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In theory a player can certainly role-play a pure fighter as a leader and strategist, sure. In practice, in my 40+ years of gaming, I think I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen a player lean into that archetype. Why? 1. Survivability trumps role-play -- players would rather...

Add to those unsafe spells: In AD&D when the fly spell ends you fall, it doesn't change into feather fall. Haste is very powerful but can age the target and force a system shock roll. Contact other plane can drive you insane. Most spells are safe but enough of them aren't that magic feels like...

I think one of the big mood shifts, that happened sometime between 3rd and 4th, is the stripping away of consequences from player choices and actions. You can be any race, any class, put your ability scores anywhere you want, specialize in any type of magic, and still be competent at everything...

Regarding cantrips, I saw a nice suggestion here on ENworld a while back: to give wizards access to cantrip-like at will abilities linked to their prepared spells. So if you have flaming sphere or fireball memorized, maybe you can cast fire bolt (d4 ranged fire damage) at will. But after you...

True, I forgot that one. It doesn't quite fit into an 1e/2e style game but introducing healing surges (and later hit dice) as a player-controlled, mundane resource was brilliant. 5e could have run with the concept and done something really interesting with hit dice, by making them a balancing...

A few people have mentioned kits. I actually never used them much while I was playing 2E but I get the appeal. I think 5e subclasses try to fill the same niche. You can easily have 10-20 subclasses per base class. In an alternate universe, 3E could have carried over kits while expanding their...

I'm currently running an AD&D campaign but sneaking in some houserules inspired by later editions. This got me thinking: If you had to pick just one rule innovation from each edition of D&D to add as a house rule to your current campaign (of any edition), then what would it be? What evolutions...

A friemd of mine at Uni ran a Fantasy HERO campaign in the Eshthar universe. He modeled all seven or eight types of magic pretty easily with those rules.

Watt-Evans is one of my favorite authors to this day, and his first major series The Lords of Dūs is a worthy successor to Appendix N swords & sorcery.

Good point from @GnomeWorks . If other classes have common access to abilities that are part of the psion's core identity, it kind of de-justifies the class. Of course this is a problem with later editions of D&D generally, where the different spellcasting classes and spell lists bleed into each...

I just started a 1e game but I houseruled in some key concepts from 2e like specialized wizards, specialized priests, and a simpler bard. I feel in love with 3e back in the day because it was new and shiny, but as I get older I am less and less enamored with the "one mechanic to rule them all"...

Excellent post. As I read it, my mind went back to the 80s and Steve Jackson's line of minigames, such as O.G.R.E., and new RPGs that were almost pamphlets. My friends and I got a lot of value out of these liw-cost games and some were very well designed as well as capturing the imagination...

LOL thanks for saving me the work @Staffan . I felt bad for leaving the OP hanging and was just about to show how to use the binomial distribution in this case. It is really hard to have an intuition for success when the mechanic includes two redundant ways to improve their odds (lower target...

What is the RPG? Legend of 5 Rings and 7th Sea run off d10 dice pools but they add up the highest k dice instead of counting successes vs a target number. I mention them because you can find detailed, precalculated probability tables online. You might find the same for your game. Calculating...

Frog and Toad make a Persuasion Check

Bards beat up the wizard and stole her stuff. "Learning the innermost secrets of the universe to unlock ultimate cosmic power? Why should only smart people get to do that?" Yoink! Bards bullied the cleric into giving up their stuff. "C'mon, no one wants to be like you because you just sit there...

@Celebrim : "Knowing the fiction but not the damage is different than knowing the damage but not the fiction." Very quotable and good advice for any DM.

I never allow skills to substitute a different ability score in general play. Doing so negates the interesting choice made at character creation to be better at some things than other things. If a player wants to argue that they should be able to use their PC's Int score to roll persuasion...

That's a fun idea. As a player, the first question I might ask is "does it actually work?" Do these Fat Boys (and girls?) get superpowers from eating exotic foods? Or is it just a philosophical order? From a gamist point of view, there's a lot to be said for making a class whose powers are...

It's an intriguing idea to be sure and I played a few turns. As interactive storytelling it does a decent job but as the story gets longer even advanced LLMs like Claude and GPT4 are likely to lose the thread. These models may have very long context windows in the mathematical sense, allowing...