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If I'm going to play, I expect 'em as part of the referee's due diligence. If I'm going to ref, I'll have 'em baked into the character creation options before I ever invite the first player to join.

Wild Shape is pretty potent. In exchange for it, you could give the druid full BAB and Bardic Lore, and it'd still be underpowered.

All right, final update! My house rule & character sheet document is finally done (and hopefully ready to be taken for a spin, whenever I have a chance to run a campaign again). The overall shape of the system has received one last tweak, in the shape of the assassin class, which I decided to...

Killing monsters is absolutely worth XP in original D&D. Too much, in fact: in the original booklets, slain monsters are worth 100 XP per hit die (though this is multiplied by a fraction if the monster is slain by a stronger party: a troll is considered to be worth 700 XP if slain by 7th level...

HLC was one of the very few physical rulebooks I owned as a kid. (In fact, my whole collection in the 90s amounted to: the 1e and 2e PHBs, the 2e DMG, OA, the CNHB, and HLC). I adored this book, even though I never got to use it in play — because by the time we actually saw a campaign run up...

"You should run [module X] for your first campaign, it's great for teaching beginners!"

Metathesis is a very common linguistic process, like palatalization or vowel reduction. But a zed is just an abruptly truncated zeta. (And more importantly, it's frickin' French.)

The artificer and then some! — With this latest update, I do believe that I've finished mapping out all of the playable classes I'm going to need. The system breaks down as follows: Base Classes (human characters with no special requirements): Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Thief, and Artificer...

Virtuoso is pretty great for a high-ranking level title at any rate! This thread has been exceedingly helpful. Right at the moment, it looks like I'll be calling the class "minstrel" (because that's by far the most accurate, yet sufficiently generic, term), with level titles as follows (using...

Awesome, thanks so much for this! I haven't busted out my Core Rules 2.0 CD-ROMs in a good long while, but I still have the discs — from the first and very much last time my parents ever left a D&D product under the Christmas tree when I was a kid (don't ask) — and it was high time I took a...

Naming abilities is fun. :D But of course, everything is still tentative at this stage — case in point, I've now added the monk class (along with some hints about how I'm going to work up the remaining human and demihuman classes), and the monk abilities don't all have clever names quite yet...

Well into the late 90s it was standard practice to call all the non-Advanced versions of D&D "OD&D." (See: OD&Dities Magazine, which is very much dedicated to what's now called BECMI/RC.) It's not that people were unaware of LBB OD&D; it's that the "O" was used less to mean "Original" and more...

1. The same way you account for them when playing OD&D or Basic D&D or AD&D normally (none of which have ability or proficiency checks as a core mechanic, nor need them to function). Either apply a rule that already exists (e.g. searching is roll low on 1d6, trying to persuade someone is a...

I have no idea what GreyLord is talking about. The first printing of S&W is very clearly based on LBB D&D. The "white box" edition retains the d6 hit die progressions for all classes, while "Core" and "Complete" use Greyhawk (not B/X) hit dice (just to cite one example). There's an elf class...

My bare essentials? Already wrote 'em up. No ability scores or nonhuman races, one class with defined levels, titles, XP requirements, hit points, attack roll, one saving throw, and one thieving skill.

"Trickster" is a bit too generic, I think. But "jester" has at least two really good things going for it: it's close enough in meaning to "minstrel" to convey almost the same idea (but more adventurous-sounding, and without the unfortunate implications attached to the term in the 19th century)...

Quick question. (Well, quick to ask, but who knows how lengthy it'll be to resolve.) If you were going to rename the bard class, what would you call it? When I run bards and druids, I like to keep them tied to Celtic culture. But the modern fantasy bard archetype — the happy-go-lucky, charming...

I'm aware. Just forgot to mention that it was one of the inspirational notes at work behind this notion. Rumors of my demise are either greatly exaggerated, or of dubious canonicity. :p 🤷‍♂️ I think I liked it better the first time, when it was called the Labyrinth Lord Advanced Edition...

Not long ago, I had to put the kibosh on the campaign I was running, mostly due to a lack of free time on my part. I was running what could best be described in today's old-school vernacular as a mashup of the Original and Classic editions — mostly BECMI as the foundation, but with elements...

I run the TSR editions, so I can't recall a combat ever having "run long"; trapped in the dungeon can happen, but it's rare, and it's very bad (random tables dictating the fates of characters who end a session in the dungeon are dime-a-dozen on OSR blogs; the outcomes usually range from "lost...