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None of the above. I don't need any of those "sacred cow" game mechanics to storm the Caves of Chaos.

Well said. An edition-change is a rare opportunity to make sweeping changes, and different people have different ideas about what the right sweeping changes might be.

I guess that's to be expected, if you call yourself Fifth Element, right?

I don't think of del Toro as a great fit for Tolkien, especially The Hobbit, but I'm pleased to see that he wants his wargs to be demonic wolves, not hyena-things. Hmm... now that I think about it, I guess he is a good fit for Gollum, the giant spiders, and the scary wood elves.

That's our cue to gather pitchforks and torches, right? I found Lieber surprisingly uneven. I found Howard's Conan stories surprisingly uneven, too -- until I realized that every other one in my (old) compilation was a pastiche not by Howard.

Apparently anything and everything. Hermaphroditic super-spy? Really?

I'm not sure what culturally sensitive means. Do you think it's inaccurate to call the Apaches of 19th-century Arizona vicious marauders who torture their white victims? Or is it simply uncouth to mention it? How would the Apaches describe themselves? Would they be offended to be called...

So, we should not base D&D -- a game about killing quasi-people from other tribes and stealing their stuff -- on A Princess of Mars, because the book could be construed as racist and misogynistic by someone who wants to see it as racist and misogynistic?

If there's a written rulebook, and the written rules spell out specific probabilities for, say, spotting a secret door or climbing a wall, it should come as no surprise that players expect those probabilities to hold for them. And, being human, they'll argue vociferously for those probabilities...

Certainly knowing when to use the skill system and how difficult to make the rolls is important, but one of the biggest arguments against many skill systems is that they force trade-offs in character design -- trade-offs that may have seemed like a good idea in the game-design process, but which...

When I first read the Elric stories, back in elementary school, he didn't strike me as evil so much as tragic. He was born into a cruel society, with torturers and other overtly "evil" elements, and he was trained from birth to rule that society -- and then he got caught up with an evil magic...

Elf Quest definitely has that vibe.

I think Basic/Expert may take the prize for best modules. Who doesn't love Keep on the Borderlands?

Further, whatever literature passed your progressive-morals test in the 1960s would fail in the '70s. Whatever passed in the '70s would fail in the '80s. Whatever passed in the '80s would fail in the '90s. And so on. It's an intentionally moving target.

Since no one played 1E by the rules as written, I'm willing to call it a fairly rules-light system -- like Basic/Expert, but with more spells, more magic items, more monsters, etc. More importantly, 1E had a very narrow scope of rules. Most of the game was spent "outside the rules" -- with the...

Could you spell out the "politics"? I'm not sure what you mean. Right -- which is how most humans have seen the world from the beginning of time. I don't think anyone's been recommending a thinly veiled Nazi allegory, with Nazis as the heroes, and I certainly don't think Howard's Conan works...

Right, but that continuum, from rules-heavy "gamist" D&D 4E to rules-light "narrativist" indie game is not what the original post was about. The contrast at hand is modern, rules-heavy D&D vs. old-school, rules-light D&D. In this case, rules-light means that the DM makes judgment calls about...

Real-life morale doesn't make much logical sense. There's definitely an unpredictable, random element. Sure, different creatures in different situations should have different morale scores.

Same here. The DVR is now set. Really? I was under the impression it was going to be a "typical" post-apocalyptic scenario.

I think you've drawn a bit of a false dichotomy there. The choice isn't between let's tell a story and D&D with lots of rules. After all, you can play a game full of tactics and random chance with virtually no rules by relying on GM fiat. That's what a free kriegsspiel is: the ref judges the...