<story><title>Dungeons and Dragons turns 50 today</title><url>http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2024/01/fifty-years-ago-today.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wintermutestwin</author><text>As someone who started playing in 1980, I really don&amp;#x27;t get this OSR. I remember wanting to play a wizard to cast spells but then realizing that I spent 95% of my turns throwing darts because there were no cantrips. As I have gone through the progression of the DnD editions (and of course many other TTRPGS), I have never felt the urge to look back to those earlier weak versions.&lt;p&gt;I have to wonder if people are being nostalgic for things that have nothing to do with the ruleset.</text></item><item><author>kemotep</author><text>If you aren’t interested in playing (or supporting) modern DnD, for the past few years there was been bit of an Old School Renaissance.&lt;p&gt;Modern reprintings of classic Basic&amp;#x2F;Expert rule sets in Basic Fantasy RPG or Old School Essentials are easy ways to get in. To say nothing of Dungeon Crawl Classics and of course getting your hands on the original TSR books.&lt;p&gt;There are dozens of kickstarters, fan zines, and self-published indie works out there, expanding, building, remixing, and making new experiences with the classic rule sets.&lt;p&gt;Feels like there is easily another 50 years to this hobby, if you look beyond Wizards of the Coast releases.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kemotep</author><text>As someone who didn’t get into DnD until 3.5 was a thing, I like the simplicity of Old School Essentials.&lt;p&gt;The Basic&amp;#x2F;Expert ruleset is far more about the imagination for me at least (my style of how I referee). Yes, magic-users at low levels have like no spells but at higher levels, they are capable of doing all kinds of crazy magic, in combination with the ability to research magic, create magical items and so on. That’s part of the balance of the game. I can understand why people don’t like that type of game, but that’s why there’s so many options of Tabletop Roleplaying Games. GURPS, Apocalypse World, Mork Borg, Ghost Dog, Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, etc all play differently and all have different mechanics and philosophies of how the game should be played.</text></comment>
<story><title>Dungeons and Dragons turns 50 today</title><url>http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2024/01/fifty-years-ago-today.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wintermutestwin</author><text>As someone who started playing in 1980, I really don&amp;#x27;t get this OSR. I remember wanting to play a wizard to cast spells but then realizing that I spent 95% of my turns throwing darts because there were no cantrips. As I have gone through the progression of the DnD editions (and of course many other TTRPGS), I have never felt the urge to look back to those earlier weak versions.&lt;p&gt;I have to wonder if people are being nostalgic for things that have nothing to do with the ruleset.</text></item><item><author>kemotep</author><text>If you aren’t interested in playing (or supporting) modern DnD, for the past few years there was been bit of an Old School Renaissance.&lt;p&gt;Modern reprintings of classic Basic&amp;#x2F;Expert rule sets in Basic Fantasy RPG or Old School Essentials are easy ways to get in. To say nothing of Dungeon Crawl Classics and of course getting your hands on the original TSR books.&lt;p&gt;There are dozens of kickstarters, fan zines, and self-published indie works out there, expanding, building, remixing, and making new experiences with the classic rule sets.&lt;p&gt;Feels like there is easily another 50 years to this hobby, if you look beyond Wizards of the Coast releases.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasomill</author><text>Low-level casters sucked, with or without cantrips (which didn&amp;#x27;t do anything useful in combat when originally introduced, IIRC, in &lt;i&gt;Unearthed Arcana&lt;/i&gt;).&lt;p&gt;But at least they eventually leveled up.&lt;p&gt;Or…not, if they were non-human and hit their race-specific, often single-digit level cap.&lt;p&gt;Yeah, come to think of it, old school AD&amp;amp;D rules did leave plenty of room for improvement.&lt;p&gt;Demihuman level caps were even more annoying in the old school AD&amp;amp;D computer games that enforced them, as it&amp;#x27;s hard to role play a party of permanently underleveled characters in a high-level area of a brutal, combat-focused, non-level scaled CRPG as anything other than a pile of corpses.</text></comment>