Schedule slip is a bitch

I guess this depression is going to be one of those long frustrating ones for me... For a month now I start feeling better and then crash again. I haven't been in any shape to do anything creative in that time. Apart from which I feel like... I dunno, I don't have much to say about gaming lately, and particularly OSR stuff. I still like it, mind you, but I am still pretty excited for D&D 5th Edition, and expect to drift over to that in the coming months as the finished game rolls out. I think my interest will perk up a lot when that gets out the door.

Just to give you all some actual gaming talk, though I expect you've heard already, the initial 5e product line has been introduced. I'm annoyed that character generation isn't in the box set, but having it in a free PDF (and possibly more according to the RPG Pundit) makes up for that. I mostly like the cover art for everything so far as well. What are the opinions of my tiny handful of readers?

Why do I like ACKS?

I don't hate domain play, but it's not my focus by a long shot. And let's not kid ourselves ACKS's forte is in domain play. Its AC system is... decidedly wonky. I've gotten used to it, but it took some doing. I don't care at all about realistic simulation-- for god's sake my second favorite edition of D&D is 4e (and 3.5 remains my least favorite)!

So what is it? What draws me to ACKS?

Is it the little tweaks? Things like the system of cleaving present in it, or the mage's repertoire and magical research stuff, the hijinks, the d20-based thief skills, or the list of poisons in the GM chapter? Is it Domains of War (which I've only got the free version of), which makes for a fun, effective battle minigame with more for tactics than the BECMI War Machine?

Partly, yeah.

Is it the proficiencies system, which does one of the best jobs of scratching the itch for feats and skills that my WOTC days imbued in me?

That's definitely a factor.

But I think I know what the number one reason is.

It's the classes. I'm absolutely a class slut. The more the merrier, in my book. And ACKS, between itself and the Player's companion, contains pretty much all my favorites. It has my favorite OSR ranger, my favorite bard anywhere, and a solid assassin, and that's just in the core book. The only one missing is the Warlord, and between the proficiencies available to the fighter and Thomas Weigel's excellent Aristocrat class, I'm more than taken care of. And should the mood strike me for a class that isn't already around, the Player's Companion explained the Autarchs' math well enough that it's the work of half an hour to bring my new class into the world. Ultimately that's the biggest factor in my choice.

Nostalgia for 3.5

...Dang, never thought that's something I'd have.

I dunno if it was just my age, or the fact that D&D was new to me in those days, or they just had a particularly engaging style, or what, but D&D 3.5 and its sourcebooks were just a great pleasure for me to read, once upon a time. Sometimes 4e reached those heights too. As strange as it may sound, 1e and 2e were never quite as enjoyable to me, nor even my beloved retroclones. B/X is okay reading, I guess, but a little light. If you haven't noticed I don't really care that much about other games besides D&D and its variants these days, though I am nominally in a Shadowrun game with my brother.

I don't want to set the world on fire

There are many things that fascinate me. Two of them in particular are the 1950s as perceived by America, both at the time and subsequently, and the prospect of nuclear war, perhaps because the Soviet Union fell when I was less than a year old and therefore its spectre never hung directly over me. As you can imagine, I am thus greatly enamored of the Fallout series. Last night, while watching a promotional video made by Redbook in 1957, I think I figured out exactly why, apart from the obvious fact that the bomb weighed heavily on many minds in the 1950s, that combination of 50s aesthetics and nuclear chaos have always captured my imagination so. 1) While I admire many of the aesthetics of the period, they are a thin veneer over a lot of simmering unpleasantness. I don't think the pretty stuff can be divorced from the hidden turmoil and hypocrisy that gave birth to it, so the only way to bring the two out of dissonance is to let the fire, the radiation, and the passage of time take a bat to it all. 2) I sometimes, in my more paranoid moments, think that humanity collectively cheated death in the cold war and worry that as the first generation after it came to an end, fear that it will be us that death ultimately somehow comes to collect on.