*Adventures in Middle-Earth Player's Guide" is in my hands.mwuahahah

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Just scanning the Overview Chapter so far and I am already seeing stuff to strip mine for my own game. dis gun be good.

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The Difficult-to-Believe Case of Zak Smith's Innocence

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I honestly did not imagine myself to be writing a piece like this on this blog. But I feel morally obligated to do so, given that I previously wrote a piece based on the firm assumption of his guilt . Yesterday,  Jeff Rients shared a link to an article based on an upcoming research paper  by Dr. Clio Weisman. I'd encourage anyone who has, or has had, some interest in the OSR community and/or held some sort of opinion on the case of Zak Smith, to read it after reading this one. tl;dr - The article is about the utterly bizarre lying, harassing and slandering behaviour that has somehow become prevalent in certain sectors of the Rennaisance-Formerly-Known-as-OSR. And Zak Smith sat at the heart of it, as its principal recipient. Dr. Weisman thus chose him as her case study.  Long story short, Dr. Weisman lays out a meticulous and researched case that shows Smith to be targeted by OSR trolls for many years with a series of slanderous harassment campaigns, and also to be th...
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The 3 Mile Hex - The Natural Unit for Exploration

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There will be interludes between the AD&D Appraisal series, to keep my own writing motivation going. I was going to do a 3-mile hex post outlining the virtues of it, but turns out Silverarm did that already and stole all my points  (even down to the "Outdoor Survival also uses 3 miles") and added more points I wasn't aware of myself. So go read that excellent piece and come back here. What I instead want to talk about is how the 3 mile hex is a very close fit to our natural sense of distance and visualisation and how the that makes the 3-mile hex the perfect blend between immersion and usable game artifact and how to actually bring that into your game.  Minaria hexmap. Scale: 1 hex = 50 miles. Not what we're going for here. A while back, Noisms contemplated the difficulty of creating a sense of wonder in journeys . The difficulty with journeys in RPGs is the scale of it. It becomes too big, and thus too abstract, to visualize, to immerse oneself into.  I tried, un...
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In Praise of "Black Box" D&D

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when it comes to non-Advanced D&D, The internet, and in particular the OSR blogosphere, has deserved praise galore for the B/X sets for D&D. And whilst not quite as enthusiastic, the Mentzer editions for those Basic and Expert sets also get plenty of praise for its art and way of introducing the game. The Holmes set also has its fair of passionate fans. And of course the original brown booklets themselves. Of newer releases, the Rules Cyclopedia also has a large following of fans. One release that hardly ever gets a mention is the 1991 'black box', by Timothy B. Brown and Troy Denning. Actually, the Rules Cyclopedia was published as a sort of companion to this set. Together  they represents the fifth and final edition of non-advanced D&D. "The New Easy to Master Dungeons & Dragons Game" also labelled "Classic Dungeons & Dragons" It's short, 64 page booklet, so much the same as its predecessors, comes with a simple dungeon m...
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How Difficulty Class and the D20 engine ruined roleplaying

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It seemed revolutionary at the time. 3e came out and made a unified mechanic. Roll 1d20 against a target number to see if you succeed. In combat, AC is the target number. For everything else, it's a Difficulty Class [DC]. That's it.  Some of those DCs are calculated as a function of level, opposing ability score etc. But what we also got from this system was a way of ad hoc determining the difficulty of something and then simply saying "roll against that target number to succeed".  In its core form, this is wonderfully simple and intuitive. All you need to internalise is the size of the numbers on a d20 in relation to overall difficulty and then you can resolve basically anything with it. The part about size of numbers has proven to be a bit of an achilles heel for d20 over the years, but that is a different point I will address further below. No, the real point here is that there's an unintended side effect to DCs as a unified mechanic. There are other downsides ...
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Addendum: Why "Roll under" Ability checks really are the best of checks

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My recent meditations on roll under ability checks and rant against the D20 unified mechanic has generated a bit of commentary and further clarified my own thinking on the matter. This post is an addendum to my  Using Ability Checks in B/X  article, seeking to further explicate why the "Roll Under" ability check truly is the best of ability checks. Earlier today, during my delvings into the blogosphere, I came across this box from  Quarrel & Fable , a Fighting Fantasy spinoff: First thing that struck me was how similar it was to my proposed resolution for Ability Checks . And secondly, it combined those thoughts with my memories of the old Fighting Fantasy  [FF] gamebooks and set my mind spinning into that cross section and how much I always liked the elegant simplicity of the FF mechanic. The best part about doing a post involving Fighting Fantasy is the chance to showcase some of the brilliant art in the gamebooks Now, I've given reasons already in prev...
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On the Virtues of Descending AC

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 I know, I know. Addition is easier than substraction, what kind of backwards grognard do you have to be to like descending AC in 2024? I get all that. But hear me out for a moment. My argument is that whilst ascending AC may be marginally easier to calculate to begin with, descending AC offers something different - A more intuitive appreciation of what the numbers mean  and how they are bounded. AD&D Armors We'll start at the very beginning. Before that, even. An early draft for the first version of D&D: Target20  was basically the original conception. Deduct AC from 20 and you have your attack target roll. Which is of course also how one converts descending AC to ascending. One wonders why they didn't just include this explanation to begin with, alongside a +to hit modifier, instead if messing with THAC0. The math in the draft is a bit off, but it suggests another, even more intuitive, layer. If we stipulate that one must exceed the AC and not just meet it, it m...
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