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Sorcerers exist because some people hate Vancian magic. But WotC doesn’t have the balls to reinvent it. So they keep trying to cobble together some kind of half-assed fix to let spellcasters be less than useless when they run out of spells. My two cents? Give sorcerers cantrips (possibly with a...

I’ll respond to this one. I like D&D because I really like the d20 as a resolution mechanic. It’s simple, and just swingy enough to be fun. And D&D didn’t used to be nearly as gonzo as it is now. Druid Wildshape came much later. Paladin and Ranger didn’t get spells until 9th level. Slow XP...

That would’ve been fine. But it seems more complicated than just giving us a dwarf, elf, halfling and human as, y’know, not classes.

I dunno. Maybe. I was a weird kid who hated cliches and I was like: "So Humans get to pick, but if I want to be an Elf, I'd be just...an Elf? Or a Halfling? That seems weird." But again, I wasn't a typical 9-year-old. We switched over to AD&D character creation once we got the PHB, but kept...

There's honestly a funny aspect to this in that, as a small child who got my first Basic Set in 1981 (and mine WAS Moldvay - pictured upper left), but had already played White Box D&D at the home of an overly slightly older neighbor, one of the things that I never quite got about Basic was Races...

I definitely appreciate Mr. Bloch's historical research into this, while also finding the provenance of Adventures Dark and Deep to be highly suspect. I'll get to that more later in the post. That being said, it's very interesting for someone to have collected all that was being published in...

It's also worth noting that the Thief-Acrobat came about after the D&D Cartoon aired in 1983. In case you aren't aware, the 6 characters in that were Acrobat, Barbarian, Cavalier, Magician, Ranger and Thief - the first three of whom were introduced in Unearthed Arcana, which was published in...

4d6, drop one, and arrange as desired was listed in the 1e DMG. Just fyi.

And? Those are all failings of TSR's earlier decision not to include more pages, rethink the unintuitive aspects of the game, and so forth. In other words, it was a bad decision made by someone in the course of designing the product. It may be hard to point fingers at whose "fault" it was, but...

The rule is always "if you don't care about a thing, it's pointless to bother tracking it." But I would offer the following replies: Academics - This skill covers everything from Research (the archives kind), to Law, to Writing, to Economics and Business. Basically, if it's a college degree...

I'll also throw out that without my beloved "Fighting Wheel," I would have found 1e AD&D to be entirely unplayable. If only someone had made a "Saving Throw Wheel" that I could have gotten my hands on.

Blasphemer!! Burn the witch!!! In all seriousness, I know there's a lot of similarity, but THAC0 really was a dramatic improvement. ;) And you'll find a lot of people willing to rant until blue about the end of "Real D&D" having come from the addition of the Bard to the class list, but...

Separately, I'm fascinated that some people see "Separating Player Ability from Character Ability" differently from the obvious anti-metagaming rule of "Separate Player Knowledge from Character Knowledge."

I think there's a fairly high "Disregard the stats and 'just roleplay'" attitude among players I would broadly characterize as the "grumpy old fart 'it's roleplaying not roll-playing'" crowd. And those also tend to be the people most likely to tout "Just roll 3d6 in order as the almighty Gygax...

The Moldvay Basic Set is perfectly easy to understand...if you're already familiar with D&D. As a starter introduction to a very complicated game, it pretty much fails utterly. I started with it, and it was a mess. There's a reason people like me tend to look back nostalgically on the Red Box...

I mean, as another example, there's the kernel of a very good game in 1e AD&D, but the presentation was an unholy mess. It makes it fun (for some definition of "fun") to dig through the 1e DMG and find new stuff even after owning it for 45 years, but it made it a little unwieldy to use. ;) It...

Yeah Voadam, I pretty much figured that's how you'd vote, seeing as it was our discussion that inspired my poll.

Just a note: I think you meant that bolded name to read "Rob." But basically, that's my point. If you can't roleplay a character who is smarter (or wiser, or more charismatic) than yourself, then the whole premise of roleplaying games, or at least how we approach mental stats in them...

And so far, it seems that the answer is mostly "Yes," "Yes, but with caveats" or "It's complicated," with a few outliers choosing "Not at all!"