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Soda, based on the info provided. Could be a root beer, Dr. Pepper, or one of several varieties of cola, but they're all kinds of soda.

For our edification and amusement, would you provide a few quotes and citations? :) Obviously the line in the poem/song sticks in many people's memory, but so far other examples aren't leaping to mind. Are they from the Silmarillion, as opposed to The Hobbit or LotR?

I think it's "ironic" (at least in the colloquial sense) that Gary knew that the descending AC system was awkward and had issues and yet he made the decision to stick with it for reverse compatibility JUST before D&D's sales launched through the stratosphere and its player base vastly expanded...

One of my gaming white whales is to nail down a quick and playable initiative/action system which still incorporates some elements of real world and narrative combat which D&D traditionally fails to capture, or stumbles and gets slow and awkward when it tries to. AD&D 1E has a famously...

I think this is a fair point. The difference both in scale principally considered and in gamist vs. simulationist priorites. OD&D and AD&D borrow a good bit from old-school large scale miniatures wargames. The scale (including 1 minute rounds), the rules for movement speeds and for archery...

They certainly could have, but doing it in 1E would have required ditching the attack matrices in favor of an attack bonus system, and for whatever reason they didn't have the initiative and wisdom to take that step. Customers can also be pretty unreasonable when a change requires them to...

And ironically Gary tells us in the 1E DMG that he used descending AC in AD&D "for the sake of continuity and familiarity" (DMG 164). Essentially the reason we had to wait until 2000 for ascending AC is because Gary thought, when putting together the DMG in '78-'79, that reverse compatibility...

Mostly. Rob Kuntz, Jim Ward, and Mike Carr were among those lucky few who got royalty deals before TSR reneged on those or stopped offering them at all, and they were able to make some significant cash. Like, solid middle class homeowner money easily. Although Gary and the Blumes tried to...

Nice catch! From what I read in there it does look like Gary did a lot of travel back and forth between WI and CA; maybe more before he settled at the mansion? The chapter "Gen Con 1984" (starts on p 107) talks about the two of them hanging out and working at Gary's place at Stone Manor for...

Some of the quotes in there (such as from Robert Louis Stevenson's essay A Gossip on Romance, about the nature of adventure fiction) were real eye-openers. It's also got pages and pages of primary source references, which naturally include PatW a bunch of times, but a ton of other interesting...

AD&D 1E? Appendix B?

That all makes sense to me, and is one of the reasons I haven't been in a hurry to read the second edition. I don't expect much new, so I've figured it would be basically a re-read, with some different organization. Speaking of scholarly research on TTRPGs, have you checked out Nachtwey's...

Had a longer session on Sunday, which was nice. Although I think I need to be even more careful on my leg press form, as I definitely felt some lower back stiffness and impairment last night and this morning. Three sets of dumbbell flies, three sets of dumbbell inclined curls with drop sets...

I don't even mind the ending, really. I get the concept and I like how they tried not to just resolve it with a CGI punch-up. Thunderbolts was quite good, yeah. It helps that they had some time invested in establishing several of the characters beforehand.

That last was an optional rule in 2E, of course. You don't need to drop treasure for XP to slow down advancement if you just give less treasure, of course. They did not. That's just a false statement. There are a few rare occasions at low levels when it's possible for them to be two levels...

I was really disappointed in Captain America: Brave New World. Some charisma from the leads and some decent action, but damn the writing was bad.

In '82? Absolutely not. Gary didn't (edit, correction) move into the mansion for another year, and he didn't hire Lorraine until '85. As Game Wizards and When We Were Wizards clearly document, Gary was still one of the people in charge of TSR, and tacitly or explicitly approving and agreeing...

Yeah, I think Gary was definitely writing from a context with more adversarial/opportunistic players. In retrospect, though, "have an adult conversation about expectations and mutual fun" is better advice for that than "hit them with invisible mummies and bolts from the blue if they get...

Makes sense. As Max and Sacrosanct illustrated, a fair number of DMs ruled more harshly, which strikes me as pretty brutal given how the odds are already against Thieves even just playing strictly by the book, but I figured I'd confirm whether you were among them rather than assuming. I prefer...

Maybe there's an example in a popular module? Or maybe it's just folks extrapolating from Gary's guidance in the 1E DMG to never cut a Thief a break.