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I generally fall on the side of "I want to know the rules" but my first experience with Vampire: The Masquerade was with a game where we didn't know the rules and the Storyteller rolled all the dice. I will say this... it really heightened the mystery and tension in a way that knowing the rules...

While a decade and a half later, 3E seemed to have a rule for everything and had craziness like the grappling and Dispel Magic rules.

I do know they indicated there were a number of things they wanted to change, such as getting rid of "lower AC is better" and I suspect they would have cleaned up the stats and gotten rid of things like exceptional Strength, smoothed out the advancement tables (look at how whack the tables for...

I tend to think that that's what he said at the time and place. The "official" was really due to the fact that in the late '70s people often went from campaign to campaign with the expectation of bringing their character. Think quasi-Adventurer's League, I guess. I'm sure DMs would represent...

Much of the bulk of a system like 1E was in the pages and pages of tables for all sorts of special cases. This was very much in line with the way war-games of the time often worked, so while it looks really bulky to modern eyes, it's how things worked back then. I agree that 2E started...

For the kind of grognard represented by his argument style, filled to the brim with "No True Scotsman" haggis, the answer is really never. I agree. The OSR stuff I've seen appears to be pretty well modeled not on AD&D but on BECMI. Interestingly enough, back in the 2E days a friend of mine...

Good point, and props for mentioning Toon... 'cause Toon. I only played it once, and I'm not generally a fan of comedy RPGs, but Bub Hare, Bugs' cousin who munched on parsnips and was from a tougher part of Brooklyn got to fall down more than once. I'm not sure I'd really characterize that as...

I hope Modiphius gets the new Conan titles out in hardcover form soon... I prefer to purchase at my FLGS.

Very good set of points. EGG was a real pill for "official" some days---the infamous DMG1E intro being a good example---and other days was much more "make it up yourselves!" on other days. I do think it's fairly clear that most OSR type games I've looked at seek to emulate BECMI D&D more than...

I very much agree with this. Lots of new games were explicitly built to handle some perceived deficiency of D&D. Rolemaster, for instance, started out as a set of "advanced" rules that were pretty clearly to be added to D&D for players looking for a more detailed set of rules. It became a game...

Me too. Mr Roarke would be proud.

One reason 2E was such a minimal rewrite of 1E has to do with business issues. It's really important to remember that these kinds of design decisions are not made in a vacuum. Recall that 2E came out in 1989, which was just a few years after Gygax was kicked to the curb and new management came...

I recognize trust is a very loaded word but in a sense with things like starting cars, yes it really is a matter of trust (dictionary definition linked). Starting cars back in the day of hand crank was actually quite difficult. Many people couldn't do it reliably and it was relatively slow and...

Many were also not explicitly house ruled due to the frequent incomprehensibility of 1E rules. I mean, did anyone actually run initiative the way 1E wrote it? Probably a few people, but not many. I have a PhD in a mathematical science and can't figure out what the hell EGG wanted me to do!

This is exactly how 1E developed. It wasn't really designed per se. It has lots of different ad hoc subsystems that were developed separately and then collected---this is explicitly noted in the introduction of either the 1E PHB or DMG, I forget which. Some used a D6, some a D20, percentile...

One thing I really have to emphasize about the Threat/Momentum mechanic is that if you just read it, you really don't get a feel for it. It runs way better than it reads. I have no problem running games that way and it's how I run most of mine, to be clear. I'm still running a heavily house...

Indeed, although as the one contemporary portrait (maybe!) I could find shows, the one posted wasn't actually that bad, though it is clearly a product of Orientalism overall. Of course, we are talking about D&D!

IMO she's right on the edge of mythological. There have been some other figures in this series that are like that, such as Boudica, Rasputin, Jeanne d'Arc, and La Maupin.

Yeah, that picture makes her look rather Northern European or at least Italian. As was the case with a lot of pictures from the Renaissance and immediate period after, which took some pretty major liberties, sometimes showing historical figures like Alexander or Saint George in armor from the...

Any good coop game really needs to put in things that push the clock and make it hard to keep things going. We recently played Pandemic, which was a lot of fun and long ago I played a good bit of Arkham Horror. Heh. I too have my preferences and can go "get off my lawn!" on a lot of things...