Here's an observation I just made, that came up from a friend's question about the 1E AD&D rules for a big project they're working on. Ultimately this highlights the less-than-optimal state of editing in those books. You may know that 1E AD…
As you'll know if you followed the spring season of Dan's Olde Time Minis Show, I've been playing the classic Star Frontiers game all this year, and enjoying it immensely. To me, running a roll-low percentile system seems like a breath of f…
Fearful Ends is a rules-light, story-centric roleplaying system for horror themed games. It features nihilistic stories about characters discovering impossible horrors. It aims to allow players to roleplay characters that experience mental
Here's some notes & observations on that. You can take this as a case study of my thesis that there was a lot of key stuff in OD&D that was haphazardly copied or lost in the transition to AD&D, making it a lot more cryptic and mysterious th…
I'm constantly fascinated by the novel rules detail in OD&D Swords & Spells. There's a bunch of stuff in there that can be interpreted as updates or clarifications to the core D&D rules -- stuff that often failed to matriculate forward into…
Consider the O/AD&D Superhero -- a.k.a, the 8th-level Fighter. If you blink you'll miss it, but in multiple places in early texts it says that fighters of that level can automatically see invisible enemies. (!) Here's the Fantasy Reference
Recently on Wandering DMs we had a neat conversation about slime-type monsters in classic D&D. Now, in Original D&D, a couple of those infamous monsters are said to split into smaller slimes if they're hit by any physical weapons (Vol-2, p.…
A number of times in recent episodes of the Wandering DMs D&D Sunday talk show we've wound up debating how much detail is best for published adventure text. So I wanted to share some of the possibilities running around my head from classic
The d20, of course, is closely associated with the D&D game. But it's easy to forget that the early classic editions used the d20 in fairly narrow circumstances: just attacks and saves, in fact. Everything else about running an adventure wa…
Today I'm happy to feature a guest post from our friend Angela Black, who wrote to me with what I thought was a clever idea for establishing standard architectural/layout detail for Suloise tombs in the World of Greyhawk. A stylistic notion…
There's a surprisingly small number of combat modifiers (adjustments to the combat rolls) in Original D&D. What did Gary and Dave think were important then? Using the 7th printing, let's take a look: That's actually it! Pretty minimalist, i…
Characters: Under "Notes for the Dungeon Master" on p. 2, Gygax says: "This module has been designed to allow six to nine player characters of first level to play out many adventures, generally working up to second or third level of experie…