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Since spells don't have levels in BtW (and they're all roughly as powerful as D&D 1st or 2nd level spells), I keep it like BtW, one per day per caster level.

In my home campaigns, I tweak the BtW magic system in a few minor ways to make it fit a B/X aesthetic a bit better. • I don't want ability scores to have a direct impact on spell ability (which they largely don't in BXCMI), so instead of Int and Wis checks, I have cantrips and rituals require a...

@Snarf Zagyg, I wonder if you're familiar with how Beyond the Wall and its sister games (Through Sunken Lands and Grizzled Adventurers) handle magic. There's only one caster class, the mage, and it has three types of magic: cantrips, spells, and rituals. • Cantrips are weak effects that can be...

We have rather different definitions of "notable" and "significant", I think. There is one significant difference between the '81 rules and the '83 rules that I'm aware of — magic-user spell acquisition, limited under Moldvay and unlimited under Mentzer. That changes gameplay in a way that...

By that logic, it's hard to consider BX and BECMI separate editions.

There's a reason @Snarf Zagyg tried to head these kinds of arguments off at the pass. They're not interesting. We're all of us here, I think, familiar enough with postpositivist incredulity to be aware that certainty is a technical impossibility. But it's trivial — it doesn't lead to any useful...

Uh, yeah, about that… * laughs in ecto-containment grid *

For me, the issue isn't authenticity, it's artifice. I like old-school play with a hard landscape milieu and a principled, neutral referee, because those are the conditions that minimize artifice. The game-world is what it is, what happens happens, decisions have consequences, and all victories...

Blogger Sandra Snan coined a name for this kind of prep-focused, principled restraint — blorb. (Excellent summary of the neutral referee in the OP, BTW, SZ. I'll throw another bard on the BBQ for ya.)

Are D&D players and DMs considered "fans" of the game now? That doesn't seem quite correct to me.

The Basic Psionics Handbook is excellent, and quite an improvement on all versions of 2e psionics IMHO, as it completely eliminates power checks as a mechanic. (If by "mad" you mean "multiple-ability dependent," the PX1 version of the psionicist uses only Int and Wis as prime requisites.) I...

I'll let a druid shift from an owl into a bear or vice versa, but not both at once.

Last I checked, paper, eyeballs, and literacy all still exist.

No, they don't, because I never just say that I want to run D&D. That would be asking for confusion. Instead, I'll put up flyers in my local game shop advertising the campaign and prominently showing the edition that I want to run — with, like, a picture of the Red Box cover front and center...

What difficulties are you encountering? I've lived in small towns and big cities, and I've never had trouble getting a BECMI campaign off the ground.

If you offer three doors that all lead to the same quantum encounter, what happens when a PC peeks behind them with a divination? Well if there's nothing actually there, they cannot be permitted to do that — forcing any DM who didn't anticipate this to throw up a last-minute, BS anti-divination...

I'll go ahead and pull an excerpt from my own house-rules doc to provide what I hope can serve as an example.

That's how I handle it. (As I mention a couple of times in the comments on Dan's blog.)

Ever since I first heard about how alignment entered D&D — in Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign, the players organized themselves into Team Good and Team Evil and competed for treasure and territory; Gygax decided to use Law and Chaos in his Greyhawk campaign instead, because he was a Moorcock...

Having nonhuman main characters is a genre convention in fantasy that we owe to Baum, Burroughs, Lewis, Tolkien, Anderson, Moorcock, Brooks, &al., &al., &al.…