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Not going to lie, part of it is nostalgia. But I do think the art on the whole in the 89 versions is better. Oof! Yeah, there was a ton to carry. It wasn't until 5e that I finally had enough of that and told people if they wanted me to DM a game, it was going to be at my place. The conciseness...

This is the second time within the span of a week that song has come up.

The presentation and artwork of the original 2e books just brings too much nostalgia for me - the revised books just have an uncanny valley feel for me. The number of books I'd have to lug around just to run a game was ridiculous! I remember I had a backpack and a duffle bag filled with books...

I finished reading Effinger's A Fire In the Sun. The second book in the Budayeen Cycle matches the quality of the first book. The series began in 1986, so while some of the language used hasn't aged well, it's still impressively inclusive for the 80s, with multiple trans characters, and a...

Unfortunately, absolutely. My FLGS is smart in that they balance retail with online sales, but even still, this is going to be a hit - not just the direct costs of gaming products, but everything else that's going to get more expensive.

It's clear that this is going to have a disastrous effect on the market, for years to come. And this is going to also put the squeeze on gaming stores. Just depressing.

Hmmm 1e - official settings; 2e is known for settings, and Judges Guild started setting books earlier, sure, but the first official ones came on the scene here B/X & BECMI - race as class; it's a drastic simplification, but considering how many OSR games model it, clearly one that resonated...

In no particular order: Cyberpunk Red BECMI AD&D 1e Dungeon Crawl Classics Problem players get stuck with the worst chores for a week.

DCC is such a smooth system. The Crawl zine Bard class has specific abilities that would be useful for a face character in that scenario, but otherwise, yes, a simple Personality check would make the most sense.

My preferred system these days is Cyberpunk Red. First off, for something so complex, I'd probably have everyone roll initiative to keep things straight. Either that or focus on each player's part, one at a time (which is generally my preference when out-of-combat netrunning is going on, as I...

There are a handful of causal factors that contributed to me getting back into gaming in the early 00s. The Fellowship of the Ring movie was one of them. Another was picking up this Dragon magazine from the shelves of a grocery store:

That screams Dungeon Crawl Classics to me.

Paracelsus' stuff is wild. There are some great ideas for gaming in it, though.

A sure lesson on how reality TV is anything but.

I love watching 80s WWF and 90s WCW wrestling. Like, I get that a significant portion of the people on screen died at a young age and/or are legitimately terrible people. But it's fun and theatrical and over-the-top. Not to mention, especially with the WCW, some of the jaw-dropping athleticism.

Yeah, you can't really fake the attachment that comes from leveling a character up over time, earning things through danger and excitement. It's like It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. It's all about sincerity.

One of the great things about the rise of nerdom in pop culture is that barriers between fiction and genre fiction are dissolving to a certain extent. People are writing dissertations about Robert E. Howard! Dude got out there at age 16 in a pre-internet age. That's no small achievement.