OSR Stalwart James Spahn kickstarted White Box: Cyclopedia this summer and raised a whopping 50k. I missed it and have now paid 25 dollars for the pdf, when I could have paid 15 in the summer. It's a 290 page product and let me start by saying it's a ridiculous game. I mean this in the best possible way. The idea of a 290 page rulebook with "whitebox" appended is of course in itself a ridiculous notion - whitebox is D&D shaved to the bone, so what can a "Cyclopedia" edition of such a game possibly be if not the antithesis of whitebox? It's not though. What it is, is the OSR from its loveliest side. Not artpunk reinterpretations or pushing-the-limit [color] hacks on just how lite an RPG can be and still be an RPG. It's about loving the old games and applying your craft, experience and creativity to that; flexing your DM moves in a blog or forum post for others to +1 and say "stolen!". With the Whitebox Cyclopedia, James has flexed all  h...

Smaller numbers are better. It's not always  true in RPGs, but it is generally true. It's easier to work with in terms of calculation, but perhaps more importantly it makes it easier to intuitively gauge the significance of the numbers. You can feel the impact of a +1 on 1d6 more than you can on a d20. The older I get, the more I appreciate smaller numbers. The art quality in OD&D may be lacking, but the art direction  was pretty dang good. Number creep started with Greyhawk, continued in AD&D, really took off with 3e, before being scaled back a bit in 5e, with its notion of "bounded accuracy". 5e's notion of bounded accuracy still yielded a greater inflation of numbers than Classic D&D (Holmes, B/X, BECMI, Cyclopedia) which held back a bit on that front but still had slightly higher numbers than pre-Greyhawk D&D. One of the most obvious parts where number inflation took off is hit points. And in this regard, I quite appreciate the HD scale in OD...

 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...

I've been anticipating reviewing "Mystara" as perhaps the most difficult of the setting reviews.  Unlike most settings, it never really had a dedicated setting book. As the default setting for the "non-advanced" Classic D&D line, it grew from a couple of pages in the Expert Set published in 1981 up and ended as an AD&D in 1995. It is, perhaps moreso than any other setting, a product of organic development which grew and changed radically over the course of its different release cycles.  Unlike the ham-fisted attempts at development and expansion in other settings (Forgotten Realms with its Time of Troubles, Maztika and Kara-Tur getting tacked on to the edges with cheap glue and then destroyed for 4e altogether stand out), this somehow worked out well for Mystara. Perhaps because it is so non-premeditated and basically a collection of different authors having good ideas they wanted to throw at a setting and a setting that is very receptive to such tre...

I discussed the poverty of options for the poor fighter recently. And concluded that extra attacks seems to be the go-to solution for giving the fighter something extra. I think it's a poor solution. For one, I think breaking the action economy is generally undesirable. It makes it the impact of a lot of other bennies exponential, it slows down combat and adds tactical decision-points that mostly don't really add anything to the combat experience, other than the fighter being better than he was. I also think it is a bad fit for the low resolution of the D&D combat round. A round is already 6-60 seconds long (depending on edition) and we are supposed to understand that the attack roll and subsequent damage roll is the sum of a rally of blows exchanged. So how does extra attack fit into this? It seems to me a high-resolution manoeuvre retrofitted into a low-resolution attack sequence. As I see it, extra damage is a mechanic that plays much better into this abstraction. Four E...