It's also not a coincidence that the iconic gaming comic, Knights of the Dinner Table is set in Indiana. It had a huge gaming scene.

To get into more history, RuneQuest was designed by Chaosium. which also made Call of Cthulhu. Chaosium actually published the first two editions of RQ themselves. At the time, RuneQuest was a decent challenger to D&D and was possibly more popular than D&D in Britain. Chaosium had a deal with Games Workshop to publish…

I don't know what the issue he had with combat was, unless he piled on too many optional rules, but character generation with GURPS could take a long damn time if didn't know the system yet. That was the weakness that drove me away.

Palladium games got increasingly clunky over the years, but Ninjas and Superspies was from the era when they were still enormous fun for 12-year-old me. I don't know if it holds up, but I loved it at the time.

I run the old Basic and Expert sets from 1981. That version of D&D is significantly simpler than 3rd and 4th edition, and a bit simpler than 5th. Third edition was probably the high water mark of complexity. It read very well, but it was an enormous work to run. It was also slooooow in play, which killed the pacing.

Sorry, posted before I was done…

Gygax generally didn't use minis either. They can be handy from time to time, but I think mostly they stop people from picturing things in their head and focus on moving pieces around the board.

There is a retroclone of AD&D 2E. While the physical book costs money, the PDF is free. You can get that here…

It's my theory that movie is actually a follow-up to Martha's storyline this season on The Americans

Overconcern with balance in later editions sucked a lot of the fun out the game.

B/X is the real shit. AD&D is for fancypants show offs.

It's one reason I made another comment objecting to this quote from the article:

I'm certainly interested. It would come down to the specifics if I could take part.

I've heard that joke many times, but for some reason, it just really hit me how absolutely awful any attempt to make a low-calorie calzone would be.

That's the true joy of RPGs. While I have lots of strong opinions about "good RPGs" and "bad RPGs" it is 99% about the people I am playing with.

Welcome aboard!

MMORPGs have honestly been a boon to tabletop RPGs. Back in the '80s, there was a sizable subset of gamer that just wanted to kill things. MMORPGs and FPSs drew them out of the hobby to more appealing murder simulators leaving the more imaginative people behind.

Once you get into the '80s, dice weren't hard to get. It's also worth remembering that D&D is a Midwestern creation. It is made for people that live in podunk towns without much to do. Indiana had a thriving D&D scene.

I used to run GURPS back in the '80s, and I found it a lot more manageable than the Hero System. Faster moving too. Gurps is very modular. If you are playing it with none of the optional rules, it is actually pretty light. From that point, you can make it is as crunchy as you want.

While I don't have the animosity towards WotC that you do, I do prefer the earlier editions of the game. Are you aware of all the retroclones of older editions and the enormous range of supplements for them? Basically, any company or individual can make a supplement for D&D these days and WotC can't stop it. It's a…