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"It's time you moved on from that clunky old outdated inferior game-design" is also tiresome. "You only like those old rules because of blind nostalgia and/or a political agenda" is also tiresome. "You liking and promoting this one narrow play-style isn't valid, because not everybody played that...

The actual rules are very similar to Mentzer Basic, but with some very odd changes. • Charisma modifiers go up and down to ±3, making all ability score adjustments uniform. (But partially offsetting this, the monster reactions table is shifted one point towards hostility: a 2d6 roll of 6–8...

The usual OSR response to the very, very, very tired criticism that old-school play was never a monolith and has always encompassed a diversity of play styles — best articulated by a widely-shared 2009 K&K Alehouse post by T. Foster that the author of the article in the OP also links to in Part...

@Reynard : Ooh, I just remembered another game that I haven't played yet, but which has always intrigued me: Dungeonslayers. It seems to aim for a vibe somewhere between "old-school" and "dungeon-punk," and the mechanics look fairly traditional, but (despite the fact that single d20 rolls are...

It's not a matter of owning the generic term "old school" (or having "old school" itself be any kind of value judgement); it's a matter of linguistic precision. The OSR was founded by old-school D&D players mostly interested in old-school D&D, with any interest in other old games being sporadic...

No, that rule is only optional in 2e, and it comes from a similar but much more convoluted rule in 1e where a hit that brings a character down to as low as −3 might be survivable with some maiming/scarring and −10 is identified as absolutely dead no matter what. 2e "isn't old-school" for the...

Ah, that makes sense. I don't think anybody would dispute that a killer dungeon from 1975 is old-school. I did wonder, though, whether you were talking about the TSR Indiana Jones game, which had a "Temple of Doom" adventure published for it in '84. Thing is, I've never played that system, so I...

Well, yeah, Temple of Elemental Evil (1985!) is definitely either very late old-school and proto-trad, or it's fully post-old-school and therefore early trad. (I'm inclined to think the latter, because of the assumption that the PCs are heroes out to defeat Evil rather than just tomb-robbers who...

I concur with those who re-roll any cocked or off-the-table dice. I also prefer that my players not shotgun their dice across the table with projectile force (some players just can't seem to help that); lightly drop their dice onto the table in front of them so that only they can see the...

Alternatively, old school ended when the majority of players started focusing on playing one character per campaign and expecting that character to be the protagonist of an epic narrative. (Which appears to have happened at some point between 1975 and 1985.)

Yes. Not my personal cup of tea. Aside from the fact that it's just a poor fit for my play-style, the bounded accuracy is a bit too bounded for my tastes, and combats above 3rd–4th level are too slow and predictable to keep me engaged. I completely forgot about Agasint the Darkmaster! I've...

One amendment. 1. Jonathan Archer, captain of the NX-01 Enterprise 2. Ed Mercer, captain of the USS Orville 3. All the rest :geek:

When I became sick of D&D circa most of 2013, I tried a number of systems for dungeon fantasy: FATE didn't work at all; Savage Worlds and Victoriana fared no better. Risus held up for two or three sessions at most, while Barbarians of Lemuria could sustain a campaign that lasted maybe triple...

Rolling low to hit, save, or succeed.

I would say, even if the elves (or dwarves or orcs) all share a common plane of origin and have simply migrated to Oerth and Abeir-Toril and Mystara, they've all likely been separated for sufficiently many centuries or millennia for significant linguistic drift to have rendered one Elvish...

You've got 'em on your list. The '77 Basic Set and the '91 D&D Game. At least in the area where I grew up (the Midwest around the Great Lakes), it was typical to distinguish all of those sets from Advanced D&D by referring to them as "Original D&D" (preceded by a box color if you needed to...

Well it's hardly all-or-nothing, don't you think? Most people, I should imagine, like to apportion the strength of their opinions to the strength of the evidence in their favor. What are we even doing here, if not delving into the reasons why we believe what we do? If, on the other hand, you're...

Okay, this is good, I'm hearing you more clearly now. Side 1: I'm the Authority over my game-world when I'm the DM, but if you like to distribute authority among all players present, that's cool too. Side 2: DMs being the sole Authority over their game/setting is a problem. Fair? And if yes, why?

So you have a preference. Cool, me too. What evidence do you have that the default "the DM gets to decide" is something to be concerned about? (And, heck, just for the sake of good-faith argument, let's go ahead and assume competent, non-Viking-Hat, non-antagonistic DMs all around, regardless...

To which I can only respond: what evidence do you have that "more content" or "new content" (in terms of races/species/monsters in the game-world) makes for a better game/experience? What evidence do you have that Side B makes for a better game/experience than Side A? To me, it all seems too...