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Well it's not a secret or anything. The point is, my own bias aside, one side in this argument is open-minded about a variety of campaign styles being valid, and the other side is attacking one specific style. (Even if the OP tried to frame it as an anodyne, "Consider the following…") I am...

And yet… same as last time, the two entrenched positions on this thread can be summarized as, "I curate, but if you don't, that's totally cool," and "Your curating offends me, on behalf of your oppressed players."

Very interesting subject! How am I a D&D outlier? Uff da, let me count the ways… 1. My go-to edition is OD&D (by which I mean the white box, blue box, red box, and black box* editions; they're all coequal in my eyes and not different enough from each other for me to go about drawing pedantic...

In a setting where arcane magic explicitly doesn't exist but psionic power does, you can use whatever mechanics you please—including reskinned Vancian magic, which works just fine. If both need to coexist, I personally prefer that the mechanics be distinct in some way—at least as distinct as 3rd...

Levels are pretty important. In my experience, you can remove a lot of surprising elements from the game — the d20, the ability scores, character classes, demihumans, magic, hokey medievalism — and D&D will still feel like D&D. Levels are not one of those things. Though I do think you need at...

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...

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.

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...

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

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...

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…

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!)

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...

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...

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...

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!

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...

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)...