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I currently read more than I get the chance to play . . . . . . which means I'm not interested in purely notional rules quibbles, and am baffled by such discussion as calling rules 'broken' that seem to work perfectly fine for almost everyone.

How is 'dwarves' more American than British? Since 'dwarves' is legitimate, and moreover it's the established plural for D&D dwarves (whereas Warhammer dwarfs are dwarfs), I wouldn't make this change. But do use British punctuation: single quotation marks, commas not brought inside them, no...

You'll get quite a bit of speculation. If I were you, I'd find David "Zeb" Cook and ask him.

In British English, -ize endings are at least as correct as -ise endings, and are favoured by the Oxford dictionaries. It's a misconception that -ize is an Americanism. the plural of dwarf in the 'fantasy' sense is 'dwarves' as well as 'dwarfs', since the precedent set by the British author...

The original Dungeon Masters Guide names six type VI demons: Alzoll, Balor, Errtu, Ndulu, Ter-soth, Wendonai.

See "Realmslore: Broadcryers of Waterdeep".

At a minimum: If you don't look at it all in advance, you'll have to take pauses to read ahead. You can get by if you give it just a skim through, but you'll have to think on your feet as you find yourself thinking things like 'I should have done this earlier' and 'I didn't realize that was...

Although Gary talks about D&D in 'game' terms, original D&D is not purely gameist -- it has a large simulationist element to do with recreating the feeling of fantasy fiction (see "Swords And Sorcery—In Wargaming", reprinted in Dungeon #112). While it isn't narrativist in Ron Edwards's sense...

I'm a lot more intrigued by the original subterranean settings of the Realms (see here, 2/3 down page) and the World of Greyhawk (which is hollow, as in Pellucidar) than the hybrid TSR Underdark that came to be applied to both.

I don't see a great difference between the two. Except for some good ideas and discussions scattered here and there, does either series consistently make campaigns better?

It will remain so as long as it's aimed mainly at existing and lapsed 'gamers', and in particular those who buy lots of supplements. D&D is designed partly to enable complex fun with character-'building' and other rules-for-rules'-sake stuff, not primarily to be an easy-to-play game with...

As well as not applying much to S1, this is just paranoid. Of everything that happens in an RPG campaign, very little of it depends on the rules. Geography, what groups and individual NPCs exist, what their capabilities are and what they do, the layout of dungeons, is all 'DM whim'. And unless...

That quote from The Horde is very close. But it's hardly an edition thing -- compare the distortion of the Faerûn map in the 3E Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting.

I ran these successfully. They're certainly not classic modules, due to their ill-conceived premise (imposed on Ed Greenwood) of following the novel characters around, but they're workable and a wonderful, and underappreciated, source of Realmslore. FRQ1 Haunted Halls of Eveningstar, even in its...

I like the original AD&D for what it is. It's the perfect system for the World of Greyhawk and similar worlds, and for its own style of play. I admire those things and like to travel there, though they're far from what's most natural to me. From that perspective, 2E misunderstood or changed the...

Relying more on strategy and less on die rolls is unfair and arbitrary and therefore bad? That's a pretty idiosyncratic idea of quality. The rules are there to adjudicate conflicts when the world as created by the DM interacts with the actions of PCs in uncertain ways, that's all. There's no...

Rich Baker said:

This is a truism of horror film-making, and what the mind conjures can indeed be more horrible than what a lot of film-makers could conceive and show. But this is only one way of doing it, part of the conservative strand of horror fiction which says you should be afraid of what you're already...

It's playing a role. The 'real you', if it exists, exists at a deeper level than persona. A role isn't something separate from yourself, as any actor will tell you. 'whether we realize it or not' is certainly part of the operative point.

It's only conventional wisdom among anti-D&D pontificators, who started up right after D&D was published, leading to RuneQuest, Traveller, Chivalry & Sorcery, etc. ... some of which I like, some days, better than D&D. But I think the idea that complex customization is inherently better than...