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😯 In B/X!? A.k.a., "the one with all the really detailed dungeon-crawling and hex-crawling rules"!?!

I've given this one a lot of thought before responding. I think I'm going to have to go with feats. They're fiddly, they're inherently restrictive (in that they define what you can't do as much as what you can do), and they're just plain indicative of a level of mechanical character...

As soon as you decide to give two-handed weapons more damage output than one-handed weapons, you have a variable weapon damage system. And if you don't do that, why in the world would anyone ever favor a two-handed weapon over a one-handed weapon and a shield or second weapon?

Risus is exactly as @Tonguez described. Flexible enough that it can easily handle a mass combat just like a small-scale combat, but it'll very light on detail. The Book of War (and the Fellowship Supplement) aim to give old-school D&D a suitable mass-battle system that replaces the likes of...

I certainly hope so, but sadly very few artistic tarot decks have suit and number indices. If this deck does in fact prove to be suitable for jeu de tarot? Hey presto, WotC'll actually get some of my money for once.

I once ran a whole BECMI campaign that took two players from 1st level up to the end of the "Initiate" tier (immortal level 6th in Wrath of the Immortals, roughly equivalent to a Temporal Novice in the much more baroque gold box rules) over the course of about three real years. When the...

They're mostly pretty good changes IMO. Expanded weapon and armor lists, a clerical spell progression that looks more like AD&D, and (most especially) MUs getting to add spells to their books as they find them? Threaten me with a good time…

(This is some epic thread necromancy.) I used to be on team d16, but at the moment I'm a d14 proponent — you can always generate a random number from 1 to 16 by rolling a d8 and d2, but the d14 is genuinely handy for adding multiples of 7 (or days of the week) to your dice pool. And I have a...

Nobody deliberately named the movement "OSR." It was a mere accident of recent hobby history, and it's as unfortunate and potentially misleading/divisive a name as "roleplaying game" itself. (e.g. I would personally much rather "fantasy wargaming" had stuck, or "tabletop adventure gaming" had...

When I do still have occasion to play AD&D, I run stats almost by-the-book (and I make characters roll 3d6 in order, the default method in 2nd edition, so significant modifiers are rare); the only significant change that I make is eliminating percentile Strength, and instead just giving...

"It's time you moved on from that clunky old outdated inferior game-design" is also tiresome. "You only like those old rules because of blind nostalgia and/or a political agenda" is also tiresome. "You liking and promoting this one narrow play-style isn't valid, because not everybody played that...

The actual rules are very similar to Mentzer Basic, but with some very odd changes. • Charisma modifiers go up and down to ±3, making all ability score adjustments uniform. (But partially offsetting this, the monster reactions table is shifted one point towards hostility: a 2d6 roll of 6–8...

The usual OSR response to the very, very, very tired criticism that old-school play was never a monolith and has always encompassed a diversity of play styles — best articulated by a widely-shared 2009 K&K Alehouse post by T. Foster that the author of the article in the OP also links to in Part...

@Reynard : Ooh, I just remembered another game that I haven't played yet, but which has always intrigued me: Dungeonslayers. It seems to aim for a vibe somewhere between "old-school" and "dungeon-punk," and the mechanics look fairly traditional, but (despite the fact that single d20 rolls are...

It's not a matter of owning the generic term "old school" (or having "old school" itself be any kind of value judgement); it's a matter of linguistic precision. The OSR was founded by old-school D&D players mostly interested in old-school D&D, with any interest in other old games being sporadic...

No, that rule is only optional in 2e, and it comes from a similar but much more convoluted rule in 1e where a hit that brings a character down to as low as −3 might be survivable with some maiming/scarring and −10 is identified as absolutely dead no matter what. 2e "isn't old-school" for the...

Ah, that makes sense. I don't think anybody would dispute that a killer dungeon from 1975 is old-school. I did wonder, though, whether you were talking about the TSR Indiana Jones game, which had a "Temple of Doom" adventure published for it in '84. Thing is, I've never played that system, so I...

Well, yeah, Temple of Elemental Evil (1985!) is definitely either very late old-school and proto-trad, or it's fully post-old-school and therefore early trad. (I'm inclined to think the latter, because of the assumption that the PCs are heroes out to defeat Evil rather than just tomb-robbers who...

I concur with those who re-roll any cocked or off-the-table dice. I also prefer that my players not shotgun their dice across the table with projectile force (some players just can't seem to help that); lightly drop their dice onto the table in front of them so that only they can see the...

Alternatively, old school ended when the majority of players started focusing on playing one character per campaign and expecting that character to be the protagonist of an epic narrative. (Which appears to have happened at some point between 1975 and 1985.)