The Seven-Sided Die

There has been a bit of chatter about the Tyranny of Fun1 that has come to dominate the design of D&D. I have some sympathy for those on both sides of the argument. Chatty points out that it injects more incendiary material into the edition wars. I agree that demonising fun is stupid.
On the other [...]

I’m not really starting a series, just echoing the title of J.D. Wiker’s post Sacrificing Sacred Cows: Random Encounters. I really like random encounters and the events they precipitate, and I have to take issue with the points against that he makes.
“Random” means the GM literally doesn’t have any control over what happens from encounter [...]

I ran a game of D&D 4th edition shortly after the books were released, and I badly mangled that abortive campaign.
I want to say that the books made me do it, and I have good reason to think so, but the blame is mine for letting them. Let me explain.
If you’re a roleplayer today you [...]

I’ve just started reading Tommi Brander’s blog, Cogito, ergo ludo. So far I’ve found Tommi to be a consistently engaging writer and an imaginative roleplayer. His homebrewed persistent fantasy roleplaying system looks intriguing, but I think I’d need a pile of designer’s commentary to successfully digest it. I do like the goals of the system [...]

Recently I was reading the Creative Commons version of Clinton R. Nixon’s The Shadow of Yesterday. That he chose to release it under an open license is awesome, and though I could write about that I’m more interested in an aside he buried in the game.
Note that this is from an older version of TSoY, [...]

My recent return to 1st edition AD&D has been illuminating. Re-reading the books now, I realise that much of what I thought was “wrong” with the game then was a product of my immaturity, both as a person and as a gamer and GM. I’ve been a D&D player of various editions after AD&D, and [...]

[Rules] help ‘inspire’ things you might not create on your own. — Fang Langford
I always intuitively felt that D&D, as a game of creative imagination, was intensely flavoured by its rules. I didn’t really understand what this intuition meant when I was a high school–aged DM and I was trying to figure out why I did and [...]

Old school gaming gets defined differently depending on who you ask.
The two most common definitions—that an old game is “old school”, or that the earliest edition of a ruleset is “old school”—aren’t what do it for me. I don’t think that Everway is old school, nor do I think that 1st edition Vampire: The Masquerade [...]

Just last week Microlite74 was released. It’s a d20 variant designed to have modern rules (based on Microlite20) that enable an old-school play experience. It manages to get character creation, task resolution, spells, and more than 80 monsters into a mere 4 pages!
But my purpose in posting is to quote this paragraph on skills in [...]