Recent content by Jack Daniel

I'm a single-system referee, but I find that OD&D makes for a perfectly cromulent universal dungeon- and hex-crawling system. I can use it to run games where fantasy heroes are searching dungeons deep and caverns old for magical items and gold coins; where far-future space opera heroes are...

That's because it's really easy to make the argument for any type of spellcasting being tied to any one mental stat. Why are wizards traditionally Int based? No particular reason, beyond "something, something spellbooks" and "that's what Gary Gygax decided to name the magic-user stat." Wisdom...

Fighter, Thief, Black Belt, Black Mage, White Mage, Red Mage. :p But in all seriousness, I kinda-sorta do this now. In D&D games, the six classes I use are: Fighter (Str) Mage (Int) Cleric (Cha) Thief (Dex) Ascetic (a psionic monk that uses Wis and Con) Ranger (actually the forester/elf class...

Nah, it was good. Basically a long, live-action episode of the cartoon series — which is exactly what a Ghostbusters sequel ought to be.

Another vote for "Efficient." I use laminated cardstock "tiles" and numbered tokens and pawns.

Yeah, I can't agree with JB. BECMI holds up better than AD&D in the long-term, IMO, because it has structure that AD&D lacks. The clear procedures for dominion play in the Companion Set, planar adventuring rules that (despite their anemic presentation in the Master Set) blow the Manual of the...

"THAC0 is your personal attack roll DC. Your first level guy needs to beat DC 20 on 1d20 + enemy AC to hit someone. That DC will go down as you level up."

It always strikes me as odd that this changed. When I was a kid, there was OD&D and AD&D, and OD&D was the name we used for all the stuff that wasn't AD&D, which included BXCMI/RC. If someone said, "Hey, let's play OD&D," the "O" more or less meant "not-Advanced." It didn't mean "the original...

I still have a copy of For Faerie, Queen, and Country!

Explicitly, unequivocally yes. I'd of course convert the character to the "local" rules/reality of my campaign — including magical items — just like the old D&D rulebooks say to do. The character can always "reality shift" back at a later time, based on how other DMs they play with run things.

As far as I'm concerned, characters belong to players, not to DMs or to DMs' campaigns. If a player leaves a campaign, their character leaves the campaign milieu along with them and doesn't become some kind of retried NPC (unless the player says so). If a player wants to take their character...

I call nat 1s in my roll-under system "aced rolls." :)

"Baffling" is exactly the word I use whenever this topic comes up. I also prefer roll-under, and precisely because it makes the odds transparent. To the point where I use it across the board in D&D too.

"Should there even be a thief class?" remains a hotly contested and ongoing debate in OSR circles. And even those of us who lean towards "yes" prefer to let thieves succeed at routine feats of larceny automatically, reserving the skill rolls only for extenuating circumstances or treating them as...

I avoid using the mechanic entirely. I use secondary skills rather than NWPs to define characters' backgrounds and side-hustles, and I adjudicate miscellaneous actions by fiat if they aren't already covered by a rule. I don't want ability scores to be so central to character competence, and I...