours and...

D&D was pretty incoherent from the start. Heck, even Chainmail didn't try for coherence. D&D's white box has Extraordinary mind powers are absolutely appropriate to pseudo-medieval fantasy, IMHO. They can't be much less coherent than the following, from Greyhawk, p.61: I read accounts of...

I don't know how representative my 3.x experience is. My DM ruled (correctly according to the books, I think) that in 3.0, spells can only be memorized once per day. However, the adventures tended to require exposure to danger for a period of six to twelve hours of game time. Once engaged in...

When one can remember to roll on a regular schedule, wandering monsters present an excitement not unlike gambling. (But in fact much more interesting than gambling, because instead of just losing a coin, you're threatened with the potential appearance of a scary combatant.) I'd like to say I...

I had one DM -- extremely Monty Haul in his judgements -- set a trend that was imitated by several others, including myself when I DM'd AD&D. He ruled that since it takes 15 minutes to memorize a 1st-level wizard spell, the rest break after combat should allow long enough to re-memorize. There...

The A-series didn't really "work" for me or my peers at the time, because we could only work with it by missing the point. We had some fun by completely mis-using it. It would have been better if we could have used it. The map for A1, in particular, makes very little sense to me. I can't...

Tenet #2 Quote: Tenet #3 Quote: Both of these are points I wish I had known fifteen years ago (along with the vital principle of coming to a consensus about what the mood of the game should be *before* the game starts). Over the years, I've had too many arguments that cut into precious...

I don't have Master of the Game. I *do* have Roleplaying Mastery and recently I've started reading it again. Unfortunately, my lack of common sense and somewhat slanted sense of appropriateness means that I am probably still missing many of the points therein... To return to the quote in the...

Back when my notions of "reasonable challenge" were set by a Monty Haul DM who would run his brothers and myself through ultra-high-level dungeons, disintegrating everything merrily, I had the notion that AD&D was supposed to be *won*, and that with enough preparation, it *could* be won. (In my...

I've played many campaigns where the participants didn't know, or care to know, about the following passage from p.38 of the AD&D DMG: I've played in other campaigns where the rule was known but found too difficult for record-keeping in practice. Fatigue points were also suggested and...

Looking at Vol.I, p.15, I'm pretty sure 10 gp is 1 pound. So I'm pretty sure that treasure weighed 700 pounds, and the character had to work quickly to get it out of the dungeon, being highly vulnerable to ambush all the while. If he was alone, let's hope he had a pack mule. Actually...

It's a somewhat obscure interest of mine. I find the old game materials vastly more inspiring than the new ones. I can use the rules-light and cinematic game systems. I can back off and let players narrate the plot. But when the players are out of ideas, I need inspiration. So this little...

I have a mad ambition: to run Temple of the Frog, the first module ever. I think AD&D rules will be suitable. My question is this: How on earth shall I handle encumbrance? There will be treasures that weigh much more than what a party could reasonably carry while walking. I suspect that...

That sounds pretty cool. It would be a neat contrast for a geographic contrast -- suppose the party could sail a ship between a Greek-type area with Olympian gods, an Arab-type area with djin, and several areas with totem spirits.... E.g. Slavic spirits, South Pacific spirits, African spirits...

This is a good example of why I always try to avoid using monsters with diseases and poisons. If the characters are going to die, I prefer that they die in a gory fight. When I have characters who are doing obviously stupid things, I usually pause, look them in the eye, and say something like...