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Yes and no: have a look at The Curious Case of D&D's Two Experience Systems.

Well, that's because "B/X" doesn't actually exist. It's not a discrete "edition" of D&D, not in the sense that we use "edition" nowadays to mean a complete, iterated version of an RPG. The D&D game as it was published 1974–1996 is more of a continuum than a series.

Or you could just let a single d20 roll stand for all the checks addressing the same problem, no matter whether they're coming from multiple players or a single player. After all, there's only DC; one roll should tell how well the PC or the group is doing at overcoming it.

The final boss of Barrowmaze was a dracolich named "Ossithrax Pejorative." It's intentional.

In my experience, players who want D&D to be something other than a game desperately want it to be art — and specifically storytelling or performance art. Games are low-class; art is high-class. It's a metanarrative born from pretentiousness.

1 shot vodka ½ oz peach schnapps 2 oz each orange and cranberry juice serve in glass with ice, cherry, orange slice, and tiny umbrella

Right, but it's tactical infinity + personal avatar that makes an RPG, which is why a generic free Kriegsspiel with no role to play (or Diplomacy for that matter) would be problematic to categorize as an RPG, whereas a Braunstein free Kreigsspiel most definitely is a simple kind of RPG.

Tactical infinity is the thing that separates RPGs from wargames or board games where you might still be in control of a personal avatar. The lack of it is why HeroQuest and Gloomhaven are not RPGs (even if you do improvisational playacting and get "into character" while playing them). Think of...

Technically, paladins, rangers, druids, priests of specific mythoi, bards, and specialist wizards were all optional. See the intro text to chapter 3 and Table 13 in the PHB (pg 25 in the original edition, pp 34–35 in the revised edition).

🤫 Shh! Not so loud! 🤐 Do you want to get us all sued by those litigious Tolkien Estate IP-tyrants!? It's mithral!

The latter, of necessity. When talking about RPGs, we can a priori exclude contextually inappropriate definitions of roleplaying — the CRPG sense or the pop-psych therapy sense or the adult bedroom sense or any other everyday use of the word — and limit ourselves to just the contextually...

To be fair, that table in the 2e DMG called it "Elven steel." :)

Here's the problem with that. If you use a cribbage board to play a horserace RPG, you're not playing cribbage, you're playing a cribbage-adjacent RPG that you've invented. It's the old "Monopoly insurance fraud" chestnut. What makes Monopoly "not an RPG" isn't the fact that there's no...

Thinking back to my 2e days, we used the "points plus dice" method of stat gen (stats start at 8, roll 7d6 and assign whole dice to each stat), critical hits, hovering at death's door, WPs and NWPs (including the Ninja's Handbook martial arts), psionics, and kits; and we largely ignored racial...

I don't think I can agree that the player is the avatar in a LARP. Even if the player is portraying a version of themselves in a LARP, it's going to be a fictionalized self interacting with a fictional world. And to my knowledge, most LARPs don't even work like that — most LARPs have the players...

I define a roleplaying game as any game where (1) players control personal avatars existing in a fictional milieu and (2) said avatars enjoy some degree of tactical infinity, which is in turn defined as the capacity to attempt any conceivable action, constrained only by the fictional positioning...

Druids didn't really solidify into the "generic hippy-dippy nature-caster" niche until 3e. In 2e, the text of the DMG was explicit about only humans and half-elves being druids because druidry was a human religion. Halflings actually lost the ability to be druids between 1e and 2e to conform to...

1e and 2e did it differently. In both cases, the multiple attacks were supposed to be staggered through the initiative count rather than all happening at once like in BECMI or 3e. I don't remember ever seeing anyone actually follow that rule, so I'm fuzzy on the particulars, but the idea was...

Whataboutism is just a false dichotomy with extra steps.

What we do when we gather with friends around a table and play a game together is difficult to characterize as an "inanimate thing" — but it's also beside the point. The point is: "It's just elfgames, bro" is emphatically not the same thing as "remember the person" or "don't tolerate bad...