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In Forbidden Lands, it was capped at d12, and when you were in a settlement you could spend cash to increase the die size up to that point. Forbidden Lands actually uses this for pretty much all supplies - torches, food, and water are all tracked this way, though the conditions that trigger a...

Even in D&D, I tend to use loss of ammo as something that happens based on PC and NPC actions in the narrative, rather than by counting shots. I like when games include that sort of mechanic by default. A couple of other light mechanics I've liked: 1) The usage die from Forbidden Lands (and...

It's also true that contemporary OSR folks often offer advice that fits well with the sort of advice you'd get in a lot of PbtA games. For instance, the Principia Apocrypha suggests that GMs should: This is all stuff that you'll hear, perhaps in different words, from the GM chapters in...

I think my longest game back then was on the order of four or five years, because that was how long I lived in a given area before moving, and I've been the GM for most of my groups. I've moved toward shorter campaigns as I've been in the hobby longer, because I'd rather get to explore more...

Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands?

This is correct, and I didn't mean to imply that everyone engaged in "old school" play is reconstructing past modes of play. There are definitely groups and individuals that have maintained some level of continuity. What I would say, though, is that the OSR and things like it are attempts at...

I've been playing since the mid 80s, and until his recent death the group I GM included someone who played with Gygax. It still includes a couple of people who started in the 70s. The sort of thing that some folks here ascribe to "old school" does not fit with the games I played back in the day...

Nor have I ever known a GM let my real-world knowledge of metallurgy, steam engines, and coal mining allow my character to kickstart an industrial revolution in a classic pseudo-medieval D&D setting. (That said, there are times where I like it when real-world knowledge can be brought to bear. I...

I don't think it's productive for me to engage with most of the claims in @bloodtide 's post, but I did want to remark on one point: This is not an accurate characterization of the new school approach. And as others have pointed out, the way the contrast is posed here is obviously intended to...

Adding to what others have said (and which I largely agree with) I'd add that as you say, NFTs were a big scam. What they are now is still a scam, just not as big; it's a pool of ever-more desperate grifters preying on an ever-diminishing mass of true believers and gambling addicts and...

Thrift stores don't generally work for me either, but I frequently find good stuff at the local Half-Price Books. My best find was probably a copy of the licensed Dune RPG that came out in 2000 from Last Unicorn Games. Only 3000 were printed, and it's the only copy I've ever seen in the wild. I...

I know I said I was done on this topic, but I did want to chime in once more after all. I think this is largely correct, and one might wonder how to square that with my example, from a supposedly neo-trad leaning game, of the GM inflicting that level of consequence on a player without first...

Yes, and knowingly inflicting treatment on someone that they don't like, for months on end, during an event they ostensibly do because they want to enjoy it, seems performatively cruel to me. Telling me that people will endure it doesn't make it less of a bad thing to do to them. I understand...

This is disingenuous. I was referring to this: I quoted that line and a few others. Turning a character into a duck for months radically diminishes and potentially entirely removes a player's ability to meaningfully play the game in a way that taking away a character's weapon, even their main...

That is a good point, and I'm afraid my last post was reacting to that trend rather than furthering the topic. On the subject of what I like about this style of play: as someone who almost entirely GMs, I appreciate how it encourages player buy-in and gets them involved. We're playing out their...

Rendering a player unable to play for real-time months is ludicrous behavior, assuming you're playing a game where each player has a single character. You are simply wrong about this. This has been pointed out many times, in this thread and others, with people giving examples from their own...

I enjoy pulling ideas out of published adventures, and from time to time I've been known to use them as a starting setup. The last 3.5 campaign I ran borrowed the setup and the initial hex map from Pathfinder's Kingmaker adventure path, but veered wildly from the plot of the path - I kept the...

What counts as "unique" changes over time. If I tell someone I'm starting a D&D campaign and provide no more information, I think that most players would come to the table with the very reasonable assumption that they can use the things in the book. When I started playing some 35 years ago with...

It does help, but it comes at a cost, and it adds a bit of a push-your-luck mechanic - will the extra intel you get from doing more prep and planning help, or will you end up accumulating more Heat than it's worth?

In general I have no objection to homebrew. I love homebrewing stuff for my campaigns when I GM. The last time I ran 5e was about a year ago, and as part of that I made a dozen or so homebrew magic items. As a player, I would be excited to get a homebrew item or learn a unique homebrew spell. In...