NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9715249" data-attributes="member: 7052563">Retreater’s experience of Shadowdark reminds me of something I read on The Alexandrian blog.  Justin Alexander ran an OD&D Caverns of Thracia campaign in order to test out how the game played RAW.  The 3d6-down-the-line method produced such poor characters that after several TPKs the players no longer bothered to give them unique names, instead using designations like “Bob the Dwarf III”.  They measured progress in terms of how much farther they could get into the dungeon before the inevitable TPK, almost like a Roguelike computer game.  It sounded excruciating to me.  I started in 1985 or 1986 with the Moldvay Basic Set, even though Mentzer Basic and Unearthed Arcana were already out.  I learned all of the dungeon crawl rules from Moldvay but rarely used any of them once I started playing heavily streamlined AD&D 1E with older kids.  On paper I should be an ideal recruit for the OSR crusade, but like Retreater I actually prefer something like 2E or a somewhat depowered 5E.Off topic: While the original goal of J. Alexander’s campaign was to try playing OD&D RAW, they quickly discovered that this was basically impossible since so many parts of the rulebooks directly contradicted each other.  The original rules assumed that the DM owned both Chainmail (for mass combat) and some long-forgotten Avalon Hill game (for wilderness survival), so technically the original box was not quite a complete game.  In the original standard rules all weapons do 1d6 damage, and most of the combat rules people remember using were actually optional rules variants.</blockquote>

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