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Now that there are print-on-demand Rules Cyclopediæ, the only purpose retro-clones serve is their original one — recognizable labels that indicate compatibility with a specific edition of The World's First and Most Popular Fantasy Role-Playing Game, Wink-Wink, Nudge-Nudge, 'Ello-'Ello...

I have to go with the compass mermaid from X1. (By Jeff Dee, I'm pretty sure.) Sure, Darlene's mermaid in the 1e DMG might be reclining in a more classically alluring pose; but this one? She is ready to slither up onto the deck of your ship and mess your effing crap up with that trident. Half...

Oh, no, not "toxic". Anything but a buzzword. Uncle.

With so many forum-warriors routinely threatening to leave all the hypothetical tables in a self-righteous huff of indignation, it's truly a wonder that the hypothetical game-tables still have any hypothetical players at all.

Not to mention, the time that the fist is in contact with its target matters for Δp.

Holmes is definitely closer to LBB in terms of raw mechanics, and it's very much written to serve as their introduction — you can even think of Holmes + the LBBs as paralleled by Moldvay Basic + Cook/Marsh Expert — but Holmes also lays the groundwork for a number of innovations in Moldvay...

That's a matter of convention. When I was growing up in the Midwest? Every gamer I knew used "OD&D" to refer to both the LBB/white box edition and the later BXCM/red box and RC/black box editions. I'm used to the older "lumping" rather than the newer "splitting" that occurred on Dragonsfoot...

Easy solution (works every time I've ever had to do it): PLAYER: "I roll a perception check!" DM: "Okay... you fish some funny-looking dice out of your pocket, crouch down, and give 'em a roll. Everyone else in the party is giving you weird looks, wondering what that's all about. Meanwhile...

I describe my elves as swashbuckling adventure-junkies (<jakeblues>on a mission from Faerie</jakeblues>).

I don't even know who the artist is, but this is a druid. Celtic dude in plaid with a big honkin' sickle. Not some elf chick with green skin and deer antlers. (With all due respect to the Bard—) That's rubbish; this is brilliant; that's an abomination; this is a druid.

Since spells don't have levels in BtW (and they're all roughly as powerful as D&D 1st or 2nd level spells), I keep it like BtW, one per day per caster level.

In my home campaigns, I tweak the BtW magic system in a few minor ways to make it fit a B/X aesthetic a bit better. • I don't want ability scores to have a direct impact on spell ability (which they largely don't in BXCMI), so instead of Int and Wis checks, I have cantrips and rituals require a...

@Snarf Zagyg, I wonder if you're familiar with how Beyond the Wall and its sister games (Through Sunken Lands and Grizzled Adventurers) handle magic. There's only one caster class, the mage, and it has three types of magic: cantrips, spells, and rituals. • Cantrips are weak effects that can be...

We have rather different definitions of "notable" and "significant", I think. There is one significant difference between the '81 rules and the '83 rules that I'm aware of — magic-user spell acquisition, limited under Moldvay and unlimited under Mentzer. That changes gameplay in a way that...

By that logic, it's hard to consider BX and BECMI separate editions.

There's a reason @Snarf Zagyg tried to head these kinds of arguments off at the pass. They're not interesting. We're all of us here, I think, familiar enough with postpositivist incredulity to be aware that certainty is a technical impossibility. But it's trivial — it doesn't lead to any useful...

Uh, yeah, about that… * laughs in ecto-containment grid *

For me, the issue isn't authenticity, it's artifice. I like old-school play with a hard landscape milieu and a principled, neutral referee, because those are the conditions that minimize artifice. The game-world is what it is, what happens happens, decisions have consequences, and all victories...