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Can't believe I've slept on this thread either. BECMI is my home, and the Cyclopedia is my jam. I'm an eleven-six (a.k.a. tan box) kiddo myself, though I did play a few times with the ten-seventy black box before getting seriously enamored with the game and the hobby. I've only just finished...

"Red box oh-dee-and-dee."

Everyone is a prisoner rowing on a galley together, until they very suddenly aren't.

3d6 in order, no whammies, no waiting. Get the dice on the table and then pick a class and let's effing go.

Definitely 1e multiclassing, not just because demihuman fighter/clerics can use swords, but also because demihuman fighter/magic-users can use armor like they're supposed to. 1e magic-resistance is just easier to deal with.

I'm hearing that sentiment from a lot of places, and I wholeheartedly agree. I'll just be happy as long as the villain isn't related to either Gozer or Vigo in any way.

FF1 is heavily based on BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia D&D. Fighters and thieves are self-explanatory, white mages and black mages are clerics and magic-users, the black belt is the mystic, and red mages are sort of standing in for the druid and the elf — especially the elf. (I let this feed back into...

Old-school, trad, neo-trad.

And neo-pagans aren't also appropriating "druid" from ancient history?

All my monochrome-cover AD&D modules. Ugh.

Yes and no: have a look at The Curious Case of D&D's Two Experience Systems.

Well, that's because "B/X" doesn't actually exist. It's not a discrete "edition" of D&D, not in the sense that we use "edition" nowadays to mean a complete, iterated version of an RPG. The D&D game as it was published 1974–1996 is more of a continuum than a series.

Or you could just let a single d20 roll stand for all the checks addressing the same problem, no matter whether they're coming from multiple players or a single player. After all, there's only DC; one roll should tell how well the PC or the group is doing at overcoming it.

The final boss of Barrowmaze was a dracolich named "Ossithrax Pejorative." It's intentional.

In my experience, players who want D&D to be something other than a game desperately want it to be art — and specifically storytelling or performance art. Games are low-class; art is high-class. It's a metanarrative born from pretentiousness.

1 shot vodka ½ oz peach schnapps 2 oz each orange and cranberry juice serve in glass with ice, cherry, orange slice, and tiny umbrella

Right, but it's tactical infinity + personal avatar that makes an RPG, which is why a generic free Kriegsspiel with no role to play (or Diplomacy for that matter) would be problematic to categorize as an RPG, whereas a Braunstein free Kreigsspiel most definitely is a simple kind of RPG.

Tactical infinity is the thing that separates RPGs from wargames or board games where you might still be in control of a personal avatar. The lack of it is why HeroQuest and Gloomhaven are not RPGs (even if you do improvisational playacting and get "into character" while playing them). Think of...

Technically, paladins, rangers, druids, priests of specific mythoi, bards, and specialist wizards were all optional. See the intro text to chapter 3 and Table 13 in the PHB (pg 25 in the original edition, pp 34–35 in the revised edition).

🤫 Shh! Not so loud! 🤐 Do you want to get us all sued by those litigious Tolkien Estate IP-tyrants!? It's mithral!