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What I came to realize as I grew older was that the game ends up being ABOUT whatever it is the rules are most focused on. As we progressed through editions of AD&D and into d20 system, the game very much became a game about Creating Characters and Killing things. BECMI's ruleset focuses much...

Back in the day, we played AD&D because we assumed Advanced meant Better. Looking back at the two rulesets now, BECMI was years ahead of its time. AD&D 2e is a mess by comparison. I did own a copy of the Rules Cyclopedia, and always wanted to give it a shot at the time, but the players in my...

Currently running a campaign for 6 coworkers. 3 have played D&D before, but only recent editions (3.5, 5). The other 3 have never played a tabletop RPG before.

Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play predates Mordheim by 13 years. It's not a conversion from Mordheim.

I just realized this is a D&D General thread, and not an OSR or OD&D, so this may seem out of place, but in BECMI (or at least in my copy of the Rules Compendium), halflings don't even seem to have their own LANGUAGE. Elves and Dwarves are called out as speaking their own language, plus a few...

It's not much of a joke. The pareto distribution, and pareto analysis is a thing I do pretty often at work.

Telling the young races what the world was like "back in my day" with literally no context. Like, if you think about LotR, the events of the second age were thousands of years ago. The elves just happen to have been alive at the time it happened. Imagine being a general trying to prepare your...

In my setting, at least, lords actively encourage adventuring because offering the occasional bounty is cheaper than keeping standing armies on constant patrol. Consider the type of setting the original editions of D&D described. Societies with early renaissance technology recovering from...

At the time they were featured in exactly one author's works. I'd argue they didn't become part of modern fantasy canon until much later, possibly with some help from their inclusion in the original D&D. Warhammer originated as a way to play Wargames with the models Citadel produced for RPGs...

There're articles out there talking about how reluctant Gygax was to include "Hobbits", but the players insisted. I think OD&D briefly mentioned Gnomes as a variant of Dwarves.

My view on Raise Dead is that there are only so many clerics in range of 10th level or higher, and those clerics are probably already casting it as often as possible to save as many people as possible, so it's really unlikely your dead friend is gonna be the one they devote a spell slot to. A...

The Variant Rules chapter in Rules Cyclopedia has some more forgiving rules for death. It has you roll a saving throw against Death Ray when reaching 0 hit points, and again if taking any damage while below 0 hit points. It also allows for magical healing, and use of Healing skill at -5...

All of this is why we never recommended 4th edition in the first place. 1st and 2nd edition don't need to be adapted for OSR, because they're already OSR.

For thieves and traps, i'd let any character search for a trap in the same manner as searching for a secret door (1 in 6 chance). Roll for the thief's find traps ability in addition to their normal 1 in 6 chance. As far as removing the trap being a seperate roll, there's no reason the group...

Not relevant to OSR, but This may have been borrowed from the recent Warhammer miniatures rulesets that were in play at the time. In 40k and AoS, there's a hard rule that you can only re-roll a roll once. The fastest way to make a bonus (or penalty) that can't stack is to make it a re-roll...

Fate/Fortune: Fate is rarer and more powerful than fortune. Success Levels: If you just treat the value on the 10s die as your success level, you get basically the same end result, with a lot less math. I've always done it that way. Advancement: They're not classes and shouldn't be expected to...

I've started putting together a for-personal-use edit of the Rules Compendium. It doesn't really invent many rules, but alters the way some rules are communicated and moves puts my preferred optional rules in the main text. A few example changes i've incorporated... the various Experience...

BECMI D&D has two overlapping bell curves happening. If you rolled a hypothetical 1d16+2 for ability scores in becmi, you'd still get a bell-curve for ability bonuses: you'd have a 1-in-16 chance of a +3, a 2-in-16 chance of a +2, 3-in-16 chance of a +1, etc. AD&D (and I think OD&D) don't...

Sidekicks would help simulate the weakness of WFRP characters. If you do this, you should also create profession based equipment packages rather than let people buy their gear. A big part of WFRP is that a Camp Follower starts with the stuff a Camp Follower would own. She doesn't get to buy...

As far as telegraphing, I don't want characters to live or die solely by what the player knows to expect. Avoiding mold because your last PC died that way (or saw a mold covered skeleton once) even though your current character has no reason to know the danger sounds like metagaming to me. The...