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I started collecting the battle mats, map tiles, and pawn sets that Paizo makes for Pathfinder and Starfinder. Some of the older Flip-Mats and map tile sets have gone out of print and become hard to find, and some pawn sets are now unobtainable at any price except in digital form (PDF or VTT)...

I find phrases like “not gonna lie", “I gotta be honest here”, or the dreaded “I’m just telling it like it is” to be quite useful. All too often they serve as warnings that the speaker is about to lie not only to me, but to themselves... 😐 EDIT: Obvious exception made for fellow commenters...

I had a few more late “staircase thoughts” about those weird dragon subdual rules from the 1E Monster Manual, and about efforts to buff iconic RPG monsters so they don’t go out like chumps. The fact that the MM has rules for subduing dragons and selling them to powerful unscrupulous NPCs on...

The first Best of Dragon volume in particular was my first glimpse of 70’s D&D, as I mostly played B/X and AD&D 1E with fellow teenagers starting around 1985. None of us knew anything about the original game or even about Holmes Basic, so BoD Vol #1 was a real eye-opener. I was glad to learn...

I suppose this issue was an early example of iconic monsters getting buffed with extra attacks, lair actions, and such, which would show up in monster materials for future editions. The dragons that appeared in the 1E Monster Manual definitely needed some help. IIRC there were eight age...

When I played SFB the guy who hosted (because he owned all of the stuff) had at least three house rules designed to reduce complexity, and none of us players saw any reason to dispute them. (1) No boarding parties or ground troops (2) No electronic warfare, because ECM & ECCM mostly seemed to...

If I am playing a spellcaster or martial artist, spell slots and ki points represent daily powers my character can use. Keeping track of how much I have left does require some minor bookkeeping, but I know that if I can make it to the next long rest I will get all or most of that power back...

Some DMs have their own spell fumble systems, but it is hard to generalize about those since they are home brew. Some OSR games feature elaborate and crippling spell fumble systems as an actual selling point. IIRC every spell cast in Shadowdark is a gamble, so casters can temporarily lose...

Those 1982 AD&D monster cards were the first D&D products I ever saw, circa 1983-84. A friend of mine who was two years older started collecting RPG stuff, including AD&D and Star Frontiers, and he must have had all four of these sets because I remember the art for most of those new monsters...

Regarding the bark tea situation, Tolkien’s work provides several precedents for portrayals of anachronistic crops in Western fantasy, the most famous being “pipeweed” and po-tay-toes. 🥔

When I was a kid I don’t think I picked up on the sword & sorcery elements in the Known World, but now it seems obvious that the strongly themed nations packed together in one convenient continent are very similar to REH’s Hyboria, which used stand-ins for lots of real countries, often with the...

That is a fantastic cover. It has a dreamy feeling evoking medieval legends that was not often present in D&D of any era. The game began with pulp sword & sorcery influences before becoming its own brand of fantasy, itself quite influential on other TTRPGs and CRPGs, but Greyhawk and the...

When 2E is discussed today people are most likely to praise its gonzo settings above anything else, but for me they were a big part of why I lost interest in D&D in the 90’s. I liked the B/X “Known World” and Greyhawk, but mostly because they were the settings that got me started with D&D. I...

Multi-class demi-human fighter/thieves would get some of the benefits of the fighter class, but not all. They would of course be limited to leather armor whenever they wanted to use thief skills. By strict interpretations a F/T trying to backstab had to use the THAC0 for their thief level and...

I am not sure if it was here or on RPGnet, but I read a long forum thread in which somebody noted that in 1E RAW 75% of XP was supposed to come from treasure, both monetary and magic, and they were curious about how that system would work with published TSR modules. They went through the...

In one of the Best of Dragon magazine compilations there was a reprint of an early article that introduced three new chromatic dragons: orange, yellow, and purple. The author used science and the existing MM lore to extrapolate breath weapons for them. IIRC orange and yellow had some kind of...

IIRC dwarves had bonuses to pick locks, find/remove traps, and poison saves, so they had at least a somewhat better chance of being a decent “safecracker” thief. AD&D poisons and venoms mostly seemed to come in “instantaneous save or die” flavor, which was neither realistic nor fun. One of...

Maybe I have been remembering it all wrong all these years. When I ran 1E I usually gave the human NPC opponents class levels, and the players were not fighting ordinary farmers and such so I probably did not worry too much about their stats. I tended not to even look much at the stat blocks...

Huh... I could have sworn it was just a standard d8 HD for normal 2E humans. Maybe there were different stat blocks for different types: d8 for bandits & brigands, soldiers, etc, and d6 for civilians. I was going on memory from years ago. Still, d6 is a bit better than the d4 of 1E. In my...

Regardless of edition, I always assumed that all soldiers and guards were at least 1st or 2nd level fighters, with officers of level 3-5. Elite units or the minions of powerful NPCs would be a few levels higher. Spellcasters would be uncommon but not unheard of. In the 1E MM ordinary humans...