Games I Play
I started out playing AD&D 2nd Edition in the late 90s. I played a lot of 3rd edition, too, and then got out of the hobby for a while.
A few years ago I started playing again, inspired by reading blogs in the “Old School Renaissance”. Actually, my real intro to old school DnD was somehow stumbling across Philotomy’s OD&D Musings, so my touchstones are more in the Original D&D lineage than in the AD&D or B/X lines.
Here are some games I’ve played more than once over the past few years:
- Delving Deeper is a clone of the original (1974) edition of D&D, without supplements. It seems quite alien to somebody who came to the hobby with 2nd, 3rd, or later editions, but that’s part of what I like about it. I love d6 damage / d6 hit dice for all, mechanical crunch in Normal/Heroic/Superheroic tiers, and the bizarre implied setting.
- Whitehack is a wild riff on 1974-style D&D. It’s also a totally solid RPG, with some very unique & useful mechanics, and a usable, interesting campaign setting, all in 64 pages!
- Basic Fantasy seems inspired by & probably plays a lot like B/X D&D. I stumbled into this one because I needed something to play fast, didn’t have any books about me, etc, and knew that this was easy to download. Actually that’s one of this game’s great strengths: it’s very freely available and has a lot of support.
- 5th Edition D&D I’ve played a few times, because: the basic rules are freely available for players to download, and I bought myself the boxed beginner’s set one year as a birthday present to see how it played. I like things about it, but when I play it I’m reminded it’s missing major features e.g. reaction/morale checks, that I really appreciate from the earlier lineage games I most enjoy.
The first two books, Delving Deeper and Whitehack, sit side-by-side on my shelf and I reference them quite often, even when I’m supposedly playing other games.
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