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Oh yes it is. Nostalgia is typically, often, usually a manifestation of personal association but, semantically, it does not need to be at all. I do agree that it must be tempered. As I said earlier:

@Transbot You seem to assume that nostalgia appeals only to an extant user base. Nostalgia often has personal associations for people but plenty of people are nostalgic for things with which they have no personal association. Therefore, nostalgia does not necessarily only appeal to 'the base'...

When the feeling of nostalgia exceeds the value of that which is missed, it is to be scorned. When it is justified by that which is missed, dismiss it at your peril.

Just a tad disingenuous. Can I just point out those of us old enough to be in this tier have grown out of all caps and exclamation marks? Seriously, let's not have tiers. People won't be able to resist writing adventures that begin or end at a given tier level and that is going to make for lots...

So far so good. And it's still that easy to come off the rails. It's not a binary argument. Undoubtedly. Er, not for any given definition of 'it' but for yours, evidently. When you say 'the goal as stated', if you mean, as you said earlier, "If, as a designer, you view the D&D ruleset as...

By the way, thank you for 'implicit'; more apposite than the word I used. Sorry, everyone. As you were.

Please forgive me if I've forgotten this point being made upthread, but it seems to me that it's the idea that a D&D rule expresses or tries to encapsulate, rather than the rule itself, that many people here - push comes to shove - would say helps them define what they mean when they talk about...

Absolutely. Strangely, while I prefer Go to Chess, I prefer my D&D to be more akin to Chess than to Go.

Ha! The very reason for that recommendation is because so many people had magic shops from right back in the days of 1e, as plenty of White Dwarf, Dragon, et al articles and letters illustrated. This I will grant. I love scribe scroll and always wanted something like it back in 1e days...

The system says I've got to spread XP around but I wanted to throw a point in your direction, because one of my favourite 2e things was the initiative system (even acknowledging Seregil's observation). It is a derivative of this that I most often entertain the idea of when it comes to modifying...

The AD&D system is close to what war game designers use (I'm not talking about hobby war gamers; I'm talking about those who design for the military). 25% casualties and you have morale issues - possibly leading to a route. Just noting. I prefer rules to DM guidance on this issue (though...

My guess? You're not going to get sick of it. Just a hunch.

Vancian is the worst form of magic system, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Apologies to Winston Churchill.

You'll encounter true name magic in Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away and The Magic May Return, if you're interested in fiction. I was always a big fan of the idea, which is why I was delighted when it showed up in 3e's Tome of Magic. Unfortunately, the treatment it got didn't turn out to be...

And let's not forget that Bill Gates himself wasn't averse to a little cheating.

I like the idea that it takes a long time to reach high level. I would prefer that the investment of time required to scale the dizzy heights of character advancement, coupled with the chance of character death, made high-level play something most of us aspire to or, perhaps, occasionally...

I would think again, if I were you. Matt's assessment is pretty accurate. I should know; I'm the guy who turned WD into what it is today, apparently. It wasn't that the market wasn't sustaining WD. It was that the change enabled GW to concentrate on building its own intellectual properties. And...

Cue lots of people mentally replacing '4' with the integer (or even floating point) of their choice.

In addition to everything else, he was a world builder of extraordinary talent and imagination who inspired me greatly. Respect.

Does it have to be an AP or a campaign in a box? You could design half a dozen NPCs, with a loose campaign idea for each one. There is no need for any two campaign or adventure seed ideas to be compatible. Just create an adventure around one of them, to kick off. Introduce some or all the other...