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Obvious to anyone, Subverted D&D is not D&D. Like any act of improv, it isn't even gaming. All actual games are designed for repeat play. Unlike stories which an audience simply consumes and then they go stale like an old joke, games are enabling mechanisms to improve oneself at the behaviors...

You make the act of cultural subversion to eradicate of everything in the hobby of RPGs by falsely rewriting its entire history sound positively open-minded. My goodness! Why shouldn't we all engage in collaborative narration and call it gaming? Or the lie "gaming means making choices." A hit...

Obvious to any game designer who has read the Big Model, it is an intentional falsehood meant to subvert all gaming by treating gaming as the act of improvisational expression, which it is not. Read any actual game design theory for hundreds of years. Gaming is the act of goal seeking in a...

So I dug up pemerton's penchant for The Big Lie perpetrated by the Forge and his desire for continuing their historical revisionism of RPGs into a "storytelling" hobby. As I understand it, the original post in that thread feeds nicely into his current polemics within this thread. Those three...

You've used the mention function for me twice in this thread, so I assume you value my input and aren't just trying to drum up discussion. However, I've learned from your posting habits in your past threads you typically aren't exploring an idea, but attempt to sway posters' unformed...

I know I've been saying things like the OP does about old school D&D for years. But it's nice to read others saying it too. In early D&D the game didn't stop being a game when the rules were hidden behind a screen: the seminal moment of the hobby's creation. What D&D became was the world's...

Sorry, but that does sound boring and one-dimensional. And even impractical as I'm not going to write 100s of one-liners to account for 100s of NPCs. My advice is to stop thinking of NPCs like characters in a story. D&D is a game, not a story. So think of the elements in your RPG like a game...

XP Score is each player's game score. D&D, like other games, is designed for repeatability so players can actually improve their playing the game. The XP score can be a reliable measure for players reflecting on the different campaigns they've played and how they might change their play to...

Murderhobo is a bigoted term made up by individuals about 15 years ago who hated D&D, shared an ignorance for understanding about its design and play, and wanted to change the hobby into one more like we have now. One focused on "collaborative storytelling" and not gaming. As a result of...

If you fail to stay alive in the game, you start over at zero. Zero XP level 1. Every time.

With the new effort to republish popular game settings there is a desire to update them to 5th ed. What also tends to happen is the redesigning of settings to fit the new edition's rules. This is nothing new. In fact, many settings were designed backwards to fit the rules. 2nd ed Darksun is...

Blackmoor 4 Mystara 8 - as the Known World

Oops: 5th ed forum.

I run old school D&D, so for me the thread question sounds somewhat absurd. Perhaps because I think of it two different ways. 1. What do the players track? Well a big part of playing the game for players is remembering and note taking (including mapping). Exactly what they wish to track is...

It looks like all three debuted at Origins IV, 1978 GenCon XI, 1978 was the D series http://www.greyhawkonline.com/grodog/gh_tourneys.html

Roleplaying in the hobby of roleplaying games uses a different definition than the one used in acting circles. These are opposites. In the kind of way gaming is the opposite of inventing something, roleplaying in D&D is the opposite of expressing a personality. In reality, gaming is the act of...

Nothing I ever heard of. I suppose it might enable travel to rather than divination of alternate probability scenario timelines. Though preparing for that as a DM would be difficult. I take it there are no mechanics specified for doing such?

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S1 is one of the greatest game modules of all time. It does however contain many flaws. A good DM can fix these and balance the module to fit capably within a well designed system. But I think most present day DMs don't even understand the basics of the actual original D&D game to begin to do...

OD&D is king. It's still more relevant to the design of almost every computer game today, and in the last 30 years, than to any present day tabletop RPG. New RPGs aren't about beating a game system anymore. OD&D and most every 80s and 90s tabletop RPG were about mastering the system - like any...