There was a late 2e, 3e, PF game culture that was based on serving up a long line of supposedly balanced encounters. Since this is super hard to actually do, fudging (either of dice rolls or on-the-fly monster stats like hitpoints) became pretty common. The question is whether it’s worthwhile to even do in the first place.

We still see some survivors of this game culture even today; some who have clung to those ideals (and keep on giving bad advice) and other who have mashed those ideas up with more functional ways to play, but overall I think it’s no coincidence that the reason D&D and TTRPG has been taking off and became bigger than ever now that we have a large influx of people who do not play “that 90s way”.

Gurbintroll has a new B/X out, “Light Fantasy”, what are your takes?

The unskilled weapon damages in Dark Dungeons don’t match Rules Cyclopedia exactly 🫤

The Rules Cyclopedia is my second favorite RPG that we never ever get to use (well, we use the occasional rule from it) because it’s too close but yet so far to our normal, slightly more 5e-tilted edition mashup. During the OGL scare, the RC was one of the games I considered (not that it’s open source either, but OSE and DD are and they’re reasonably compatible).

I was reading some OSR fanzines with a ton of custom classes and monsters today and they’d probably be usable with RC too, with maybe just the XP curve changing.

I have the kinda blurry (but works just fine) PoD reprint of the US original. This Japanese edition is especially beautiful.

“One of the most unforgiveable things that mainstream D&D has ever done was to make Diplomacy a skill.”

I agree 100%. This blogpost is great and is exactly how I’ve been trying to run it over the last decade, inspired by @robindlaws@dice.camp’s chapter in Unframed.

I also sort of agree with Arnold in what you need to add to 5e to make it work. Encounter checks definitively, and removing Persuation, Intimitation, and Deception—did that day one when the Starter Set came out in 2014.

Reaction rolls, I’m not so sure. Instead I have a table where I roll up something like “She knows, but doesn’t wanna say because she is afraid the PCs will get her in trouble” or “She doesn’t know, but wants to string them along and get some coin out of it”. The table is independent of the PC’s charisma bonus 🤷🏻‍♀️

Great approach to generating wilderness hexmaps with a lot of semanticity.

Luke Gearing generously posted some side-by-side comparisons of bullet points vs prose.

It’s great that he did this because we almost never get to see extended examples of how the exact same location would look like with bullets or with prose. I just prefer the bullets.

Warms my li’l heart to see people out there use the phrase “diegetic mechanics” in the canonical way. 🥰

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