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...

One simple houserule I use during character creation is to simply treat any 1 rolled as a 2. "The House Rule Register" might become an ongoing feature on this blog, so I made a tag for it. It means that: The minimum ability score is 6, which I think should be the baseline anyway. But the chances of getting extraordinary (15+) scores are not increased, and there is only a +2.77% added chance of rolling a 13 and a +1.39% increased chance of rolling 14. No one starts with 1 hp unless they have also have CON 6-8 and rolled a 1 or 2 for HP. Minimum starting gold is 60 gp. I initially went with re-rolling all 1s as that seemed a bit more fun, but the implications of that are a bit wider reaching. For clarity, here's the chart for proabilities for "at least" outcomes in anydice, respectively for "3d6", "3d6 treating1s as 2s", "3d6 re-rolling all 1s" and "4d6, drop lowest". There is a whopping +16,47% of rolling a 13 when you re-r...

I've been running our group through the sandbox presented in "The Vanilla Adventure" using classic D&D with some houserules, strict 3d6 in order, no re-arranging or re-rolls. I sprinkled in a few other modules (Hole in the Oak, Incandescent Grottoes, Gatehouse on Cormag's Crag. might add more). Before I go further into the review, let me just say that the actual play experience has been a blast so far. The players are loving the open-ended nature of it and all the things going on and have taken it in vastly different directions from session to session. And though the module has significant gaps it also has enough meat to help me as DM to navigate all that with more ease than anticipated. The sandbox is well-sized and with a number of dynamics going on that this can go in a number of different directions, sometimes simultaneously. The main threat, dragons, my group managed to contain early by sheer luck. In the space of our last session, they moved from recovering ...

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've analysed and critiqued the concept of Hit Points in the past . The gist of the critique is that whilst hit points conceptually are mostly "hero points", mechanically they are treated entirely as "wound points". And that grates. The 10th level fighter with 60 Hit points who loses 80% of his hit points will need seven weeks to recover those 48 hp lost,  assuming a basic 1 hp/day of recovery . Meanwhile, the 1st level fighter with 5 hit points who loses 80% of his hit points (and was near death with just 1 hp left) will need just four days to make a full recovery. Besides the incongruence of this, it also has the mechanical downside of necessitating magical healing at higher levels for the game to be at all functional. Art for the entry is from the old Swedish "Drakar och Demoner" supplement Torshem. I've seen various elegant and less elegant attempt to remedy this, from healing HP equal to level per day (as 3e faultily suggested) to each added d...

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...