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Jeff tends to get a bit deep in the weeds for me, but I watch occasionally. My mainstays are usually Mike Israetel (his sense of humor works for me) and Sean Nalewanyj, with maybe the occasional Larry Gao or Lean Beef Patty for youthful fun and inspiration.

While I love the clarity and simplicity of the Will/Reflex/Fortitude save division, I definitely prefer the half level bonus to defenses from 4E or the purely level-derived saving throws of the TSR editions over the class and ability score-derived bonuses of 3E and 5E, because of the big...

Those are also aspects of skilled play, but Skilled Play, or Gygaxian Skilled Play also involves understanding the rules and intelligently exploiting them* and employing tactics where relevant. Many of the rules are directly designed to simulate tactical advantages or disadvantages from reality...

The example of play in the 1E DMG has the party getting arranged into this kind of ranked formation to optimize attacks, though they don't get into any corridor fights so you don't see it showcased in use. We never had enough characters or had enough limited frontage fights when I was young...

Aw, come on. Dragons is definitely asking too much.

Yeah, that's a terrible ruling. Audible Glamer (MU2, I1) says nothing about not being able to reproduce intelligible speech. To the contrary, it explicitly says the sounds can include talking, singing, or shouting. Which spell are you talking about? Can you cite a page number? Overall I...

Absolutely. Even character sheet automation is generally just a nice ribbon when I'm running old school on Roll20.

These are house rules to make the Thief better. In 1E BtB you usually need to have Surprise (see Gary's notes on DMG p19 re: negating the attack form). Eh. Sniping is very much in flavor for assassins (and for Thieves making this sort of attack). B/X always allowed that, going back to 1981...

I was going to make the same joke. "Oh we like both kinds- D&D AND Pathfinder!" (Although as of 2025 on these forums maybe it should be "...D&D AND Shadowdark!"

At least some of the VTTs are easy enough to use that you can develop character sheets and basic automation on your own without a lot of overhead. I know people who've done it for tiny games, for example Delta's Original Edition Delta variant of OD&D. But that's obviously a lot less support...

I've got that big ol' Penguin Classic deluxe edition, and yeah, it's a bit of a monster. A nice edition of a book is a pleasure to hold and read. :)

Both the poetic and prose eddas are well worth reading, but the poetic is wonderfully readable (at least in a decent translation) and pretty short.

Thanks for the interest, the courtesy, and for adding a moment of surprise to my day. :LOL: Fair point that it's not necessarily really opposite of traditional pre-Christian wisdom recorded in Biblical sources. I sometimes notice commonalities between Jewish and pagan thought that make the...

No, I think you're misremembering the rules again. In 1E you got read magic and three mostly random spells to start (if you rolled well you might get to choose one or more), but the DMG says you add one every time you gained a level and doesn't say anything about that being random. The random...

I think this is a bit of a game of telephone distortion (third hand, or farther?) of someone who went to GaryCon saying that they heard he offered to do the covers for the new books, but was told they wanted a digital artist instead, for "more pop". Margaret Weis apparently confirmed that was...

Havamal, from the Poetic Edda. From the 2014 translation by Carolyne Larrington, which is probably my favorite. My mind is a bit blown that someone pegged these as Biblical. Quite the opposite! :LOL:

27. The foolish man in company does best if he stays silent; no one will know that he knows nothing, unless he talks too much; but the man who knows nothing does not know even if he is talking too much. -Havamal, (Larrington 2014 translation) Related- 6. About his intelligence no man should...

This is an exaggeration. Being a level or two behind is pretty equivalent in all editions. More than a level or two definitely gets bad in 3e-5e, but in the TSR editions if you were more than that behind you were generally hiding in the back anyway. The HP difference mattered and sometimes...

100%. And one of those swords was likely an Intelligent sword with special powers. And at low levels spell scrolls and other doohickies the M-Us can use help to make up for their weaknesses. The first 1974-style OD&D game I played in extensively (online, during the pandemic) showed this well...

Magic-Users leveled slower than Fighters. At least until higher levels, weirdly. Thieves leveled faster, but were so weak that being a level ahead was rarely enough to make up for it, though it was nice in theory.