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So you’re basically looking for heavy-story, moderate-combat trad play without the heavyweight character customization rules of 3e (and 5e to a lesser extent) but still with a decent amount of player-facing, rules mediated customization?

My groups pretty routinely get into the high teens, but we usually start a little higher and level up pretty frequently. (Every 2-4 sessions.)

OSR play is a totally different thing that the play that happened in the ‘70s and ‘80s, from my understanding. Same system, very different concepts.

It’s very important for OSR style play (including Shadowdark) to emphasize that the point of play is to solve environmental puzzles. Rooms with monsters are simply another kind of puzzle to solve. Any party that gets into head-to-head combat with a monster group without some kind of setup to...

If you’re doing drafting/bidding for class/race, you would probably do that in an OSR type game where classes and races are both more limited AND access to them is usually gated by what your stats are anyway. It would work great in a B/X game or DCC, for example.

My default is 1, although I've been experimenting with the other two approaches I outlined the past few years. I started a thread about the topic a few years back, the topic definitely created some interesting fault lines around people's approaches.

I would generally agree with this. Certainly, within the same system (assuming systems that are roughly D&D-shaped), any one group can use either approach, but it is usually inharmonious to attempt both at the same time. Just thinking out loud; I could hypothesize a game style with...

It's interesting in how we see the same problem but chose different ways to address it. To me, the idea that the exact same ability progression would be seen across tens of thousands of individuals is extremely damaging to verisimilitude. And I can't see a logical reason that a simple...

Obviously, you should play however you want, and I'm glad you and your group have fun with your game. I would just have trouble playing in a setting with classes that function like that; it's too much of a violation of my sense of verisimilitude. But if that doesn't bother you guys, that's great.

1) Noticeable changes, maybe not to the extent of significant changes. Modifying a dwarf clan in the way I mentioned in earlier posts is something I would expect to be greenlighted, working under the assumption that the clan is not front-and-center at the start of the game. Maybe I make up...

I can't speak for @EzekielRaiden, but for me, it would depend on how much leeway I'm allowed. If it's just "make up some holy days and ritual practices", that's not really a ton of input. Can I make up a holy order? Can I have input into their beliefs? Can I tweak the alignment, like say...

Assume it wasn't a major factor in your campaign. Let's say you have a large setting gazetteer, like Forgotten Realms, with over a hundred pages of setting background and various nations and regions. And that this dwarf clan was a two-sentence mention in one of the region descriptions. If a...

Do you consider adding details a "change"? Like, I don't view my "dragon blooded dwarves" idea as a real change from the presented "Dragonborn dwarves are a clan of dwarves" initial presentation. It's just a deepening or fleshing out of a short blurb.

Impressive ritual necromancy!

How would you, personally, compromise in this hypothetical? Assuming I was the DM in this case, I would probably say that the Dragonborn clan of dwarves actually does have some dragon blood in their clan ancestry, and that occasionally that ancestral blood comes through more strongly and some...

I think it would be fairly obvious in this case that the player and GM aren't in alignment. So the interesting question here is "What now?" And does either party have more or less of an obligation (not moral, but out of politeness/courtesy) to compromise or bend?

All taxonomies do a terrible job, right up until you try and create a better one. :)

I climbed up a cliff, and it turns out on the top of the cliff was a cook the whole time, just cooking up weather.

I don't think we need to. But people seem interested in defining it since the concept has been around for decades.

I'm a fan of Daggerheart's campaign frames for building setting. They give a sense of setting texture and boundaries to help with building characters and NPC adversaries. They're "real", in the sense that they're right in the core book and thus easily accessible to all the participants. They...