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That doesn’t seem denigrating to me. A lot of TTRPGs could benefit from being as thoughtfully designed as a lot of modern board games.

I do think a reachable goal for an AD&D revamp would be to keep the generation of character stats consequential for determining character concept (and ideally, something that can be strategized around). But also without being overly punitive to the point of making any set of rolls completely...

Oh, I agree. I was thinking more of raising the requirements on the core 4, and lowering the requirements on the other classes.

Method V + raising ability requirements would get you pretty far from "the dice screwed me over" while still providing a fair amount of randomized character "texture", I feel.

Totally agree on the impact, but I see that as feature, not bug. It creates a strategic tradeoff between using your 18 on Str to get an early boost to damage (at least +2, and maybe more and an attack bonus with a lucky d100 roll), or buffing your other stats at the expense of low-level combat...

Slow scaling of the baseline features acquired at character creation (15-20% times increase in potency or frequency every 4-5 “levels”), primarily magic item progression, and unlockable boons/feats/“prestige classes” would be my ideal. Not necessarily all the options in the game, of course...

I'm pretty flexible, in that I enjoy multiple approaches; sometimes what I do like in one system is something I don't enjoy in another! Some games feel better with tight constraints, others work better with a looser approach. What I enjoy most is an approach relatively underserved; a game with...

I like something similar too. If I was hypothetically hacking AD&D, I think I would let a 1st level fighter set their Strength to 17 if it wasn't already there, and then go up by 1 tier every level after that. So 18 at level 2, 18/01 at 3, 18/51 at 4, etc., up to 18/00 at 7. So rolling high...

A pretty core problem here is that there an awful lot of situations that occur that are more likely to be solvable with more people to help. If you have some kind of puzzle, or need to remember some obscure fact, it just makes sense that having 5 people give it a try is going to be more...

For sure. I don't think I'm clamoring to go back to AD&D, but if I wanted that experience for the nostalgia, I'd want to keep the "fun" parts of the kludge without the "annoying" parts. The fly in the ointment here, of course, is that one person's fun is another's annoyance. For me, those...

For one, I'd imagine it would be written in French.

The weird non-linearity and number of subsystems baked into the ability score system of AD&D make removing or heavily modifying it pretty much a non-starter if you want to maintain any semblance of the AD&D play experience. As you said, the easiest solution is to simply remove, or heavily...

Gotta agree with @Lanefan here on this point. The point of a game is to play, with 45 years of people creating AD&D fixes it’s easy to identify what fixes you need for your particular problem points and just implement them. None of us here are young, slow and cautious incrementalism serves...

Not normally, because that doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm just saying that Wisdom (and the other stats) are indirectly used as widgets on the character sheet because they modify skill and attacks that do get invoked directly. Contrast that with a pure identifier like "hair color" or "age".

At least in modern D&D, the primary use of a stat is to modify skill checks (counting attacks and saves as a variation of a skill). So, kinda yes?

Of course, that shouldn’t even be a question. It’s the presence or absence of the fictional space that matters, not the relative freedom to make assertions about the fictional space.

Not sure I totally agree with this, though. I agree that the thespian/acting/portayal portion of the game shouldn't be elevated in importance over the more mechanical portions as a general rule. But I think the core of an RPG, as opposed to something like a board game, is the conversation...

You seem fun.

Chewing up grandpa is what a Druid has to do to get to 13th level, according to Gygax.

Well, at the very least they're a dirty, granola-chewing hippie. :)