There was a time when Old School gamers simply referred to those gamers who played OD&D, B/X and AD&D 1e back in the day and never stopped doing it. Then Grognardia started writing blog posts about it and before long a Renaissance movement was born. The Blogsplosion was supplanted by a flurry of G+ games and discussions and before long, people started making actual game products.  Zac became a a self-made billionaire and Matt Finch began pondering if he should simply buy Mattel in order to acquire the D&D brand or if Swords & Wizardry was now so much bigger that it wouldn't even matter. Shit went down over the years. G+ shut down and fragmented the community. Maliszewski went AWOL for 8 years when he couldn't deliver on the Dwimmermount kickstarter. Zacgate. Stuart amended the OSR logo to say dickheads weren't allowed to use it anymore. JB switched from B/X to AD&D. Tumultuous times all-round.  Many a blog post was dedicated to the meaning/demise/reforma...

I'll tell you what I instinctively disliked the first time I opened the 3e Player's Handbook:  Priest spell levels going all the way up to 9th level.  Now, the reasons for this change seem fairly obvious to my mind. It streamlines spell progression for priests and wizards and makes it easier to gauge power level of a priest vs wizard spell.  But are those actually good  reasons? Is streamlining in and of itself a positive? Perhaps being able to gauge power level is useful, but tangentially so if so. How often do you need to compare a priest spell to a wizard spell and determine how powerful they are compared to each other?  As for streamlining spell progression between wizards and priests - This may seem useful as it makes progression transparently equal (getting rid of different XP tables was another move to ensure everybody progressed at the same pace. An alleged virtue I would question the virtue of), but it belies a point that is central to the argument of t...

update 31/01-24 - I have, upon actual investigation, since changed my belief concerning Zak's guilt. See  this post  for more. Normally, I would simply not comment on these things, but as I am now publishing my stuff on DriveThruRPG, I felt compelled to write something. Quick recap of what went before: Zak Smith wrote a blog about OSR stuff and was a pillar of that community. He also wrote some award-winning OSR products and consulted on D&D's 5th edition. He was always an asshole, but tolerated by many for his talents. Then earlier in the year, it transpired that he was also  the kind of asshole who serially abuses women . Pretty much everyone in the RPG community disowned him, DriveThruRPG banned his titles and James Raggi, who owns the Lamentations of the Flame Princess  publishing outfit that produced a lot of Zak's work, ended his working relationship with him in a "I'm sorry I had to do this" manner. Then at GenCon, Raggi published an adven...