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The Rules Cyclopedia is 1991 and the Complete Fighters Handbook 1989 anyway. Mentzer vs Moldvay has all sorts of interesting little tweaks and differences. One I just was reminded of last week was that Mentzer gives you a slightly more explicit definition for what Holmes and Moldvay call...

They can miss all their attacks in a given round, get hit by a round of attacks and die. This is less likely to happen to the Wizard, who will infrequently be attacked in melee by comparison. A 1st level TSR D&D M-U has one spell. One. Magic Missile might get lucky and roll enough damage to...

No. You're conflating and confusing different things from several different editions now. Remember that enemies DON'T get saving throws against Shadowdark casters. The roll to cast REPLACES saving throws and rolls to hit. You can play 4E if you want them to work more the same. But in...

No, but on average two hits from an enemy is enough to "spend" a first level fighter in an old school game. Either for the fight or just forever. The front line martials are more at the mercy of enemy rolls. The back line casters are more at the mercy of how successful their spells are. But...

Martials have always had to roll to attack. And hope the enemies roll badly to hit them in turn. Their success has always been a combination of strategy and luck. Having roll to cast just means it's on more of the same playing field. A mix of strategy (when to deploy spells, when to use Luck...

Great post. Glad to see follow up on this a year and a half later.

This is one reason I like the "flip/mirror" method so much, because it eliminates "hopeless characters" and raises the average a bit, without any re-rolls. There are other ways to eliminate the re-rolls, of course. In a game I ran last year I had each player generate one set of ability scores...

In AD&D you can mostly count on your utility spells working. Other spells usually allow a saving throw. At higher levels enemy saving throws get really good, not to mention magic resistance! The tradeoff you get for utility spells not always working in Shadowdark is you get more spells in...

I did wind up going after work on Friday. Only did two circuits of my baseline regular exercises (dumbbell bench, dumbbell inclined curls, dumbbell behind the head skull crushers, and dumbbell lateral raises) instead of 3, and I drank two or three times as much water as usual while I was doing...

I picked up The Legend of Weathertop as a kid but I seem to remember it being a bit complex and not quite getting it. And I think I let it go in paring down some possessions when we moved back to the East coast when I was 17. Making me sad about that one. :( Lone Wolf I played several of...

Using the thread for its actual purpose for once: Nazis always think they're more clever and subtle than they actually are. And with that, I'm off for the weekend! Cheers, folks.

Love you, buddy. I think we're tired (or at least I am; time to go home!) and talking past each other a little?

Yeah, sure. We may have made a much bigger deal out of it than the tweet itself really merits, and gone off on all sorts of tangents in the process (in a 20+ page thread?! NO!). As Whizbang observed this may have just been their social media peeps getting on a trend that other social media...

I mean, you've been on Twitter, or at least seen social media-savvy companies capitalize on it and making pop culture references, right? Taylor Swift has an enormous fanbase, largely of Millennials. She's not my thing, but it seems reasonably plausible to me that there could be a good overlap...

Let me backtrack the thread for a minute to try to untangle the misunderstanding a bit. Ok, so here's what Whizbang was saying, in context, what he was responding to. Warpiglet and Lakeside were opining that maybe current D&D lacks a fantasy identity to make discrete but limited deviations...

Maybe there's some licensing rights issue with the translator, who was prominently credited in these? TSR Legal certainly didn't always have their ducks in a row.

Which is kind of hilarious when I think about the Japanese RC localization Questing Beast showcased recently. TSR: Inadvertently has the first or one of the first games appealing to anime fans, in the 1980s with Record of Lodoss War being a B/X Actual Play, and in the early 90s with the...