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2e's optional level limit rules worked quite well, and I used them consistently; after all, the demihumans did get a lot of extra abilities, and they must be worth "something". Paying 2x XP up to the maximum racial level (possibly extended via high attributes), and 3x after the maximum is an...

Note that Ariakas was a human, so RAW he cannot multiclass, but he can become a "character with two classes" (start as a Fighter, then switch to Magic-user.) In the DL series of modules, he is a dual-class fighter/cleric; as a fighter/magic-user he would not be allowed to cast spells in armor...

PHB followed by DMG (in parallel with the MM). The DMG is your friend. Repeat: the DMG is your friend. For no other reason that the way the game is structured, there's very little, rules-wise, that's player-facing; the PHB won't tell you the rules for combat, for example.

Yeah Dark Sun is not for the faint-hearted (DM and/or players!) Back in the day I ran it pretty much by-the-book (the original set), using the Complete Psionics Handbook, Will and the Way, and Dragon Kings. I did use level limits, but with the optional rule in the DMG to double XP requirements...

The "problem" with ADDICT is that it's just a possible way to play, not THE way to play. The author extrapolates or gives a personal interpretation in many places, where someone else might give a different interpretation to the same text (e.g. he refers to a fan article in Dragon magazine to...

Hard to argue! The MotP is a really subpar product. D&DG does a much better job in its Appendix 1 at providing simple, gameable information for planar travel and adventuring. The book even provides an outline of the quest for immortality, which is remarkably similar to the overall Master...

Yeah, those were always curious omissions. Not even the RC has rules for natural healing!

Personally it's not so much about "long-term play" (I had at least two BECMI campaigns go to 36th level); although I can see why a wider variety of content, be it spells, classes, monsters, races, etc. may increase long-term replayability, what I am mainly after is ready-made content I can drop...

I don't have the material at hand for a detailed comparison, but for most of the items (notable exception: mass combat and domain management) you mention, AD&D provides more depth and more gameable material; an example that comes to mind since I used the material recently: in the AD&D DMG, the...

I think a good way to understand the scope of BECMI is to draw parallels with AD&D 1e. We know Frank Mentzer was Gary's "creative right hand", and to this day, he runs pretty much exclusively AD&D 1e with some BECMI "extras". Some similarities are subtle, others more evident: In the Basic set...

No theme, but they are perhaps the best of the crop of BECM. B10, X4, X5, CM1, M1 in particular are golden and showcase the tiers of play. I ran close to that campaign years ago but using AD&D 2e (we liked the added flexibility of races and classes and extra spells), with Dominion and War...

This is the Way!

Early issues of Polyhedron were an official source of errata and clarifications by Gygax himself (through Frank Mentzer.) For example, the spellcasting levels of Rangers and Paladins is nowhere stated in the manuals.

There was extensive errata to all three core books, published in Dragon Magazine. Whole appendices were added to the later printings of the DMG. So if the OP wants to go after originals, it's a good idea to check the printing. The Acaeum website has a list of errata. Note that some of it wasn't...

A thing worth noting is that the game, to the contrary of later editions (including 2e) assumes a rather strict "reward cycle": adventure->get treasure->train to level->adventure. The cycle IS the game, in a sense. Getting treasure is the main objective; killing monsters is highly inefficient...

I'd say the unarmed combat rules (System I) to replace the godawful correspondent in the DMG. The rules on spellbooks are easily integrated.

Definitely. I use them in Birthright, for example, which relies on them. Ditto for Dark Sun. But other settings, or homebrew? Rarely if at all.

QFT! The first encounter I ran for my players with our first 3e game was with a squad of orcs...TPK!

I still run AD&D, but these days, if I feel that skills are needed in the campaign for whatever reason, I prefer to run 3.0. Even in the 2e days, we rarely used NWPs (at least the 2e version was self-consistent and reasonably complete; the 1e versions in DSG and WSG had two different resolution...

The Toughness feat has been mentioned earlier. I house-ruled it and made it class-specific, i.e. to provide the average (rounded up) hit die of the class. So, the standard Toughness applies to Wizards and Sorcerers; to d6 classes it provides 4 hit points; to d8 classes, 5 hit points; to d10...