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What notebook are you using?

I think DIY homebrew is very important to people in the OSR. Everyone has their own house rules that turn into a house system, and eventually some of those get published.

A lot of OSR systems use HD as a measure of conversion so that you if you know the HD of a creature you can derive or look up all other relevant stats. Games like Knave and Whitehack are explicit about this. Other games like Cairn are harder to convert, but the authors include conversions of...

Questing Beast makes a distinction here between "official dnd" and "folk dnd." The former are those who require the material they play with to come from an official source, usually the company making the game. The latter are people who make it up themselves. Of course there is a spectrum...

I think the idea (IMO) is that you focus on the skill of the player rather than on the skill of the character. So you are given a set of tools when you pick your character, and you do your best to addresses the challenges presented using those tools in creative ways. I think what's interesting...

This is extaordinarily pessimistic. I don't think this is true at all. The act of playing an RPG is itself inherently creative to begin with. I found my old Black Box set and found some homebrew classes that I made. One of them was a changling class, probably inspired by star trek, that...

Also, I love this:

Into the Odd is really my favorite OSR based system (perfected, IMO, in Mausritter). I'm excited for this KS

Creating a whole new game is a lot of work, as you suggest. However, creating new house rules or small subsystems for an existing system is less work, because you can leverage the design that's already been done. You aren't designing the whole thing from scratch, you are expanding in minor ways...

These are two different situation: 1. A case of the right kind of product not existing 2. A product existing that says it is going to do X, but then is not good at doing X. I would agree that if you purchase a product like an adventure and it doesn't work, it is reasonable to complain. I...

A lot of the 2e adventures had very evocative locations but were railroads in 2e fashion. If I was going to 'run' any of them now I would have to take them apart and make them more open ended.

I think there is space to try to neutrally analyze the direction of the corporation. Wotc's own metrics of "winning" have more to do with dollars and cents, and in my analysis they seeming to be currently winning a lot, while seemingly wanting to win much much more through more extensive...

Some quotes

It would be less about people switching and more about a) existing dnd beyond users who just wants something light that uses dndbeyond and especially b) new players. Since they are the ones selling the product, they could easily direct people toward their platform and away from the others...

The real question is whether committing so many resources not only to digital but to a specific idea of what digital looks like--the 3d VTT--is actually a good business move. Clearly they think it is, but maybe they previously thought a heavy release schedule was a good business move, and it...

I'll need some time to dive in. Very exciting!

Last year wotc said that they want to create a "recurrent spending environment." Arguably, this has been the problem (from a business perspective) with dnd and ttrpg since the beginning: all you really need to play is a rulebook-or-three, some dice, and your imagination. So how to get people to...

Are you familiar with Whitehack? It does some of the things you seem to want to do, though maybe in a more radical way. One thing you might want to embrace re: prof bonuses etc is a roll-under mechanic. Whitehack (and other games, like The Black Hack) uses a roll under score even for attacks...

I've heard that "the future of dnd is digital." We'll see if that ends up impacting a) the density of analog products available or b) their game design

I think agenda and principles are brilliant and at the same time I'll never think of them as "rules," per se. The interpretive latitude that one has with "be a fan of the pcs" or "think offscreen" or what-have-you is of a extremely different order than the other three categories you list. Yet...