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I tend to agree the difficulty is 1) keying complex rooms and 2) Keying simple rooms in less standard spaces. E.G. "4 orcs arguing about what's on the menu" is likely functional for a room in a stone dungeon beneath the ruined castle when orcs are your basic "evil monster-men". It won't work...

I've been thinking a lot about keying again... perhaps it's my day job moving into highly restricted forms of informational writing, perhaps it's the One Page Dungeon Contest rolling around again, and perhaps writing dungeon keys is just something I find comforting. I wrote a post about it...

"I adopted the rules I'd done earlier for a Civil War game called Ironclads that had hit points and armor class. It meant that players had a chance to live longer and do more. They didn't care that they had hit points to keep track of because they were just keeping track of little detailed...

We do know that bows were frequently mentioned in "viking sagas" and found at many Northern European sites. They tend to be single stave bows that are fairly long and mentions of war bows (such as in Olafs Trygvasonar's sagas) tend to emphasize heavy draw weights and use at sea. A fair amount...

On of the things I try to avoid in thinking about RPG mechanics, especially combat ones, is stuff that seems cool, or is too specific, or too hyped. I think of this as the "Katana Issue" or more historically maybe "Gygax's Spear"*. The basic problem I see is the urge towards simulation (not...

The one I use is "if you roll under a 5 on the to hit - regardless of any bonuses etc - you do full damage to an ally". It's bad enough that people avoid it most of the time, but also will do it when things are tense. I tend to think of light crossbows and throwing axes/knives as the dungeon...

I don't but since no one fires missile weapons other then throwing knives and axes more then once usually (the rules for firing into melee are harsh ... but fair I think). I would likely in a game with more missile fire. Not exactly sure how though.

It doesn't matter if Tolkien's dwarves cast spells... This whole discussion reminds me of "Gandalf is a 7th level Magic-User tops" sort of claims. Tolkien's books do not follow any D&D system and can't really be laid on top of them very well, and despite Elric or Cthulhu getting stats in the...

Personally I like to keep things a bit less granular and more abstract. I privilege location and placing over initiative and speed. My approach to rank/file and flank combat is here: https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/2023/10/dungeon-skr.html Usually in dungeon crawls this ends up with...

So giant mega dungeons need a large amount of variety and factions. While ancient may tower of the mad elder god wizards is certainly a reasonable start, if this is going to work as a mega dungeon you'll need more then decaying cyclopean stone halls, undead and various failed experiments...

I mean BFRPG is fine as far as I know. It's a BECMI or B/X clone from the first wave of OSR retro-clones like Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, and OSRIC (an AD&D clone). I understand it does a few things different then the originals but other then that I've not heard much about it beyond...

My own impression is that as the OSR recedes into memory (or ages into senility - whichever descriptor one prefers) it becomes harder to identify. It has so many offshoots and sub communities, but lacks core shared cores spaces now. To me this is a sign that the OSR is no more... but others want...

That has been my experience as well. My suspicion is that Yochai, like myself and many others in the Post-OSR, doesn't like a small group of creators who hold extremist and bigoted political views. Most of them are also banned in many "OSR" spaces, and Yochai will ban people for intentionally...

I don't disagree, I think the possibility of this kind of play and some mechanics to support it exist within OD&D, but they are incomplete. My assumption (or how I'd run OD&D as a wargame) is that the player wouldn't control a single character but a domain - including several leveled PCs. So...

My own reading is that both Lake Geneva and the West Coast D&D scene missed part of the point of OD&D, because I do suspect that it was originally intended as a sort of mini-game to a larger Chainmail campaign - a sort of "raid the castle for gold to build your army" thing in a Castles &...

I disagree. I played a lot of D&D in the 1980's and there were plenty of different ways the game was played. There were good and bad referees. Moreover, these differences were part of table culture, which was dominant then because there were far fewer means of offical or even inter-hobbyist...

While I agree that adventure content has a good deal to do with how deadly a given campaign is ... there are absolutely bad refereeing methods that make for "killer DMing". many of us may remember some of these from playing D&D when we were pre teens and teenagers in the 1980's... 1) Having...

I always figure that one of the important aspects of older editions is the relative ease of rolling up new characters. Consequences are part of the game. Sometimes being recklessness gets you the gem eyes of the statute - sometimes it animates and pulps the party... Both results are the game...

I was also thinking of a rule for "barbarous finery" - that is if you dress in your battered armor and gear but wear thousands of GP worth of tomb gold... basically nobody wants to mess with you, but everyone wants to overcharge you and rob you ... you'll get invited to nice places but charged...

XP for Gold Spent is pretty traditional way to award XP, it encourages player involvement in the setting and provides a ready made way for characters to make an impact on it as well. In an OD&D game I played back in the G+ days (Pahvelorn run by Brendan of Wonder & Wickedness and the...