Search results

Here's the item description I put into the auction catalog: Item Name: Dungeons and Dragons Party Estimated Value $: 200 Item Description: Enjoy an afternoon or evening of Dungeons and Dragons with experienced Dungeon Master, published D&D writer, and Hunter dad Tavis Allison! Play the modern...

I donated a D&D party for kids or adults to my son's school's auction. It's on Friday, but there's already a $215 pre-bid from a parent of a fifth grader who wants it for his 12th birthday. Tony Dowler (microdungeons.net, How to Host a Dungeon) also successfully auctioned off a D&D party at a...

I had a few cavils in the early part: - in the Braunstein games, all players were not commanding troops (some were generals, but separated from their men); one of the things that made it a proto-RPG was the one player = one character focus - it's worth mentioning the Domesday Book, where...

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has two of these d20 on display - one is glass and one is faience, if I recall correctly - in their Greek and Roman exhibit (upstairs from the chariot, in a glass case on the west wall). They have letters on the faces, and the museum catalog says they were used as...

That's Braunstein you're thinking of. I missed a chance to play it with creator Dave Wesely at Gen Con 2005, but he's still around and could be coaxed to do so again; in the meantime you can get a good handle on it here and here. Yes, it's satisfying to be like "1974 D&D is soo new-school."...

This is the system we used for my Blackmoor Dungeons event at the Arneson Gameday in NYC. I'd been following Daniel's archaeology of the rules from the early days of Arneson's campaign at the OD&D boards with great interest, and was psyched to get to play a pre-release version! Bottom line was...

Someone is probably typing right now that "OD&D" is commonly understood to mean the 1974 edition, which is non-trivially different from what you're talking about here - "RCD&D" or "BECMI D&D". In case I'm faster on the draw, well, you heard it here first! My OD&D game starts at third level...

I'd love to see someone do that analysis; I won't until I need to make a 2E, 2.XE, 3E, or 3.5E, which is to say "no time soon". A good book about choice and how to get its benefits without options paralysis is Nudge, which inspired this blog post (and perhaps others; I'd love to know about 'em...

I was thinking along these lines when I counted up how many choices you make during character creation in OD&D and 4E. Check the comments for some critiques of the methodology, but it might bring some quantitative data to the conversation.

The edition war that erupted about five minutes after those pictures were taken was not recorded for posterity, alas. However, in the interests of fairness I want to go on record as saying that the sweeping victory of my proto-D&D faction should not be taken as proof of the superiority of our...

And indeed, here are those photos, courtesy of the awesomeness of Carlos A Smith (aka Truth Seeker @ EnWorld & CM).

Very, very amateurish video I took at the Gameday can be downloaded from drop.io 2ndArnesonGamedayNY. The first one is my Blackmoor Dungeons group; the second waltzes around Mark's Pathfinder game, Joe's AD&D one, and George's 4E Temple of the Frog.

It was a pleasure seeing you again, and I'm glad someone more skilled with a camera than me took some shots! If you can pass 'em on to me I'll put together a post at the TARGA website with the video I took, if it turned out OK. We had upwards of 35 people (according to the daughter of one of...

For those who've been following the awesome ludo-archaeology of Arneson's pre-D&D house rules at the OD&D boards, I'm honored to say that aldarron, one of its main co-rediscoverers, will be at the Gameday. (snorri is in France; maybe next year). He'll be bringing some copies of Dragons at Dawn...

Those guidelines, and a link to the hit point rule Mark describes, can be found here. Click that link, yessss, click it! I've been wanting to talk about how awesome Tiptoe Tagends was but have refrained until now for fear of getting his name wrong just like I did about every other time I tried...

Ah, but I wouldn't have had the ass stamina to keep me going until 5:30am Sunday morning if it weren't for the intensive training in sitting on my butt that comes from feeding the OSR blogosphere! I wish I'd known that Swordsman Joe the Phraint was the blogger James Mishler, who I admire. I...

Bullgrit, I just posted about what the OSR means to me at The Mule Abides. I see it as useful in the same way that a genre label like science fiction is: if I read a library book with a rocketship sticker on the spine, it's awesome to know that I'll probably like other books on that same shelf...

The thing we call race in the real world is a social construct based on phenotype (what you look like, which is related to your genetic heritage) as interpreted by culture (what meaning the people around you assign to the way you look). In the real world, phenotype changes over generations...

I just saw (courtesy of the Comeback Inn linked in Havard's sig) that there's another one happening in Minnesota on 4/10. Very cool!

Thanks for the input! I also wondered about how the terrain would be classified; it sounded like they did consistently travel on a road or trail. (The writer traded a donkeyhorse for a ridinghorse and often scouted ahead for a place to pasture the mules; often this was a graveyard because...