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Oz, maybe? Though in that case we're talking more about a variety of unique (and at times borderline freakish) entities and one-offs than "races"… Not everybody is DMing for a coequal group of friends in a more or less egalitarian social situation. The dynamic can be utterly different in, for...

Yeah… and guess who got banned from the OSR sub-reddit not too long ago for mouthing off about the GaryCon mask mandate like a thoughtless schmuck…

Whoa, that is weird for AD&D. Does your party not have any multiclassed characters either? (I'm running OD&D right now, and thirteen sessions into the campaign, the PCs' levels are already an asynchronous smear across the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd experience levels!)

One thing that helps a lot (beyond just starting the group at 3rd level, which is probably a good idea): don't dice behind the screen. At least for the first two or three encounters, make sure the players get the gist of what's going on by rolling the dice in the open and explaining what the...

No hypotheticals here. I'm running a mega-dungeon campaign right now, taking my biggest and best-developed dungeon out for its fourth official spin. The system is red box OD&D, suitably modified. I picked that system initially because it was my go-to system when I was first creating the dungeon...

Hah. After the game, one of the players said that it felt like playing their Skyrim character, since they could switch from fighting with a sword to picking a lock to reading a spell out of a book on a dime. I would've guessed that meant that it had a distinctly "1st person Western RPG" vibe...

There are at least two literal examples that have come out of the OSR tradition: Engines & Empires (by me) and Exemplars & Eidolons (by Kevin Crawford). Oh, you mean Alliterations & Ampersands!

There will, of course, be no answer to this, because it's blatantly unjustifiable. None will dare to plainly admit that this is their opinion (though it is—the thread title calls it "tyranny," for crying out loud!). And so we'll get the same circumlocutions and bad-faith arguments that we got...

Ever since last year, when the Retired Adventurer's Six Cultures of Play essay went viral, a seed of an idea has been growing in my mind. To briefly recap that essay and explain its relevance here, the author described six major "cultures" of RPG play, dubbed Classic (or Old-School)...

Well said. Your preference does indeed make more sense when you explain it in those terms — still not my bag o' tea, but then, the fantasy I was raised on? Oz and Barsoom!

So… first paragraph in the OP, and I already have a problem. "This can often lead to a knee-jerk reaction." Citation needed, methinks? Because from where I'm standing, the nigh-infinity of fantastical and alien species from folklore, mythology, sci-fi, and pop culture usually leads to...

Ooh, this thread again! (clap) Let's see if we can hit the highlights! 1) "Orbiting the sun of humanity" —Gygax; "An oddity too much" —Lewis; "Centaur, lawful werebear, or even Japanese!" —Dr Holmes; etc. 2) What do the players get out of a DM's human-only campaign? IME, a nudge away from...

To me, the salient features of old-school play are (1) randomly generated and mechanically simple characters; (2) an open world or sandbox, and an XP system that encourages exploring it (preferably something concrete and diegetic, like XP = GP); (3) a campaign structure where enough time passes...

I think I've tried every alternative to level drain under the sun. None of them have ever worked right though. In the end, I just went back to by-the-book level drain — though I do take some of the sting out of it by letting clerics reverse level drain via normal healing magic (at the added cost...

My settings' cosmology is analogous to a layered onion, with the "centermost" plane of existence being a static realm of pure Law, and the outermost void a churning sea of Chaotic everything-and-nothing-all-at-once. The planar "layers," from innermost to outermost, are: The Empyrean Center of...

Nah. RPGs don't advance cumulatively: they aren't a technology, and you'd be hard-pressed to liken their design to a science. Their changes over time are more like fashion trends—evolution, but not necessarily advancement.

RPGs ain't technology, pal, and classic D&D is certainly no Pinto! ;)

I've made no bones about the fact that red box D&D ("BECMI") is my edition of choice. I keep the Rules Cyclopedia and Creature Catalog on the table as my primary rules references when I run a game. I'm refereeing a campaign currently that's still in the early stages (roughly a dozen sessions in...

Yes, the total count includes NPCs. Unusual for a session, I had five of my regular players cancel shortly before game-time, so there were only two players present that day. Which meant that two player characters (a 2nd level fighter and a 1st level hobbit) were leading the expedition. They had...