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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!

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...

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...

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...

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...

My settings' cosmology is analogous to a layered onion, with the "centermost" plane of existence being a static realm of pure Law, and the outermost void a churning sea of Chaotic everything-and-nothing-all-at-once. The planar "layers," from innermost to outermost, are: The Empyrean Center of...

Nah. RPGs don't advance cumulatively: they aren't a technology, and you'd be hard-pressed to liken their design to a science. Their changes over time are more like fashion trends—evolution, but not necessarily advancement.

RPGs ain't technology, pal, and classic D&D is certainly no Pinto! ;)

I've made no bones about the fact that red box D&D ("BECMI") is my edition of choice. I keep the Rules Cyclopedia and Creature Catalog on the table as my primary rules references when I run a game. I'm refereeing a campaign currently that's still in the early stages (roughly a dozen sessions in...

Yes, the total count includes NPCs. Unusual for a session, I had five of my regular players cancel shortly before game-time, so there were only two players present that day. Which meant that two player characters (a 2nd level fighter and a 1st level hobbit) were leading the expedition. They had...

Well it's really no mystery. There were nineteen party members exploring the ground floor of a Chaotic Evil temple — dungeon level A1, the Palatial Fortress of the Church of Bitter Doom — and only two of them died. (Given this party's track-record, that's actually pretty stellar.) Poor Tommy...

17/19ths of the party survived!

I'm willing to help with whatever it is that you're asking for. Maybe you'd like to restate and clarify what exactly that is?

I don't believe there was any "splitting" going on. It's a mistake to even think of it that way. When D&D was first published, there were three classes — fighting man, magic-user, and cleric — and the game needed three separate "stats" to serve as the prime requisites for those classes, to tell...

For Victorian steampunk or gaslamp fantasy, I literally wrote the book and called it Engines & Empires. :D There's also Offices & Bosses for any Hello from the Magic Tavern fans out there.

Gygax didn't create the ranger class.

Acererak is a demi-lich, so I think the math works out to just one keet. :unsure:

I'm sure they could have gotten Maurice LaMarche if they'd wanted to voice Egon. (I'm not saying it would've been a good idea, but it certainly would've been S-tier fanservice on par with the Bill Murray → Peter Venkman → Lorenzo Music → Garfield the Cat → Bill Murray loop.)

3d6 in order for me. Simple; pure; nips stat bloat and power-gaming in the bud.