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The PH section describes skilled play in this sense, and see EGG's Roleplaying Mastery for more detail. It's not metagaming, because these game considerations exist in the campaign world -- it's in large part designed to facilitate them. Deadly dungeons are known to exist -- hence the given...

Of course not, as lots of people are creative 'in' D&D. But the precedent of all these little rules does encourage the idea that you need them to do stuff, and the system's complex intralinking makes inventing those rules non-trivial. And for DMs and players who prefer to improvise and roleplay...

I wish. But it's also the DM's fault for deciding to DM for powergamers, and for encouraging the quitting by allowing it. And what kind of boring characters must they have been playing if they could be enticed away from them so easily? And yes, replacement characters should be at least a level...

Sounds quite believable to me. People buy things in large part because of what they're called and what they look like, however much individuals protest that they don't.

Detailed setting material and adventures. (New races and prestige classes? Get them away from me.) But people can write and legally publish books in the spirit of those settings, without needing to use any of their proper names. All the would-be 'old school' adventures do this, and I'd love to...

The very term 'restrictions' here is misleading. They're only restrictions starting with assumption that the rules come first, then a setting, so that one that doesn't have all possible character permutations is 'restrictive'. Better to start with the setting and then use the rules as needed to...

Describe the world, with its racial cultures, to the players vividly enough that they want to take part in it and don't want to play weird, unlikely, disruptive combinations. (If they do, they at least have the information to make a maybe-plausible background.) Get them to come up with a...

This is something that may not be clear to those unfamiliar with RuneQuest and Glorantha. The things people are associating with RuneQuest in this thread are: -- Greg Stafford's secondary world of Glorantha, one of the three greatest in existence, served by the superb HeroQuest RPG, board...

Only 6 of the 19 dragons highlighted in the first chapter are Wyrms of the North.

Indeed, in the Realms gnomes are named the Forgotten Folk. But it's not because they aren't developed; the original AD&D/Greyhawk gnomes, gnomes of Faerûn, and tinker gnomes are all coherent and interesting races.

We know that the AD&D1 classes are balanced not because of any armchair-game-designer analysis but because people -- judging from the many online accounts of play -- like to play all of them.

With the proviso that 'gamers' is a group selected by the fact that most of them were introduced to roleplaying by D&D, because D&D is the only game that got mainstream advertising and press attention, which in turn creates inertia in the playerbase (you may personally like some other game, but...

Some of that (though it's not really nostalgia as I'd still like the books with product codes that I like if they were new -- it's incidental that they're not). They make referencing sources easier (and help to distinguish between books with similar or identical names). They're open about books...

At last, product codes return! I swoon.

I wouldn't waste my time playing with a DM I didn't trust completely. There's nothing illegitimate about a DM fudging.

Shredding of the Hill Giant Chief. (I think the link between GDQ and A is nonsense, but S4 is the best module ever.)

Undoubtedly the 'old school' idea bears a very partial relationship to what it purports to be about. It's a jocular stereotype -- I'm thinking of the Dungeon Crawl Classics 'NPCs there to be killed' line, which is Hackmaster-style satire. You can make some generalizations -- Gary thought/thinks...

A good abstract measure of wealth would certainly be more suited to Star Wars than accounting for credit totals -- something that has no reality in the Star Wars movies or EU and is only in the game as a D&D and RPG hangover.

Especially as there's Draconomicon and Dragon Magic which aren't about Faerûn.

It's definitely a mix: itinerant, thrilling, roistering tales of adventure (the Venturers, the Knights, Mirt and Durnan); but also epic history and elegiac beauty, but then again not weighty elevated-tone quests to save the world. The Realms has both subgenres' attitudes to magic: Mystra, but...