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  1. John Quixote

    OD&D OD&D white box, still in shrink wrap!

    6th and 7th printings (the ones that say "Original Collector's Edition" on the cover) were indeed sold in shrink-wrap according to The Acaeum. (My own set is a 6th printing, and beat all to hell, but I wouldn't have it any other way—because I quite like not being horrified at the thought of...
  2. John Quixote

    D&D 5E (2014) What do you want and not want out of future settings added to 5E?

    Who needs prefabricated settings? Give me toolboxes for building worlds and filling out blank hex maps. Make my life easier the way Beyond the Wall and Worlds Without Number did. Then maybe WotC can have some of my money.
  3. John Quixote

    Which Edition for a Megadungeon Campaign? Why?

    Delving Deeper is a mostly faithful clone of white box OD&D. S&W takes liberties, the most important few being the reduction of five saving throw categories to a single save number (that increments by +1 per level for, IIRC, all classes) and a total re-write of the treasure tables and allocation...
  4. John Quixote

    D&D General The Tyranny of Rarity

    Holy schnikes. That's gonna be a "yikes on trikes" from me, pal.
  5. zanzers_dungeon.jpg

    zanzers_dungeon.jpg

  6. John Quixote

    D&D General The Tyranny of Rarity

    Oz, maybe? Though in that case we're talking more about a variety of unique (and at times borderline freakish) entities and one-offs than "races"… Not everybody is DMing for a coequal group of friends in a more or less egalitarian social situation. The dynamic can be utterly different in, for...
  7. John Quixote

    TSR TSR CON is running at the same time as Gary Con in Lake Geneva

    Yeah… and guess who got banned from the OSR sub-reddit not too long ago for mouthing off about the GaryCon mask mandate like a thoughtless schmuck…
  8. John Quixote

    D&D 5E (2014) Exhaustion for old 1e undead level drain

    Whoa, that is weird for AD&D. Does your party not have any multiclassed characters either? (I'm running OD&D right now, and thirteen sessions into the campaign, the PCs' levels are already an asynchronous smear across the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd experience levels!)
  9. John Quixote

    OSR Need Help Introducing OSE to PF1 Group

    One thing that helps a lot (beyond just starting the group at 3rd level, which is probably a good idea): don't dice behind the screen. At least for the first two or three encounters, make sure the players get the gist of what's going on by rolling the dice in the open and explaining what the...
  10. John Quixote

    Which Edition for a Megadungeon Campaign? Why?

    No hypotheticals here. I'm running a mega-dungeon campaign right now, taking my biggest and best-developed dungeon out for its fourth official spin. The system is red box OD&D, suitably modified. I picked that system initially because it was my go-to system when I was first creating the dungeon...
  11. John Quixote

    OD&D A quick method for teaching and pickup games, which I've taken to calling "N'OC D&D"

    Hah. After the game, one of the players said that it felt like playing their Skyrim character, since they could switch from fighting with a sword to picking a lock to reading a spell out of a book on a dime. I would've guessed that meant that it had a distinctly "1st person Western RPG" vibe...
  12. John Quixote

    is the ttrpg market swamped now? could you write a winner?

    There are at least two literal examples that have come out of the OSR tradition: Engines & Empires (by me) and Exemplars & Eidolons (by Kevin Crawford). Oh, you mean Alliterations & Ampersands!
  13. John Quixote

    D&D General The Tyranny of Rarity

    There will, of course, be no answer to this, because it's blatantly unjustifiable. None will dare to plainly admit that this is their opinion (though it is—the thread title calls it "tyranny," for crying out loud!). And so we'll get the same circumlocutions and bad-faith arguments that we got...
  14. John Quixote

    OD&D A quick method for teaching and pickup games, which I've taken to calling "N'OC D&D"

    Ever since last year, when the Retired Adventurer's Six Cultures of Play essay went viral, a seed of an idea has been growing in my mind. To briefly recap that essay and explain its relevance here, the author described six major "cultures" of RPG play, dubbed Classic (or Old-School)...
  15. John Quixote

    D&D General The Tyranny of Rarity

    Well said. Your preference does indeed make more sense when you explain it in those terms — still not my bag o' tea, but then, the fantasy I was raised on? Oz and Barsoom!
  16. John Quixote

    D&D General The Tyranny of Rarity

    So… first paragraph in the OP, and I already have a problem. "This can often lead to a knee-jerk reaction." Citation needed, methinks? Because from where I'm standing, the nigh-infinity of fantastical and alien species from folklore, mythology, sci-fi, and pop culture usually leads to...
  17. John Quixote

    D&D General The Tyranny of Rarity

    Ooh, this thread again! (clap) Let's see if we can hit the highlights! 1) "Orbiting the sun of humanity" —Gygax; "An oddity too much" —Lewis; "Centaur, lawful werebear, or even Japanese!" —Dr Holmes; etc. 2) What do the players get out of a DM's human-only campaign? IME, a nudge away from...
  18. John Quixote

    D&D 5E (2014) How Old-School is 5th Edition? Can it even do Old-School?

    To me, the salient features of old-school play are (1) randomly generated and mechanically simple characters; (2) an open world or sandbox, and an XP system that encourages exploring it (preferably something concrete and diegetic, like XP = GP); (3) a campaign structure where enough time passes...
  19. John Quixote

    D&D 5E (2014) Exhaustion for old 1e undead level drain

    I think I've tried every alternative to level drain under the sun. None of them have ever worked right though. In the end, I just went back to by-the-book level drain — though I do take some of the sting out of it by letting clerics reverse level drain via normal healing magic (at the added cost...
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